I use “because life’s too short to wait…” as my tagline as much for myself as for anybody else. Tick tock, tick tock. Life is short. And the older we get, the more true it is.

None of us know for sure how long we’ll be on this earth, but one thing that I do know is that I want to make the time that I do have to really count for something. I don’t want to waste a moment of it doing something that doesn’t make me feel happy and satisfied if I can help it. And if I die right this moment, I want to know that I’ve lived full-out and done all the things I wanted to do, or at least as many as I can possibly handle.

I’ve been thinking about this lately because I have several friends dealing with the loss of a parent, and it’s making me think back fifteen years to when my mother died suddenly at only 62. It was my mother’s death that shifted my understanding of time, the moment of facing our own mortality, and knowing that the clock is ticking.

My mother was a lovely, gentle southern woman, a watercolorist who met my dad at art school. Like most women of her generation, once married, it was a given she would stay home and raise children. Moving often for my father’s job until their divorce, most of her years were spent caring for other people, putting her own dreams aside to make other people’s dreams come true.

A few months after my mom died, as I sat thinking about her, I was imagining what it might have been like for her that night, and I wondered if there was a moment when she knew she was dying. And as I tried to picture it, I knew that if it happened to me at that very moment, I would be thinking, “No! Not yet! I’m not ready, there are still too many things I was waiting to do!”

And as if it were really happening, I instantly knew exactly what those things were, things that I’d been putting aside, denying, ignoring, or just not allowing myself to experience, as if I had all the time in the world. But I don’t.

That was when I took on living my life full out, doing the things I really want to do, pushing past fear or doubt to have the kind of experiences I had only dreamt about before, and a lot of things I hadn’t even allowed myself to dream about.

I never forget that one day, maybe tomorrow, maybe in 50 years, I will, like all of us, find myself facing my death, and it’s important to me that I will have done the things that I really want to do, without pretending that there is always plenty of time for everything.

I check in with myself often to imagine what feels undone or unspoken or needs to be checked off next on my life’s list of things to do. Because, without a doubt, life is too short to wait…