“So what’s a life that matters?”

I must have looked as dumbstruck as I felt.

“The sub-title,” the man in the dark suit said, pointing to the slide on the screen. “You know, the sub-title of your book.”

Ah, my book, the one I’ve been talking about. Yes, of course. Living a life that matters.

Journeys on the edge, and all that… .

Hmmm. Haven’t had that question before… .

So with my usual grace, I punted.

“You already know the answer to that question,” I replied.

And the truth is, all of us do.

All of us know what truly matters. All of us know what makes our hearts sing. All of us know what feeds our spirits and nourishes our souls.

It’s just that we forget. It’s just that we get buried in the minutia. We lose ourselves in the urgent rather than tending to the important. We get sucked into other people’s agendas rather than our own.

Lost in rabbit holes of “busy,” glued to glowing screens, torn by technology run wild, assaulted by emails, inundated by updates, and addicted to the ephemeral connections of social media, we find ourselves running so fast that we forget where we are going, or why; caught and overwhelmed in a pace that both challenges and diminishes our humanity.

We lose touch with what matters.

Leadership expert Brendon Burchard suggests that at the end of our lives the questions we will ask of ourselves are these: Did I live, really live? Did I love, really love? Did I matter?

At the end of our lives, none of us will wish that we had spent more time in the office, sold more product, seen more customers, billed more hours. What will matter will be the experiences we have had, the lives we have touched, the love we have shared.

What will matter is whether we have listened to the deepest longings of our hearts.

The measure, according to Buddhist scholar Jack Kornfield, is regret. Will we be able to say that we have lived without regret?

The Carmelite mystic William McNamara says that “Drivenness and crowdedness scatter our perceptions so disparately that our lives become helplessly fragmented and we are inexorably reduced to uncollected dispersion and spiritual torpor. He suggests that “[m]ost of us will have to stop doing half the things we do in order to do the other half with the liveliness of faith and the contagion of love.” “[I]nsightfulness grows in stillness and tranquility,” he says.

In silence, with life stripped bare, we discover again what matters.

Clayton M. Christensen, writing in the Harvard Business Review shares these thoughts:

“This past year I was diagnosed with cancer and faced the possibility that my life would end sooner than I’d planned. Thankfully, it now looks as if I’ll be spared. But the experience has given me important insight into my life.

I have a pretty clear idea of how my ideas have generated enormous revenue for companies that have used my research; I know I’ve had a substantial impact. But as I’ve confronted this disease, it’s been interesting to see how unimportant that impact is to me now. I’ve concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn’t dollars but the individual people whose lives I’ve touched.

I think that’s the way it will work for us all. Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.”

As young philosophy students, we were challenged with the assignment of writing our own obituaries.

That will get you in touch with what matters.