This Is Your One Life — Now Go and Start Living it, Today!

It is time to start living

Darren Matthews
4 min readAug 13, 2022

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Photo by Helena Lopeson Unsplash

I’m sorry to break to you, but you have one life.

There is no evidence to the contrary.

It is one life and it’s the one you’re reading this with. You might feel shocked. You might feel scared. You might feel alive. Whatever you feel, you need to accept what I’m saying. Today is not the day to wallow in the self-pity of it all.

No, today is the day you need to wake up and stop living in fear.

You shouldn’t fear getting life wrong, you should fear not accepting the challenge of living. Because that’s what we do. We live scared. We stress over decisions. We stress over what other people think.

A hundred years from now, will it matter?

There is nothing like looking back from a future perspective to see how utterly misplaced your worries are. Of course, it is easy to rant about our one life, but quite another for a life complicated by illness, conflict, or poverty.

Unfortunately, only you can decide how to face this.

There was a guy on TV last night who lost his legs in the Westminster Bridge terrorist attack. Left wheelchair-bound, it would have been easy to say sod it. His response was to climb Mount Snowdon in his wheelchair to help raise money less fortunate than him.

This guy is living his one life to the max. He isn’t shaming those of us who can’t be arsed. Actually, he is showing us how we should be living our one life.

The Time of Your Life

Oliver Burkeman kindly calculated the average life is 4000 weeks, assuming you live to be eighty.

How many weeks have you lived?

How long a go go is a website you can’t hide from. Enter your date of birth and from there you can see how long ago your birth was in months, weeks, hours, minutes, and seconds. Compare to the 4000 weeks and you might find a number too close to the end. It happens. It is revealing and puts the stark nature of our ‘one life’ in sharp perspective.

That same perspective offers you more.

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Darren Matthews

I’m utterly curious about decision-making | Sharing lessons learned from the thousands of decisions I’ve studied and made | Founder https://www.resolve.blog