This may be my final column.
Well, if we believe the doomsday predictions by some who read the Mayan calendar, then my turn in the editorial rotation won’t come around again.
According to many, the Mayans predict that Dec. 21, 2012 will mark the end of the world. And that should give us pause: we may only have 21 or 22 more days left before our time is done, so we better figure out what to do with it.
Imagine for a moment — and maybe it doesn’t take that much imagination given the looming date — what you might do with the last three weeks of your life. How do you want to spend that time? Who would you like to spend it with? What do you need to complete? Where have you yet to travel?
It can be a frightening prospect, or a provocative one. Imagine if we really believed it. Imagine if all of us chose to live the next three weeks as if they were our last.
Would we bother showing up for work? Would we concern ourselves with the amount of savings we have for our retirement? Would we care who won the last election or football game or even the last war?
Or would we want to deal with all the messy, unresolved stuff in our personal lives?
We put off so much because of distractions or because we’re afraid to face it in the present. But I wonder, if we knew that all of it was soon to be over, would we do the things we want? Would we find the courage to say the things we really need to?
And imagine for a moment that we all did do that. Imagine that we had the freedom from the future to do what we want and need to do in the present. How would our lives be different? How would the people around us be different?
In some ways, it’s very enticing. Enticing enough to give it a try, perhaps. And then if things don’t end on the 21st, maybe we will have learned to live our lives just a little bit more purposefully and honestly.
But Dec. 21 is pretty soon, and I have tickets to Hawaii the following week, so I hope that if the Mayans are right about the end of the world, that at least their math isn’t as good as their predictive skills.
