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“If this is my last day on earth, what stays on the list?”
This is the question bestselling-author Mark Nepo asks himself every morning before he tackles his to-do list.
After surviving major health challenges — including a battle with lymphoma and debilitating back surgery — it has become a daily ritual that helps him focus on what truly matters, he tells Hoda Kotb in the July 22 episode of the Making Space Podcast.
“I’m a list maker, and I always start with the list of the things that I want to do, I hope to do, that I need to do,” Nepo explains. “But having gone through all the things I’ve been in my life, I have a cup of coffee and I ask myself, every day, if this is my last day on earth, what stays on the list? And then I take the list apart.”
“And even if I called you yesterday, it might be to call you up and say, ‘I love you,’” he adds. “You might say, ‘well, then why do you make the list?’ Because I live in the world. So every day I make the list and I take the list apart.”
Nepo says he has three other morning rituals that start his day on the right note.
“I invite folks to create their own simple rituals. I have three. I don’t do them every day, but most days,” he says. “First thing I do is I open the blinds with the consciousness of letting light in. Very simple. Next thing I do is take care of something living — our dog, Zuzu. And then the third thing is I do something for someone I love. So I make coffee for Susan, my wife, before she gets up.”
“How do you make it a ritual, not a habit?” Kotb asks.
His answer is simple: Presence.
“When I do those, the way that I enter the day is always different. If some days I’m rushing and I’m late and I go, ‘I’ve got to open the damn blinds’... well, then it’s not a ritual; it’s a habit. We have this gift. If I’m in that and I’m going, ‘Oh God, now I’ve got to take care of the dog,’ I can stop and back up and start over,” Nepo says — a simple reminder that presence, not productivity, is what transforms an ordinary routine into a meaningful ritual.
The biggest challenge, he says, is getting ourselves to slow down.
“A challenge for all of us is to try to slow down to the pace of what is real. Of course, we’re sped up, but we don’t have to stay there. So it’s always course correction,” he says. “If I’m impatient in line at the pharmacy, slow down. If I have a big decision or something alarms me, I try to stop and give my heart’s full attention to the nearest piece of life until it becomes my teacher. Forget my agenda. Forget even wanting it to calm me down. This exists outside of me.”
Getting caught up again in the fast pace of life is inevitable, he tells Kotb.
“But that’s why it’s so important to both be living inwardly and outwardly at the same time.”
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
