What The Last Year Project is All About.

"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, from 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 only had 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 many of my 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 the 365 Day Project was born.

My Goals for this 365 Day Period:

• spend as much quality time with my beloved friends and family as possible
• travel as much as possible (visit Machu Picchu and other destinations)
• follow my passions
• publish my book(s)
• have as much fun and pleasure as possible (in other words, enjoy the journey!)
• get my financial house in order (leave my family very financially cared for)
• leave the world a more beautiful, kinder, better place (i.e., add more beauty, kindness, joy, and goodness to my environment, community, and world)

Here's to an amazing year!