Longevity - Who Decides and What to Do About It?

If I were a monarch butterfly, I would want to be in the fourth generation, the one that is born at the end of summer and gets to make the trip back to Mexico or California.  They get to live six to eight months. The three generations born earlier in the year only live two to six weeks.  They do not get an extended life.  But no living thing gets to choose how long they live, do they? Because, let's face it, if I were born in that fourth generation of monarch butterflies, I could still get hit by a bus or caught in a child's butterfly net.  There are so many variables!

So then, what's the answer if we do not have that piece of information about how long we will live? For me, I think it's living into the mystery that is life itself and listening to what's on our hearts.  A pivotal time in my life was when I no longer felt fulfilled in corporate America.  I felt a strong urgency to quit.  The mantra "You only have one life to live" was in the forefront of my mind.  That mantra came about around the same time that I needed surgery for an early stage melanoma and shortly thereafter a family member died of melanoma.  What I knew then is that I didn't want to die in corporate America.

That's when a fear of dying before really living took over for me.  It won out over all other fears:  of not being good at anything else, of not making enough money, of failing, and so on.  The list goes on and on.

So maybe not knowing how long we live provides the impetus to keep living or get living, listening to what is on our hearts.
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Now for the reflective questions which you can journal about or if you'd like to share your story, I'd love to hear from you and the community would love to hear from you!  Your comment could have a major impact on someone else; most likely it will be just the right thing at the right time for one of the readers. For me, God* wanted me to know that helping even just one person is wonderfully impactful.

Reflective questions:

1.  How do you feel about longevity, especially your own?

2.  What does God* want you to know about this (ask directly, God, what do you want me to know?)

* I use the term God as a universal term.  You may decide that Great Spirit, Allah, Higher Power, etc. better suits you today.  It is not for me to decide.

photo by Kenneth Dwain Harrelson on Wikipidia (monarch butterfly)