An invitation to rethink ourselves

My brother shared with me this article, where a palliative nurse registers the most common regrets of the dying. The phrases she heard where usually these:

1) I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2) I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

3) I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

4) I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5) I wish that I had let myself be happier.

What is interesting about these regrets is that they were commonly repeated among the patients this nurse visited. They are points in common among several human beings, which coincide with simple things, such as allowing themselves to be happy, seeing their friends more often, saying and doing what they feel and spending less time immersed in work.

When we were young, these conclusions seemed obvious for us… we didn’t even think of them, we lived them. Because when we are young, there is no routine, nor destiny, nor what will they say about me tied to our Being. But, as we grow up, life in society imposes its requirements, and we need to comply, leaving our most innate, profound, wild Being aside, to be educated by our society (to fit in the mold it provides us). And our senses are altered.

This is why older people complain when they step on a small puddle, or they avoid it, while when we were young, we were capable of go running and jumping right into it, laughing out loud… we did not care if we got our clothes wet; except Mum, who thought: I need to by my soap for the washing machine, although I have to fix it first, or buy a new on e, the old one does not work, planned obsolence; besides I did not receive my last pay check…

Those common denominators are an invitation for us to reinvent ourselves on what we are doing of our lives. Is it necessary to wait for the end of our lives for us to realize what we should have done?

Certainly not… we should realize earlier, or even rethink it every single day when we go out of bed, go to the bathroom, turn on the shower and watch ourselves in the mirror, am I doing what I really want to do these days? What I will do TODAY, brings me closer to who I want to Be TOMORROW?

If the answer is Yes, then great… but it you look yourself in the mirror, and you hesitate before saying Yes… or when you look yourself and know instantly that the answer is No (I am not doing what I want to do with my life), then you need to concentrate all your strength and energy to CHANGE your routine and lifestyle. You need to change the, but before, you need to change, or define, your true objectives in life, what really motivates you.

An no matter what you decide to do, it does not matter at all HOW you are going to make it, nor how long it will take for you to achieve your goals, nor the obstacles you might stumble upon. You simply need to get your grip and do it, whatever your heart tells you to do, no matter if it sounds like a cliché, it just the way it is. I once read (and it stuck with me):

“We can choose, but we can’t know if our choices will grant you success. The beauty of this process is that, when we decide to see things spiritually, we no longer care on predicting. We turn ourselves a whole with our souls.” (Dr. Fred Alan Wolf, 2002)

In my case, it took me quite long to realize that what I really love to do in life was reading and writing.

A good friend of mine once shared with me a couple of words from Carl Sagan, who I always admired:

Apart from the books, what I want to state clear is that, only when I started reading and writing with great intent, situations started to present to me which opened more and more doors, making me always know the right people –or almost always, you always have some loss percentage-, allowing me to keep on getting inner deep in the things I was passionate for.

And this happened only when I got out of my own context, from where I was standing, and played the game of reinventing myself. And once you do it, you need to be prepared to do it again, because reinventing yourself is essential, in the exact way Nature itself and all of her components are related between them, introducing little changes throughout time, destined to weave an intricate and complex web. More and more profound…

While you think about it, these astronomy images might help you get inspired!

It will be until next week,

Greetings,

Brian Longstaff.-

Bibliography.

Fred Alan Wolf. 2002. La nueva alquimia de la vida. Editorial Océano. Barcelona, España. 2008. Page 163.

All images extracted from Google.

Sebastian thanks for Carl Sagan’s phrase; and Lizzie, thanks for your cosmic link! =)

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