an understanding of your permanent mortality should help you to realize more clearly how precious your life is. If you live to be 82 years old, what you have is approximately 30,000 days of existence. You are not going to then commute to "heaven" to live for eternity. 30,000 days is all that you've got.

Here are some of the things in your thinking that will change once you understand and accept this simple fact Your time on earth becomes much more precious to you. You begin to realize that everyone else's life is just as precious, and you start looking at them differently. You think more about what you are leaving behind when you die. You think more about the human species as a continuum, with yourself as a part of that continuum, and you start thinking about the future of our species and the planet. Like it or not, your total experience is here on earth. That realization should make you see a day wasted in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, or a week wasted preparing your taxes for the IRS, a little differently. All that you have is 30,000 days. Everyone who wastes your time -- every bureaucracy, every long line at the store -- should give you pause.

When you die, what is your legacy? What do you leave behind? Whatever material objects you own, to be given to whomever you like in your will. Whatever contributions you have made to society as a whole. If you have done research into the cure for cancer, you leave that. If you have written books or made movies, you leave them. If you funded a building at your university, you leave that. Images of you in photographs and video, as well as any letters, writings or recordings. Your children and their memories of you. The memories you leave with your friends and family.