A Year To Live

A Year to Live: How to Live This Year As If It Were Your Last by Stephen Levine is an interesting book that I just couldn’t finish. It’s not difficult to read, and I even skipped over all the meditations (and there are a lot of meditations), but despite what I thought when I got it from the library (and what I had hoped it would be when I heard about it), I don’t need yet another book giving me the same advice.

Just so you don’t need to read this book (or several others), here’s the basics:
1. Breathe and be aware of your breath.
2. Meditate daily, starting out with a little bit and increasing to an hour or more a day.
3. Look over your past. Forgive yourself, forgive others, leave nothing out.

That’s as far as I got, which is over two thirds of the way through the book.

I’m the type of person who sometimes needs to hear the same thing over and over again from a variety of sources before it sticks. I’m not sure if there’s a specific source that I need or if I just need to be won over like a river cutting through the bedrock. If you’re that type of person too, this is a good book for you. If you’re already meditating and reviewing your past, then this is not a good book for you. If you think meditation and forgiving others is a bunch of malarky, then this is not a good book for you. I think that this may be a good book for me to read again in a couple of years, if I haven’t started meditating by then.