Live every day as though it were your last... BUT.

There's a saying: "Live every day as though it were you last." It's the inspiration for sentimental movies (most recently, one with Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson called "The Bucket List": Aaww...), and, as of a couple years ago, a country music song (can't remember the dude's name, but it had lines that rhymed "sky-diving," and "bullriding," you know, the stereotypical stuff a guy's supposed to do in Texas when he's diagnosed with terminal Stage 4 cancer).

People like drama, and that's a dramatic statement... But to be a bit Buddhist, it is EQUALLY important to say and live the reverse of that statement: that is, "Live your last day as though it were every day." There you go. If you lived every day with the appreciation that it was going to be your last (which, in essence, it is: going back to the Greek saying, you can't enter the same river twice, or even ONCE), then how would your actual last day be any different from any other? Death shouldn't make any difference in how you live, if you live authentically (read Martin Heidegger's Sein Und Zeit for a more convoluted expository on "living authentically").

It is, in fact, an interesting practice to reverse common sayings. Some statements seem to contain some kind of paradox or drama... Reversing them nullifies that drama, and sort of brings an equanimity to the whole issue... Truth, after all, shouldn't be dramatic, shouldn't take sides... It's ultimately empty.