Death and the whole point of living

I had a morbid thought the other day. I wondered, for a brief moment, what it would feel like if I suddenly was diagnosed with stage 3 or 4 cancer and only had a few more months to live. Would I do things any different?

It's been coming upon me that for several health reasons, I really ought to go get my body checked out, even if it's just the supposed annual thing you do with your car for maintenance purposes. But I really, just, don't.

In the first place, kind of like the reluctance one has for seeing the dentist, I've been avoiding visiting a doctor and getting full body check ups for the last I don't know how many years. Not that I don't think that I'm in a good health with minor ailments, but simply because I don't really care to know.

And so the possibility (very slim, however) is present on my morbid thought. And morbidly enough, I think I would have been rather happy about it. Or well, not happy maybe, but at least not sad. I don't think I'd really change anything, to be honest, except maybe quit my job immediately since there isn't really much point of earning a salary I don't get to spend.

But I've always had the impression that terminal people want to suddenly do things that they've never thought of doing. At least that's how the cliche went - they'd travel the world (people who hate going on airplanes), get in touch with people they lost contact with (and barely knew before), start becoming nice to people they were mean to in the past (the Scrooge mentality, I call it) and essentially turn themselves into completely different people than they were before, in the last few months of their lives. It's almost as if they were trying on new clothes when they heard the news that they can no longer wear clothes anymore in x number of months time.

And just what is the reason and logic for that? I love my life as it is right now. I love the clothes that I'm wearing. So much so that if I could no longer wear clothes anymore in a given number of months time, I wouldn't want to wear anything else. And if I didn't like the clothes I was wearing in the first place, why the hell wouldn't I just change them now, instead of waiting for a deadline to come up?

Over the years, I've collected a series of simple but important things to help me enjoy my life better. These are in no ways formulas for how to live a better life, better being rather subjective, but it certainly helped me make the most of the time I have. I guess I'm just telling myself, so I don't forget.

1. Don't put off what you want to do today.
2. If you are contemplating doing something, ask yourself a very simple question "Why the hell not?" If you can think of 3 good reasons, don't do it. If you can't, do.
3. First, do no harm.
4. Regret is something better left for tomorrow than today or yesterday.
5. The only real law is that of gravity. Everything else are mostly theories and sometimes speculations.

And don't trust me on the sunscreen.