At the beginning of each workday downtown, I take the elevator in my office building to the eighth floor. On this morning, another fellow joins me, and in the short time we rode together he presented a snapshot of his current life perspective. After the elevator doors closed behind us, I looked over to him and asked, "How's it going." He had that gray look of resignation in his eyes as he responded, "Could be better, could be worse." We rode in silence for a few moments. When the doors opened on his floor, he seemed compelled to assure me that he was really ok, as he said, "Yea, could be worse", and then he went about his day.

Continuing on the elevator, I felt sadness. While not presuming to know this fellow attorney's life circumstances and how it is for him, my impression was that he just did not know anything different could happen for him. Or if he did, the effort seemed too difficult to undertake or the way too obscure, when it might not have been.

For many of us, on-going feelings of discontent and frustration in one or several areas of our lives seems just how it is, the only discernable way to live. There may be impasses we cannot see our way through, and we might wish for something else but believe actually getting there is out of reach. We become stuck. After a time, the discontent and frustration can turn to resignation, especially when we are living in a way not congruent with what we value. Life can then take on a shade of gray and time passes. Eventually, even the original spark of frustration and discontent that could have ignited us back to our dreams is lost.

While browsing through a New Yorker magazine recently, I found myself chuckling at one of the cartoons. Yet, it was a mix, because I also felt uncomfortable with what I had read. The cartoonist had drawn a picture of a cemetery. At the foreground was a prominently displayed headstone with the name and dates of birth and death of the deceased. Underneath, engraved in the marble, were the words: "WHY ME." The humor, of course, was the absurd denial on the part of the deceased. A moment of self-reflection also revealed that my discomfort occurred because I also identified with the question posed.

Certainly at an emotional level our own passing away is hard to grasp. Yet, isn't it ironic that the fact of human life most certain is also the one about which there is the greatest avoidance? Even though each of our lives will end sometime – tomorrow, the next day, a few months or many years from now, the prospect seems so distant and remote that we refuse to acknowledge its' actuality, except at the level of lip service. Yet, we ask, even if there was a deeper acknowledgement of our own passing away, how would this change things? We can't do anything about it; it's going to happen. Why consider it? Why even think about it? What good would it do?

To help answer these questions, it may help to turn to a group of people given the opportunity to live these questions in a way most of us have not – intensely, in their faces, and with denial made more difficult. What characterizes the members of this group is a medical prognosis of terminal illness. Their physicians have speculated that a physical demise will occur in three or six months, one year or more, however much time may be left for any one of them.

Such a prognosis can bring with it a sense of urgency and a wish for a deeper level of self-reflection than many of us are normally willing to feel and to undertake. The urgency is not about dying; it is about living! The lives of these people can come into sharp focus. Life questions previously buried can come up and be asked and considered for the first time. How has it been for me? Have I been the person I wanted to be? Have I done the things I wanted to do? Other inquiries related to our own unique character also may be set in motion. What touches me? What are my deepest callings? What do I value most?

For many reasons, we rarely allow ourselves to live these questions or do so only fleetingly, while believing there is ample time to take action. For those who are actively dying and do not have the luxury of time, the notion that there seems plenty of time left is no longer an option. These questions are drawn to the forefront and may become a necessity rather than an uncomfortable annoyance.

If we were told our time here was relatively defined and more limited than we had hoped, some of us might choose to ask similar questions as they relate to our lives. How we spend our days is how we spend our lives, and a closer look at our days at work and at home can tell us much about our lives. Consider the following:

• Does my work serve my life, or is it the other way around?
• Am I clear about what I value most?
• Do I live my values?
• Is my work life a good fit or do I describe it as "could be better, could be worse?" Does it exhaust my inner resources and leave little room for other interests and priorities?
• Are my lives at work and at home integrated, of a whole piece, however different? Or, am I someone else in each place, one a stranger to the other.
• Am I clear about my purpose in my work?
• Have I considered and articulated a mission statement? Might such a statement be the same for my work as for my life as a whole?

As we consider these questions, a troublesome thought might arise: Is our circumstance really any different from the person who has a medically defined and limited life span? Does each of us know how much time is left, as we move through life acting like our days are numberless? And, most important, will we allow ourselves to comprehend that the only difference (and it is a slight difference at best) between "us" and "them" is that no one has told us how long we have to live. It is there this difference stops!

Certainly the lack of knowledge about the time of our own death is a blessing in the obvious respects. However, there is also a curse, and it is this: Without such knowledge the film coating our eyes from the brush of avoidance deludes us into denying the great importance of doing now what really matters – not waiting until later.