We don’t need to live longer. We need to live deeper.
And that doesn’t require a plane ticket or a new guru. It starts with this moment. This breath. This brave little decision to be present, to ask a better question, to go one inch deeper into our own truth.
Because if we don’t cultivate depth before death, we risk missing the one thing this whole wild journey is really about: Becoming who we were always meant to be.
This past week, I lost two friends to cancer, both of whom were younger than me. One of them was a remarkable entrepreneur who, like me, shifted from CEO to Executive Chair of his company after he found out he had stage-4 cancer (I’m still stage-3). But, even with his diagnosis, he still asked deep (and funny) questions.
At 41, he told me he wanted to make every moment matter. He helped introduce me to the cancer specialists at MD Anderson Hospital in Houston and during our last Zoom call, when neither of us had any idea he would die so quickly, he asked me – 23 years his senior – about my thoughts on the meaning of life. The other friend was an MEA alum who was supposed to teach at our campus in Baja last month, but found out he had pancreatic cancer last summer.
A friend of mine used to say that when she considered dating a guy, he needed to satisfy both her height and depth requirement. And, her ex-husband (who was very tall and worked in hospice) said the two most important questions we ask on our deathbed are “Was I loved?” and “Did I love well?”
-Chip