Now that I’m dead, I want to tell you a few things.

Firstly, before all this happened, the very worst part of my day was always the Waking Up part. I wasn’t great at going to sleep in the first place, it felt like all my ideas came alive at that time – as if the cloak of darkness allowed them to take their truest, wildest forms. And in my dream time they floated away and became waves that rolled and grew and crashed and diminished.

I always needed the prospect of a good strong coffee to entice me out of bed.

Secondly, I found a book that showed me in visual form the distribution of the various occupations of our daily life, added up over our life time and presented in bold colourful spheres. The biggest sphere showed the amount of time we spend sleeping. Quite a lot of time, as it turns out. I had no problem with this however, sleep being a pastime I rather enjoyed.

I was more upset when I looked at the second largest colourful sphere, entitled ‘work.’ I scanned my way across the page until I found ‘relaxation/holidays’. It was a very very small sphere. Small enough to appear rather insignificant.

I thought about this for some time and made an important decision, one that changed the rest of my life. I can honestly say that I died happy, isn’t that the best that anyone could ask?

I made it my life’s ambition to reverse the sizes of each of those spheres. I made it a prerequisite to never accept a job I didn’t think I would very much enjoy. I decided not to just wake up feeling miserable, go to work, and then come home to greet even more misery. From that moment, waking up in the morning was never so difficult. Even though my dreams were wilder, my ideas more colourful.

I died happy.