Time Travel, Cancer, Mortality, and a Life Well Lived

In the movie, ”About Time”^[1] Tim finds out that he can travel through time. At the age of 21, Tim’s father sits him down for a serious talk. It is then that he tells him that all the men in their family have the ability to time travel. Tim’s father goes on to give him some basic advice on how it works and how to use it. The time travel is limited to his own life. In other words, he cannot go back and see Abraham Lincoln. He can go back and relive his life as a child, or an awkward conversation at a party, etc.  At first Tim doesn’t believe him but then he tests it out and his life is changed. This newfound ability allows Tim the opportunity to redo or relive events in his life. As he relives each moment, he can, and often does, change things.

The concept is fascinating. If you could relive a moment what moments would you relive? Are there times when you would go back and do things differently?  

Tim’s father retired young. Later in the movie we find out why. He is dying of cancer. He tells Tim that in spite of his time travel he could not find any way to prevent the cancer or his death. Instead he could only change how he lived his life. Knowing he was going to die, he retired young. That way he could spend hours playing table tennis with his son, living on the beach in Cornwall, and interacting with his family. 

What would you do if you knew that you were going to have a premature end to your life? Would it change anything? What would you do differently? Would you immediately retire to spend hours playing table tennis? Would you go through a “bucket list?” Would you want to achieve some great thing before the end?

Several years ago, I was on an airplane when the woman next to me began talking to me. She noticed the medical PowerPoint I was working on. As we talked we realized that I had known her husband (also a doctor). She told me that he had recently retired but then shortly after retirement he became ill and passed away. Prior to his death they had many plans of things they were going to do together. They wanted to travel. They wanted to visit their children. They wanted to spend days together. Retirement was when they planned to do all the things that they did not have the time to do when he was busy working.

Now she was trying to do the things alone. She was traveling. She was going to see their children. She was going to have the experiences they had planned. But she was not going to get to do them with him. It was hard. She was going through the motions of what they had dreamed to do together. But she was alone.

What would her husband have done differently if he had known? Would he have retired earlier? Would he have done things differently even before retirement? That conversation has remained in my mind. It pulls at me. It challenges my decisions and choices.

We of course have plans for retirement someday. They are not necessarily very specific or in great detail. For me, a lot of them have to do with just not being so busy. It includes the luxury of getting up in the morning and not having to immediately do anything. When I go to the health club to exercise, the idea of having an extra hour to do more exercise and then go sit at breakfast is immensely appealing. A few days ago, while on vacation I walked in the morning sunshine to a coffee shop. I brought lattes and biscuits back to our Airbnb. That felt like the greatest luxury in the world. My wife and I love to travel. The idea of being able to plan long trips is exciting to me. We love to go visit our daughters. I also picture the idea of a winter in a warm place. I imagine getting up each morning and taking a walk down through a golf course with just a light jacket on and not feeling rushed. Sometimes I wonder about the indulgence of writing. These quiet moments with a cup of coffee and my computer are enjoyable to me. Instead of 7 am meetings, 7 am in a comfortable chair with a cup of coffee and my computer are what an enjoyable retirement could mean to me.

Getting diagnosed with cancer makes all of these questions more intense. Before cancer it was okay to work really hard now and put off things for the time of retirement. But if retirement never comes, and all I ever did was work; would I have been a fool? 

The answers are not easy. There are important questions about life and purpose that go beyond just what I want. As I dig deeply within myself, a few themes keep surfacing:

1. Is my current life so bad? When I start thinking about the ideal life, it occurs to me that what I have now is not so bad. I get a lot of vacation days. We use them. We have travelled a lot. We do visit our children. We go sailing. I do have Saturday mornings and vacation mornings to sit and drink coffee. I am writing blog posts.  By questioning my current life, it feels like I am at least partly betraying the wonderful good things that define my life now. I am blessed. Is the answer that I need to make structural changes or is it that I need to enjoy the life that I already have? If you are at a restaurant eating a steak, can you enjoy it for what it is? Or are you a fool that looks to what someone else has ordered and who then longs to eat that instead? Can you enjoy the steak? Or do you spend the meal dreaming of pizza? And then at another meal when eating a pizza, do you spend that time dreaming of a steak? I have a good job. It is what has been my calling and my passion. My patients thank me for what I have done. I have a lot of extras in my life. I have a great family who loves me. If I were to die tomorrow, isn’t that enough? 
2. Is our purpose in life really about enjoying things? Is that what it is all about? Am I intended to go and find just what makes me happy and do that? Is my personal happiness what is truly important in life? Or is there more? Should life be more about meaning and purpose? Should it be about calling? Is this life about living out the purposes and will of God for my life? Jim Elliot said, “He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”^[2] Jim died young following God’s call on his life. Jim had a life well lived. Is life really about being an awkward old man in shorts, sandals and black socks walking down a golf course with a cup of coffee each morning? Are we really intended or promised a long retirement? Maybe life is more about doing good in the time that we have. What defines that good is unique to each of us. What that good is also may shift and change through the phases of our lives. But a life well lived is perhaps not about personal or selfish desires and goals. This means that it really is not a tragedy to die in the saddle. It is ok and it may even ideal to die working at what is your current purpose and calling.
3. I don’t know what is going to happen. I could be fine. Do I really blow up all that is my current life over fear of something that may not happen (recurrence of cancer)?
4. Is the question a different one and perhaps one that applies to all of us at any point: What is my best lived life now? With where I am now, with where the Lord has put me with the abilities, opportunities and responsibilities in front of me, how do I make the best of that? I think that is the key question and the one I hope to explore a bit more.

So now I understand. If you are facing your mortality and even if you are not, the key question is to ask, what does it mean for you each and every day to live a life well lived?

First off is to perhaps reject the idea of some future ideal. I am not sure that the image of me as an old man walking in shorts, sandals and black socks with a coffee cup each morning is necessarily nirvana. I suspect if or when I get to that point I may find myself longing for something else. The ultimate deception of this world is this ever reaching for the future ideal. Some who are retired tell me of how they long for their younger years when they had purpose and meaning and work. Even now I look back fondly at times from my past life. I would gladly jump back to many of them and live them all over again.

This world is broken. This is not the place where we will ever have everything perfect. Our purpose is not to seek our ultimate happiness in this world. If this is what we pursue, we will end up empty and in sorrow. 

Second is to enjoy and appreciate the blessings of today. I have a lot of amazing things and people in my life. I am truly a fool if I do not enjoy them for the sake of longing for something else. Even now I feel grief at how apt I am to do this. I hope that you, my family and friends, will forgive me for the times when I have not truly and fully enjoyed the gift of being with you and the experiences we have had together. This is indeed perhaps the most important thing that I must remember and live.

Third is to seek purpose and meaning. For me I have learned that I do not do this selfishly or of my own power. I seek to do this as a humble servant of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I have learned long ago that my greatest victories and things that I celebrate the most have not come from amazing things I have achieved. They instead have come from humbly being used by my Lord for good. He can do so much more with my humble submission than I can ever achieve by my active intervention. 

My favorite scripture verse is 1 Peter 4:11, “If anyone speaks, they should do so as one who speaks the very words of God. If anyone serves, they should do so with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen.”

I must now tell you a very wild and deep secret. There are some cool things that I am proud to have achieved in my life. In retrospect I think these things make me look like I am an incredibly clever guy. I feel like it looks like I carefully planned and worked and built to achieve them. The truth is that most of the really important things that I have achieved are things that I didn’t really know I was doing while I was doing them. I was just walking through them by faith and by the incredible grace and gift of God, He used me in ways that were bigger than I would have planned. 

This blog is getting long, but I think we are reaching some key and important points. Interestingly they match the conclusions that the main character (Tim) reaches in the moving, “About Time.” If I knew that my end was going to come soon, the most important thing for me to do would be to live each and every day, including the moment right in front of me, to its fullest. This means enjoying what I have rather than longing for something else. 

1. Enjoy what you have today, in this moment. Live your best day today.
2. Don’t spoil what you have today by longing for an idealized tomorrow.
3. Seek a life of purpose and meaning rather than selfish desires. Joy comes in fulfilling these purposes and meaning. 
4. Purpose and meaning for me comes from humble submission to where the Lord has put me. It comes from desiring to be used for good rather than seeking personal glory.

So, what do I change? Should I retire early? Is the solution really about playing table tennis for hours on end? Is it really about a leisurely walk each morning with a coffee cup in hand? Or is it more about enjoying what I have now?

It doesn’t mean that we don’t ask strategic questions about purpose and how we use our time. Much of life is vanity (chasing after things that may not be important). We can and should look for what is important. What does the Lord have for me to do? Am I being a responsible steward of my time now? This is a question entirely independent of having had a cancer diagnosis. 

The key question is, however, not what I want to do. The question is what defines for me, today, a “life well lived.” And that is what I must do.

Thanks for reading along. 

Please, today, would you live your life as a life well lived?

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^[1] “About Time”, Universal Pictures, 2013

^[2] This was a journal entry from the missionary Jim Elliot. He wrote this on October 28, 1949. He was killed 7 years later at the age of 29 while trying to reach out to the Hoaorani people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Elliot

⁽³⁾ If you would like to read more about finding purpose and meaning, here is one of my prior blog posts: https://manmedicineandmike.com/mediocrity-mediocrity/