Have you ever done an exercise where you stop and think about what people wouldbe saying at your funeral? We all have probably done it at one point in time. Most of the time when people do these exercises they don’t take it seriously. I encourage you to work as hard as you can at really imagining that today is your last day and what that would feel like! I’ve provided three questions to help you focus your attention.

You’ve probably done one of those exercises where you imagine your own funeral and what people would say about you, in an effort to determine what parts of your life you might want to change now. You may have also been asked, and even thought seriously, about what you would do if you knew you only had a few months or a few days to live.

Those are good exercises when we take them seriously and really imagine what we would do or what we would want people to say, and then follow through with changes in our lives.

I’d like to suggest an even more extreme exercise right now.

You have until midnight tonight to live. That is all the time you have. You must take care of everything that is important to you in that amount of time. What would you do?

Now, here’s where this exercise gets interesting. What if you lived the next few hours as if they were all you had? What if you focused on your family and friends instead of things that don’t matter nearly so much?

How would your life today change if this were all you had left?

I know you’ve probably been through this before. What I hope you’ll do different with this one is really think about it and apply it. This is totally voluntary. No one will know if you do this, unless you choose to talk to them about it.

But if you really concentrate your energy on the idea that this may be the last day you have, I’m sure you will be amazed at what happens in your life today.

You’ll find yourself looking at your children and wondering what they’ll look like as adults. You’ll imagine what it would have been like to grow old together with your spouse. You’ll look at your job and wish you could stay, or wish you had made a change years ago so that you would be happier now.

These exercises have become kind of a cliché, and that’s sad in a way. It’s sad because people think that clichés don’t matter. But it’s good because they became a cliché by being very, very popular.

Just for today, try to imagine that this is it. You don’t have to imagine what your funeral would be like, though you can; just think about what it would be like if you only had today left.

The problem people usually encounter when they do these types of exercises is that they just don’t take it seriously. They know that today is not the end, and they just can’t bring themselves to suspend disbelief. I encourage you to work as hard as you can at really imagining that today is your last day, and what that would feel like.

Some ideas for areas to focus your attention:

1. How would you feel about your relationships? How can you fix them?
2. What would you wish you had done? Can you do it?
3. How would you feel about your work? What can you do about it?

Thanks to Life Insurance Lowdown for including this post in the Carnival of life, Happiness, and Meaning, to Energies of Creation for featuring this post in the Carnival of Creative Growth, to Credit Card Lowdown for inclusion in the Carnival of Money, Growth, and Happiness, and to Think Happy Thoughts for including this post in the Happiness Carnival.