[Dottore]

Great replies all. Thanks.

Dostoyevsky writes (I forget the book) about a bunch of Russian officers who are executed at 15 minute intervals, and how one of these is measuring the time he has left from the sound of the volleys outside his cell.

With 60 minutes remaining, he realizes he has to review everything in his life in that last hour. And it is an incredibly rich and full time for him. Then he hears a volley and realizes he's down to 45 minutes, and he begins again—and the 15 minutes until next volley are even richer and fuller and more intense.

And so it goes....

When the last volley sounds, and he realizes he has just 15 minutes left in his life, he is overwhelmed by the sheer intensity of his thoughts and emotions and goes into a kind of trance.

This passage is of course the Buddhist notion of "death awareness" taken to an extreme, but it eloquently makes the case for maintaining a clear and present awareness of ones own mortality as a precondition for living a truly full and complete life.

Anyway, it is interesting that many of you are thinking along the same lines...