The Real Bucket List
by Leslie Fieger
What would you do if you found out you only had 30 days left to live?
Think seriously. What if you had just come out of the doctor’s office after hearing the news that you’d
be dead and buried a month from now? What would you do?
Of course, your first reaction would probably be the emotional pairing of fear/anger. But after you
decided not to waste too many of your remaining days on Planet Earth grieving and feeling sorry for
yourself, then what would you do?
Maybe, like in the fun movie with Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson, you’d indulge in some
adventurous travelling. There is probably some thing you’ve always wanted to do and some place
you’ve always wanted to visit. (by the way, this movie is worth watching)
And maybe, just maybe, you’d ask yourself, what you are going to leave behind when you are gone.
What is to be your legacy? Someone once said that the only things you get to take with you when you
leave this planet are the things you leave behind. And the great Pericles wrote, “What you leave behind
is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.”
Now, 30 days is not a lot of time to create a legacy; but it is still possible to do something meaningful
in each day. In 30 days, you could, like Jack in the movie, fix a broken relationship. In 30 days, you
could
Ok, you get the idea. That doctor pronounced 20 day death sentence might bring some focus to you,
enabling you to spend your remaining time on important things, rather than squander it on meaningless
things.
Now, guess what… You are under a death sentence, it was issued the moment you were born. You
know that already. Your life may end 50 years from now or it might end tomorrow. That uncertainty is
both a blessing and a curse.
The blessing is that you get to go through each day with a sense of relative immortality and no
fear/anger about dying. The curse is that you allow yourself to squander moments, days, even years
because the poignancy of a the knowable short term death sentence is absent and the unknowable span
of your years is so ethereal that you get to go through each day without thinking about the limited
amount of time you have to do something meaningful with your life.
However, even though you may not have only 30 days and actually have 10,000 days ahead of you, the
question is still capable of focusing you on what’s important.
What would you do if you only had ______ days left to live? Really. Think about it.
So, why are you not doing that right now? Why are you wasting precious moments doing things that
are, at best, only a distraction from what is important, from what will, in the end, be your legacy, the
things you leave behind?
Start today living a life of purpose and meaning. Start right now to live on purpose. Stop allowing

yourself to get caught up in meaningless stuff and start creating a meaningful life.
No matter how many days you have left to revere, relish and contribute, there are only 1,440 minutes in
each day. Each one is precious. Each one, once gone, is gone forever. Each moment is your now
moment, when you have the choice to do something valuable or waste it doing something that will be
forgotten.
Live well. Live meaningfully. Leave a legacy.
“If you would not be forgotten
As soon as you are dead and rotten,
Either write things worthy reading,
Or do things worth the writing.”
~ Ben Franklin
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,
to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what they had to teach; and not, when
I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
~ Henry David Thoreau
“As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.”
~ Leonardo Da Vinci
“When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced.
Live your life so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice.”
~ Cherokee Aphorism
“"The average man, who does not know what to do with his life,
wants another one which will last forever."
~ Anatole France
“"Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do
with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon."
~ Susan Ertz
“Somebody ought to tell us, right at the start of our lives, that we are dying.
Then we might live life to the limit every minute of every day.
Do it, I say, whatever you want to do, do it now.”
~ Michael Landon
"The only thing you take with you when you're gone
is what you leave behind."
~ John Allston
Click below to find out more about...
Leslie Fieger, The DELFIN Trilogy and The DELFIN Empowerment Platform