202411161349 As if I've deliberately come back to this one day

I just try to live every day as if I've deliberately come back to this one day, to enjoy it, as if it was the full final day of my extraordinary, ordinary life.¹

From About Time, a movie about a person, Tim, who learns that he can time travel and then the lessons he learns about living his life along the way. He initially tries to change everything to be perfect, but finds times where it's just not possible to achieve the outcomes he desires. There are many lessons in there about the value of cherishing your life and the people in it.

The final moral of the film is that we can live the perfect life without time travel if we choose to interact with the world in the right way. The writer of the film, Richard Curtis, suggests that the "right way" is to treat every moment, every day, as if it was a moment that you chose to come back to, to experience with the benefit of hindsight, and with the knowledge that you could never experience it again.

This rings true for me at least in a general sense. I think it lends itself towards a "mindful" "be present in the moment" philosophy towards life. It pushes us to shed our stress, our anxieties, our fears, and to take life as it comes. It pushes us to consider how we would act if we could never be in that moment again, or with the people in that moment again. After all, life is fleeting and it's true that we don't get to relive any of our moments.

Wouldn't we prefer to look back on a lifetime of moments well-lived?