Brian Johnson delivers a short spoken reflection (Optimize +1) on Memento Mori using a personal anecdote: he finds a dead house fly, notes its brief lifespan (stated as 28 days), and uses that as a reminder to appreciate life's brevity and live each day fully.
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Optimize plus one. In our last plus one, we talked about the science of Memento Mori. And for the courageous among us, we actually walked through the death scenario scientists used to create more gratitude in their test subjects. Now, right after I typed that one, I cruised into the bathroom. Perhaps tmi. We're on the windowsill. I saw a dead fly. I picked him. Or was it her? Up. I held its tiny, fragile, yet astonishingly perfect and beautiful little exoskeleton body in my palm, admiring its green body, remarkable wings, and little yet relatively huge eyes, thinking to myself, memento Mori. Life is indeed an eccentric privilege. Then I. I thanked these stoic scientific gods for their generous reminder of the preciousness of life. Then I headed back to the old computer for a quick little Google search. How long do flies live? Can you guess the answer? Insert noodling here. 28 days. That tiny little house fly gets 28 days. We, of course, are lucky to get a few more days and a few more brain cells than that. But two things. One, in the big scheme of things, we don't get that much longer. And two, we never know when that string of days will run out. Therefore, as the wisest have always instructed us, we'd be wise to live as if each day and each moment were our last. Time flies. Let's celebrate each precious moment today.
