As we saw in the last article, time is our more precious gift which we often throw away in exchange for a secure job, a house, and a whole series of objects or contexts (building a family) which in theory should lead us to happiness, but which unfortunately cost us too much time and effort and in the end do not give us serenity. Many of us spend the little free time we have entertaining our minds in various ways, and I say “spend” because we don’t invest it in something creative or spending time in introspection. The excuse I hear from many people is to say “but I’m not a creative person!” or “I can’t look inside myself”. Are you really sure? yet as a child you created stories, you created drawings, you built castles with sand, your whole existence was marked by creativity and you could spend hours surrounded by nature without needing a cell phone or a computer. In the article on time I pointed out that this is limited and we have no idea how much of it we will have in the future.

Today I therefore propose a concrete exercise which is to answer a simple question: what would you do if you only had 3 years to live? This is a question that my master asked me one day and which remained marked in a corner of my brain and which then pushed me to undertake a backpacking trip around the world because to that question I would have answered “traveling”. Now I am no longer so interested in the external journey which I consider important but limited, I think more about of my internal journey.

What are your priorities? Spending more time with family? Financing a water well in Africa? Writing a novel? Carving wood? Drawing? Opening a new business that can help many people? Traveling around the world? Living in the woods? Would you still spend your days accumulating money? Would you spend your days thinking about a future that no longer exists or is in any case very limited? Are you sure? Answer this question honestly, take a pen and paper and write down everything you would do in this period of time which is not that little. The problem of projecting a life expectancy (around 80 years) presents us with the dilemma of pension money, the mortgage, where our children will go to study etc. With 3 years ahead of us all this disappears and obviously the essential remains. As time passes your priorities will undoubtedly change and rightly so and each time you will have to readjust and continuing to be honest with yourself you will have to redefine your new priorities. The fear of change is what often holds us back and yet that change is the only one that can bring you internal satisfaction. You don’t need time to succeed, as Sri Nisargadatta reminds us, today you are already what you are destined to be, but to put these words into practice you need to learn to listen to yourself more, to follow that immense strength within each of us, which I like to call destiny, and live in a more natural way following the calls of our heart.