“Ichigo ichie” comes from the Japanese tea ceremony. Even if you drink tea with the same people, in the same place, it’s never the same meeting twice. The weather is different, your mood is different, everyone’s life has moved forward a little. So every encounter should be treated as a once-in-a-lifetime chance.
It immediately reminded me of a practice William B. Irvine talks about: the last time meditation.
Irvine’s book, A Guide to the Good Life, is my favorite intro to Stoicism (I can’t get through the more complicated ones). He points out a very simple fact:
Everything in your life has a last time. You just usually don’t know it’s the last time when it happens.
Take skiing.
I don’t actually like skiing that much. It’s expensive, it’s a hassle, and it’s dangerous. You have to travel far, rent gear, put on a pile of clothes, and ride a lift up the mountain. I don’t do it often either. It’s been years since I last went. If someone asked me right now whether I wanted to make a trip to go skiing, I’d say, “Ugh, too much trouble. Maybe later.”
But if I follow Irvine’s advice, something occurs to me: maybe the last time I went skiing was the last time I’ll ever ski.
The strange thing is, once I think about it that way, everything feels different.
If I’d known it was the last time, would I still have complained about how annoying the ski boots were? Would I have done a few runs and thought, “Good enough, let’s head back”? Probably not. I’d probably want to take the lift up one more time, really look at the snow around me, and do one more run.
I don’t love skiing. But if you told me my last time was the last time I’ll ever ski, suddenly I’d feel a little reluctant to let it go.
This is Irvine’s last time meditation. He suggests that once in a while, in the middle of doing something, you pause and ask: what if this is the last time?
We don’t need to live every day like it’s the end of the world. We just spend a few seconds reminding ourselves: whatever we’re doing right now, one day there really will be a last time. And it might be this time. After all, anything can happen anytime.
My life is already full of these “last times.”
As a kid, there was a last time my parents picked me up in their arms, a last time I went to some place I used to go all the time. It’s the same as an adult. Some friends I always assumed I’d see again, and the last time we met was over a decade ago. Some games I couldn’t stop playing, until one day I closed them and never opened them again.
These endings usually come without any warning. The world doesn’t pop up a window in front of us saying, “Heads up: this is the last time.”
So it’s on us to occasionally remind ourselves, “this might be the last time.”
I’ve been busy with the release of my book lately, and every day I feel like there’s still something to fix. This sentence isn’t smooth enough, that paragraph could be rewritten, the copy probably has an even better version. If the publisher were willing to let me keep editing, I honestly think I could edit forever.
Publishing has a deadline. After a certain day you can’t change it anymore, and when it finally goes to print, ready or not, you have to stop.
I hate these deadlines. But I also know that without them, I might never finish the book.
As long as there’s a tomorrow, today can wait. As long as there’s a next time, this time doesn’t feel that important.
I think life is the same.
If I had eternal life, the book I want to write could wait a hundred years, the place I want to go could wait until next century, and wasting today wouldn’t matter, because there’d be infinitely more todays after it.
It’s precisely because life has a deadline that we want to make the most of our time.
Death sounds terrifying. But without death, a lot of the things we treasure would lose their meaning too.
Older folks in my family don’t like to mention “death,” as if saying it out loud would actually pull that scary deadline closer. But I feel the opposite. Thinking about death once in a while isn’t pessimistic at all. Knowing our time is limited is exactly what makes us treasure what we still have.
My kids run over every day asking Daddy to pick them up. But one day, I’ll pick them up for the last time.
So now when I hold them, besides thinking “why are you getting so heavy,” I also become more aware that “maybe this is the last time.”
Everything has a last time. We just don’t know which time it is.
And since we don’t know, let’s make this one count.
