An Interesting Life

[clarion]

Obituary from the Guardian I happened across.

[fuzzy]

The sort of obituary that makes me think "Oh to have met and passed some time with this person."

[Paul]

And one that made me think the same a little while back.

(edit: apols - just noticed where this thread is, and the lack of any cycling content in my addition. Feel free to ask me to move/delete/if it's too OT)

[mike]

writing your own obituary is an interesting idea.  Roz Savage is someone I admire hugely:

“I would sit on the commuter train on my way to the office, wondering if this was what life was all about,” remembers Roz. “I wasn't happy. I wasn't fulfilled. I wasn't being true to my values.”

Roz knew she needed to change the way she lived her life, so sat down to write two versions of her obituary. One version told the story of her life as she was living it then. Conventional, ordinary and pleasant, with occasional moments of excitement, yet always within the safe confines of normality.

The second was the obituary that she wanted to have. “I thought of the obituaries that I enjoyed reading, the people that I admired. They were the adventurers and risk-takers, the people who seemed to have lived many lifetimes in one. The people who had tried lots of things, some of them successes, some of them spectacular failures, but at least they’d had the guts to try. I realized that if I repeated today's actions 365 times, I wouldn’t be where I wanted to be in a year – or in ten years, or at the end of my life. ”