I mean sometimes you just have to find a font. But contemplating the brevity of life brings some perspective to how we use our attention. It's not so much what we pay attention to. It's the quality of attention. It's how we feel while doing it. If you need to spend the next hour looking for a font, you might as well enjoy it. Because the truth is none of us know how much time we have in this life. And taking that fact to heart brings a kind of moral and emotional clarity and energy to the present. Or at least it can. And it can bring a resolve to not suffer over stupid things. I mean take something like road rage. This is probably the quintessential example of misspent energy. You're behind the wheel of your car. And somebody does something erratic or they're probably just driving more slowly than you want. And you find yourself getting angry. Now I would submit to you that that kind of thing is impossible. If you're being mindful of the shortness of life. If you're aware that you are going to die and that the other person is going to die. And that you're both going to lose everyone you love. And you don't know when you've got this moment of life. This beautiful moment. This moment where your consciousness is bright, where it's not dimmed by morphine in the hospital on your last day among the living. And the sun is out. Or it's raining. Both are beautiful. And your spouse is alive. And your children are alive. And you're driving. And you're not in some failed state where civilians are being rounded up and murdered by the thousands. You're just running an errand. And that person in front of you. Who you will never meet. Whose hopes and sorrows you know nothing about. But which if you could know them, you would recognize are impressively similar to your own. Is just driving slow. This is your life. The only one you've got. And you will never get this moment back again. And you don't know how many more moments you have. No matter how many times you do something, there will come a day when you do it for the last time. You've had a thousand chances to tell the people closest to you that you love them in a way that they feel it. And in a way that you feel it. And you've missed most of them. And you don't know how many more you're going to get. You've got this next interaction with another human being to make the world a marginally better place. You've got this one opportunity to fall in love with existence. So why not relax and enjoy your life? Really relax. Even in the midst of struggle. Even while doing hard work. Even under uncertainty. You are in a game right now. And you can't see the clock. So you don't know how much time you have left. And yet you're free to make the game as interesting as possible. You can even change the rules. You can discover new games that no one has thought of yet. You can make games that used to be impossible, suddenly possible, and get others to play them with you. You can literally build a rocket to go to Mars so that you can start a colony there. I actually know people who will spend some part of today doing that. But

whatever you do,

however seemingly ordinary, you can feel the preciousness of life. And an awareness of death is the doorway into that way of being in the world. And there are very few people who are more aware of death and the lessons it has to teach us than my guest today. Today I'm speaking to Frank Osticecki. Frank is a Buddhist teacher and a leading voice in end-of-life care. In 1987 he co-founded the Zen Hospice Project, which was the first Buddhist hospice in America. And in 2004 he created the META Institute to train health care workers in compassionate and mindful end-of-life care. And Frank has been widely featured in the media on Bill Moyer's television series on our own terms, in the PBS series with our eyes open, on the Oprah Winfrey Show, and in many print publications. He's been honored by the Dalai Lama for his work in this area. And he's the author of a new book, The Five Invitations, Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully. And I'm sure you'll hear in the next hour of conversation that Frank's is the voice of a man who has taken the time to reflect on the brevity of life and a wonderful voice it is. So now I bring you Frank Osticecki. I am here with Frank Osticecki. Frank, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Sam, nice to be with you. Thanks for having me.

So we know many people in common. We were introduced by our mutual friend Joseph Goldstein, who was a very old friend of mine and one of my first meditation teachers. We'll see a teacher for you as

well. He was, as was Jack and Sharon in the early days and many of the other Asian teachers who came to town as well. So I had an introduction to that world of terra vauden, but Boston of Practice, but also in Zen practice when I came to start the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco, which was the first Buddhist hospice in America, actually.

Nice. Well, I would definitely want to focus our conversation on death and dying, which is really your area of expertise. It's amazing that someone can be an expert in that, but you are certainly one of them. Just before we begin, tell people what hospice care is.

So you could think of hospice care as something on the continuum of healthcare that is usually accessed when people are in the final six months to a year of their life. It's generally oriented toward comfort care, managing symptoms, controlling people's pain, helping people who have chosen not to necessarily pursue more curative therapies. Hospice care might happen in people's home or it might happen in a facility. And of course, now we're seeing a blending of hospice care on what is called palliative care or comfort care that's even happening in acute care facilities. So what was different about Zen Hospice, we did all the normal things that any other hospice would do, but we tried to add to that mix the component of mindfulness. We wondered what would it be like to bring together people who were cultivating what we might call a listening mind or listening heart through meditation practice, and people who needed to be heard at least once in their life, folks who were dying. In our case, those folks were people who lived on the streets of San Francisco, at least initially.