Living Fully, Living Well

By Fleet Maull, PhD

November has always felt to me like a month for remembering. The trees are nearly bare and darkness comes before dinner. Many cultures set aside these first days of the month to honor their loved ones who have died. It seems a natural time to sit with a question most of us spend a good deal of energy avoiding: how do I want to live, knowing that my life will end, sooner or later?

When we’re young, time seems almost limitless. Even as we take on work and family and the thousand details of an ordinary life, we carry a quiet assumption that there will always be more of it. More time to repair a strained relationship, to make the change we keep postponing, to tend the parts of ourselves we’ve neglected.

Then something shifts. Sometimes it comes through a loss, or a diagnosis, or through watching our parents grow frail. Sometimes we simply notice, with a clarity that wasn’t there before, that a good part of our life is already behind us. The future starts to look different, and new questions come forward. What matters to me now? What do I want to do with the time I have? Can I live in a way that lets me look back, when the moment comes, with gratitude and peace?

I’ve been sitting with these questions a lot lately, partly because I’m at that stage of life myself, and partly because they sit underneath the work that has occupied most of my adult life. We usually talk about flourishing in terms of healing and growth. I’ve come to believe that any honest picture of human flourishing has to include how we relate to aging and death. Learning to live well and learning to leave well turn out to be the same education.

The Gift of Remembering

The Buddhist tradition asks practitioners to keep death close. We reflect on the preciousness of a human life, the certainty that it will end, and the complete uncertainty of when. People sometimes hear this as morbid. In my experience, it has the opposite effect. When I really let in that my time is limited, I stop taking the day for granted.

Most of us know intellectually that we will die, yet that knowledge rarely touches our daily choices. There are bills and deadlines and endless small matters asking for our attention, and over time they quietly become the organizing principle of a life. Weeks turn into years, and years into decades, in just this way. None of it is necessarily unhappy. It just leaves very little room to ask whether the way we spend our hours reflects what we care about most.

Contemplating impermanence interrupts that momentum. It can show us where our energy has actually gone, and how often the people and hopes closest to our hearts have been asked to wait. That can be uncomfortable to see. It is also good news, because as long as we’re breathing, we can still make changes in how we choose to live.

What the Later Years Can Offer

Aging brings real losses, in our bodies and in our circumstances. It also opens possibilities for psychological and spiritual development that a culture fixated on youth and productivity tends to overlook. With enough lived experience, we start to see our own patterns more clearly. Things that once gripped us loosen their hold, and our relationships and our capacity to care for others move toward the center of our lives. This deepening takes intention. Plenty of people harden with age and hold their grievances tighter. When we stay committed to our own growth, the later decades can become some of the richest of our lives, a time to integrate what we’ve learned and make peace with our own history.

That includes making peace with regret. None of us will reach the end without mistakes and missed chances, or without having caused some harm, knowingly or not. We act on what we understand at the time, and sometimes the consequences only become clear decades later. Regret can trap us in guilt. Examined with some kindness, it can also show us where we’ve drifted from our values and where repair is still possible.

The regrets people carry longest usually involve the people they love: words left unsaid, or a conflict allowed to harden for years. I carry one of these myself. When my son Robert died abruptly six years ago at the age of 44, I was left with so many things I wished we could have done together and explored together.  I also wish I had found a way to better support him in his art, which I’ve come to appreciate more and more since his passing. Recognizing these opportunities while there’s still time lets us act now, say the appreciative things we long to say, or muster the courage to have the difficult conversation we’ve been putting off. Some relationships can’t be mended. We can still own our part and set down some of what we’ve been carrying.

A Compassionate Exit

Leaving well also has a practical side, one many of us would rather not think about. Making a will, completing advance healthcare directives, organizing our finances, and telling our loved ones what we want all require us to look at our death squarely. I’ve come to see these tasks as acts of love. They spare the people we leave behind a great deal of confusion at a moment when they will already be grieving, and there’s no reason to wait for old age or a crisis to take care of them.

I sometimes call this preparing for a compassionate exit. We have no say over when or how we’ll go, and grief will come for the people who love us regardless. Within those limits, we can leave our affairs and our relationships in good order. We can also remember that the legacy that matters most is being written right now, in how we treat the people in front of us today.

Holding It Lightly

I want to be careful here, because awareness of death can easily become one more thing to get right. We live in a culture that tells us to optimize everything, and even the aspiration to “live without regrets” can turn into an impossible standard. Every life ends with roads untaken, and work left undone. Part of growing wiser is making peace with that and living wholeheartedly anyway.

Contemplative practice gives us a way to rehearse this. By sitting with the changing flow of experience, moment by moment, we watch ourselves cling to what’s pleasant and push away what’s hard. Over time the grip softens, and uncertainty and loss start to feel like part of being alive, something we can meet with some steadiness. People sometimes worry this leads to detachment. What I’ve seen, in myself and in my students, is that we become more engaged. We love more freely once we’ve stopped demanding that life hold still.

One quiet gift of growing older is a different quality of attention. The need to prove ourselves eases. A long conversation with an old friend, a slow morning, an hour outdoors, the plain fact of a body that still carries us through the day: these start to feel like enough.

We can’t know how much time we have, and medical advances may keep stretching our expectations of how long and how well we’ll live. Whatever the number turns out to be, the question stays the same: how do I want to spend the time I have?

When the time comes, none of us will have finished. There will be projects left open and people we wish we’d had more time with. The trees outside my window let go of their leaves every November, some still green, others in full color, and some already wilted, and they seem to manage it with a certain grace, flowing with the natural rhythms of nature. With practice, and with some kindness toward ourselves, perhaps we can learn to do the same.