Time to go LIVE?

     To what extent do YOU sleepwalk through life - your thoughts, speech & actions fully pre-programmed by your genetic & environmental conditioning? How predictable are you? Are you barely surviving on "story of me" re-runs?

          “To live is the rarest thing in the world. 
            Most people exist, that is all.”                         Oscar Wilde

     As one who’s spent far too much time & energy on (wallowing in) miseries from my childhood, I’ve come to wonder if such activity (or more accurately, lack of activity) is primarily an avoidant luxury when we have nothing truly important & urgent to deal with. 
     An incurable disease diagnosis with a month left to live seems to snap about 40% of people out of their “neurotic selfing habit” and right smack into the best quality of life they’ve ever known. And they’re profoundly grateful for the diagnosis! See: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.com/search?q=post+traumatic+growth

     An excellent, wonderfully well-written book IMHO is: Nina Riggs. “The Bright Hour. A Memoir of Living and Dying.” Simon & Schuster, 2017. A few relevant quotes from it:
          “Cancer removes whatever weird barriers we sometimes have with others. A mastectomy of bullshit, my mother suggests. All the o-yes-everything-is-great stuff eventually gets carted off in a bag of medical waste.”
          “Annie Dillard … reminds us again and again to clear our vision of expectations, to try to see without understanding.”

     And finally, a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke: 
          “Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.”