What would you do if you only had one year left to live?

"A man should not leave this earth with unfinished business. He should live each day as if it was a pre-flight check. He should ask each morning, am I prepared to lift-off?” ~Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, Northern Exposure, All is Vanity, 1991

A few years ago (four years ago to be exact) I took a self-development course and was given an exercise to work on:

if you had only 365 days to live, you didn't have to worry about money or your health during the year, and on the 365th day you would die easily and painlessly, what would you do with your year?

I considered this exercise and wrote an earnest answer. I wrote it all down in a journal and then put that journal in a briefcase I barely touched for the next 4 years. Recently I used that briefcase as I flew on a trip to New York and discovered my answer to this exercise. I was rather pleasantly surprised to see that pretty much every goals for my imaginary final year I managed to accomplish over the past 4 years. Those included quitting my law job, finding the love of my life, having a baby girl, writing a book, and traveling around the world.

I was rather pleasantly surprised by how all these goals that seemed rather far away when I wrote them had all come to pass. It made me think, what if I spent the next 365 days as if they were my last? What if every day I considered really seriously how I want to live my “final year”? What kind of adventures would I go on then? How would my life be different? And thus my Last Year Project was born. I challenged myself to live fully from this space for 365 days. If you want to follow my adventures, you can do so here.

I would like to challenge you to answer the question I answered four years ago: if you had only 365 days to live, you didn't have to worry about money or your health during the year, and on the 365th day you would die easily and painlessly, what would you do with your year? Feel free to share your response to this question in the comments.