Determine Your EYOD to Live With More Life

Life is a temporary journey. We don’t know when it’s going to end. All we have is the journey. There is no destination that we will arrive at where everything is ideal and without frustration. We can make the journey more meaningful by being more mindful that it has an ending. That’s completely normal. It’s both expected and inevitable. Sometimes the expected happens sooner than expected. Either way it’s going to happen. Why not use this fact to enhance today?

One way to make your life more meaningful is to determine your EYOD, or expected year of death. You simply subtract your current age from the average life expectancy for your gender and country to determine the number of years you should have left. You then add that to the current year. My EYOD is 2053. Knowing this number is a good reminder on how limited my time is and motivates me to make the most of it.

We also have to be mindful that’s if we’re lucky— if we make it to our EYOD. If we’re lucky we live to a ripe old age. There are no guarantees. What is the quality of old age?

Anyone who has lost someone close suddenly understands that life can stop on a dime. Close to where I live, an elementary school art teacher was recently on her way to work driving on a highway. Somehow, a 200-pound manhole cover on the roadway became dislodged and flew through the windshield of her car, killing her. We never know how much time we have left. Here’s the eternal question: Should we be living as if we’ll live forever, or should we be living as if every day could be our last?

Life should be like a sandcastle. We ought to enjoy the process of making it and embrace the impermanence that the tide will gradually come in and reclaim it. To enjoy it, we have to be in the present moment.

Our brains easily trick us out of the present with distorted memories that make the past seem better than it was, and with anticipating an idealized future. There are so many future unknowns. It does us no good to be engaging with them.

Since I don’t know how much time I have left, I’m borrowing another song lyric as my mantra. This one comes from the Whitesnake song, “Here I go again.” That lyric is: “I’ve made up my mind, I ain’t wasting no more time.”

To stop wasting time and energy don’t worry about thinking only good thoughts. That would be exhausting and all-consuming. What we need to do is simply embrace only good thoughts!