Set Your Egg Timer to Six Months

At the end of a trip to Europe, where I visited Switzerland and Venice, I bought my wife and daughters bracelets at the Venice airport on my way back to Denver. When we changed planes in Frankfurt, I realized I had left the bracelets in the airport gift shop. I was upset for about five seconds, then I remembered a story from The Last Lecture, the book I was rereading for the third time on the flight home. It’s the first-person story of Randy Pausch, a 46-year-old (same age as me) professor who has only six months to live – he has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Here is an excerpt:

Once, about a dozen years ago, when Chris was seven years old and

Laura was nine, I picked them up in my brand-new Volkswagen Cabrio convertible. “Be careful in Uncle Randy’s new car,” my sister told them.

“Wipe your feet before you get in it. Don’t mess anything up. Don’t get it dirty.” I listened to her, and thought, as only a bachelor uncle can: “That’s just the sort of admonition that sets kids up for failure. Of course they’d eventually get my car dirty. Kids can’t help it.” So I made things easy. While my sister was outlining the rules, I slowly and deliberately opened a can of soda, turned it over, and poured it on the cloth seats in the back of the convertible. My message: People are more important than things. A car, even a pristine gem like my new convertible, was just a thing.

This story actually took place before Randy was diagnosed with cancer. I forgot this detail when I told the story to my brother Alex, which made the point even stronger. Though we don’t think of ourselves as being in Randy’s situation, we all are – we have an expiration date. Randy’s egg timer had been set for six months by his doctors (he actually lived for 11 more months). Others of us have our lives suddenly interrupted, like Kobe Bryant, or greatly extended, like Kirk Douglas. We don’t know.

How would you live your life if you knew you had just six more months to live? Would you let yourself care about the same things? Would you let yourself be upset about leaving some tchotchkes at the airport? Would you let a stained back seat or dirt on your car upset you? Think about it. Randy died 12 years ago. Where is his car today? Does it have clean back seats? Does it have dents? Does it really matter? The truth is we make a choice when we allow (let) ourselves to value things that are so fleeting and unimportant.

I keep saying we, but when I say we I really mean me. Before I left for our ten-day European trip, I asked my wife to please not park my brand new shiny Tesla Model 3 close to other cars, so it wouldn’t get scratched. My wife loves to play a game of finding the closest parking spot to the door of the grocery store, which means she often parks too close to other cars. She was texting me pictures of my car parked alone on the outskirts of parking lots, with the caption, “Your car is scratch-free.”

If I knew I had six months to live, would I still have asked her to do this? We objectify things, cars especially. If we had our egg timer set on six months, we’d prioritize what really matters: relationships, inhaling life, walking in the park. We’d reset what we care about, and it wouldn’t be things.

I don’t know when the buzzer on my egg timer will go off, but I’ll be trying to keep it mentally set on six months (and at some point it will be). And honey, if you are reading this, you can park that piece of metal anywhere you want (but not too close to other cars).