While leading a recent online course on movies, the ever-gracious Gareth Higgins suggested that the well-intended advice, “Live every day as if it’s your last,” puts a bit too much pressure on the imagination. “Better to think of how you might live each day if you knew you had only six months.” In response, a participant wondered aloud how we might live if we treated everyone we met as if it were their last day.

It takes a gifted teacher like Gareth to draw such a vision from his students and say, as he did, “That’s putting it better than I did.” How carefully might we attend to the truth and kindness of our words if there were no tomorrow to mend fences? Would we act more thoughtfully if there were no “later” to repair the damage, no “next time” to reveal our heart’s deepest longing?