The Day I Died On Facebook

You’re listening to Your Life on Purpose:  the podcast that helps  you feel less like a cog in a machine by connecting the dots between life, your passions, and what the world needs, all in under ten minutes.  

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I’m your host Mark Guay and welcome my friends to season 2 of Your Life on Purpose. On this episode, I’d like to share with you a story that happened in my life when I went to college. It wasn’t a major event back then, yet now I realize that this small dot in my life significantly altered my way of looking at living my life.

Let me take you back:

On one blistery fall night, the trees had shed their motley colored leaves and, as chilled air blew throughout the college campus, I walked the two miles back to my dorm room to go to sleep.

Before that, however, I did what one shouldn’t do before bed: I checked my digital messages.

And as I waited for the archaic clunky desktop computer to boot up Windows XP, I had no idea what would happen next.

It was fall semester my sophomore year and I had died.

The computer booted up, I checked my AOL Instant Messenger (remember that?), and messages flooded my screen like some type of dystopian novel:

“Please tell me NO!.”

“Mark, you will be missed. I remember when… ”

‘Mark, please call me as soon as you can.”

And on and on and on.

I then signed on to this new app called Facebook and quickly learned the reason for all of these messages.

An old high school friend who thought he’d play a prank had posted: “RIP Mark Guay”.

What ensued next surprised my old friend like a monster under his childhood bed. The message began to get shared and shared and shared well before the world even had a “share” button or a timeline. Facebook, at that time, wasn’t even open to the public: only college registered students with a university email.

The message took on the telephone effect where one person told another who told another who then embellished the story to tell another.

When the telephone at my mother’s house rang, she woke up from a deep sleep to hear the news no parent ever wants to hear: her son was dead.

Meanwhile, at the time my mother heard the news I, on the other hand, was enjoying the fall sky and the smell of pumpkin spice in the air as I enjoyed an evening walk. My legs worked perfectly, my heart pumped oxygen to my blood, and a smile crept on my face every time a gust of wind would blow a vortex of leaves in the air.

What about a cell phone, you ask?

The minimalist in me at the time left my archaic flip phone in the dorm. Text messaging was too expensive, so I didn’t have that either.

As soon as I realized what had happened, I called my mother to tell her I was okay and proceeded to reply back to the many messages that filled my screen. Some perhaps thought my spirit had typed the messages, but alas it was just the peach-fuzz faced college me trying to let the world known I was alive and well.

Reflecting back on this dot in my life, I realize now how lucky I am that this happened. I had the opportunity to experience something that many often wonder about: What would people say about my life if I died?

Perhaps you’ve even thought of this before.

A part of me wishes I had the foresight to save the kind messages people wrote, but without a camera or a screenshot feature, I didn’t even have that option. Perhaps one day, Facebook will bring them back to me. But for now, I continue to think of this question.

Asking myself what would people say about me if I were to die tomorrow continues to push me to be a more loving, kind, and thoughtful change-maker of a man. It continues to fuel my desire to (teetering on the cliche here) be the change I want to see in the world.

It continues to allow me to see my imperfections as tools to learn more through the human experience.

When I first wrote the Empowered Life template that many continue to use to manifest their greatest self, this was the first question I had asked readers to think about.

It’s a grave image, yes, (see what I did there?) but thinking of what people will say about you at your funeral allows you to reverse engineer and now build this vision into present reality. It pushes you to live in the now and be that which you want to be remembered for.

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Try this one-minute exercise:

Take in three full and complete breaths with a 4-6 count inhale and 4-6 count exhale. Gently close your eyes, smile, and lengthen through the spine to broaden through your chest. Continue to breathe with this power posture as you begin to imagine one person in your life you love. Imagine them speaking to you and saying the things they will always remember about you. Imagine them hugging you, filling you with their love, and thanking you for the many kind words and loving deeds you shared.

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In my life, I’ve found this simple visualization technique to push me to be a better person in my life. Am I perfect? Ha, absolutely not — that’s the beauty of living — but am I growing more and more into the person I love to be? Absolutely.

Now, why does this visualization work?

Social Psychologist Amy Cuddy taught us in her popular TED Talk that the simple act of putting our bodies into a power posture changes the hormonal structure in our body. Our body releases more happy hormones that boost our confidence and literally trick our body into feeling that which we wanted to feel. In other words, Cuddy took the old idiom “fake it till you make it” and gave it scientific backing. If you want to feel more confident, says Cuddy, putting yourself in a power posture and breathing complete steady breaths will literally get you to feel more confident. Pretty cool, right?

Cuddy’s research furthers my belief that we are capable of far more than we often give ourselves credit for. Perhaps like how Einstein showed us the universe continues to expand and expand beyond the limits of our understanding, we too as individuals can continue to expand and expand and expand.

Perhaps we truly can become anything we intend to be.

Well, that’s my story for today. Thank you so much for joining me and I wish you a life full of love, light, and adventure.

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Now, without further ado, let’s dance.