“If you could, would you want to know when you will die?” asked a voice from deep within. Before I could say “No,” it said, “You have three years to live.”

True. There was a period of three years in which I believed there was a good chance I would be dead by the end of it. Not surprisingly, the consistency and length of my spiritual practices increased. I am well past those three years, and sadly, my practice has degenerated since then. Even after being within the proximity of death, the lesson was not learned deeply.

I found the book Death: Only for Those Who Shall Die—A Yogi’s Guide to Living, Dying, and Beyond by the Indian mystic and spiritual leader Sadhguru deeply informative and wise. And I was excited to interview him about it. But as most know, to effectively connect with someone, you have to meet them where they are. Same with magazine articles.

So, when I met Sadhguru, the only question I asked him was this: Since you’ve traveled across the U.S., teaching from your book on death, where do you find most Americans stand when it comes to death? He chuckled and said, “Americans don’t believe they’re going to die.” 

Accordingly, we start at the beginning, familiarizing ourselves with the knowledge that we’re going to die. The problem is the chasm between what we know in our heads and what we know in our hearts. Of course, we know we’re going to die, but that’s in our heads. Since we have yet to experience death ourselves, we don’t know it in our hearts. And it’s only when one’s heart knows that one acts accordingly. 

Impermanence, including death, is the first of Buddhist teachings. When I started learning about Buddhism, I was taught to repeat “I may die today” over and over again. For a while, they were the first words that greeted me every day as I set them up to display with my phone’s wakeup alarm. I even visualized dying in violent car accidents while driving down Atlanta’s highways. These practices made the thought of death more prominent in my mind, but they did not move that knowledge to my heart. 

Indeed, nothing triggers action like lived reality. What would you do over the next 24 hours if you knew you would be dead at the end of it? What would you do if you knew you had a week to live? A month? Six months? Our inability as humans to imagine our own deaths so vividly that we are compelled to act is telling. To wit, studies of those who had near-death experiences compared to those who survived life-threatening illnesses such as cancer show that those in the former group exhibit much deeper and lasting changes in their values and perspectives than those in the latter group. We literally need to die and be yanked back to life in order to act as if we could die within the next five minutes. 

So, while I don’t have a death or near-death experience to share, what I can say is that if you want to honestly live life knowing that your time is severely limited and that your time of death is truly unknown, do the exercise above diligently. In other words, write down your answers, since writing always makes things more real. Then revisit and revise your words as needed. Then act. Take the single most important thing from your “24 hours left” list and start doing it, or some version of it, every single day. Pull from what’s next on your list, then what’s next after that. I had three years, so I had both long-range and short-range goals. For three years, I worked on the things that mattered most to me.