“The top 5 regrets of the dying: I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself; I wish I hadn’t worked so hard, had the courage to express feelings, I wish I had stayed in touch with friends, I wish I had let myself be happier,”  Bronnie Ware.  When we look back on our lives we see how it all fit together.  We know how we got from childhood to adolescence to adulthood.  We see the losses and wins.  We see the struggles and triumphs.  We see the moments we got smacked upside the head with a 2×4 or wish we had been.  By the time we realize it’s over, it’s too late to go back and do any of those things listed as a regret.  The question is how do we ensure that we live a life without that regret?  We make sure we LIVE with no regrets.  Sure, it’s easier said than done.  Programming is programming and it runs deep.  It is locked in the cadence of our breath, our walk, what we share with people.  We are programmed down to the DNA for what we do and do not like and what we will and will not do along with our beliefs.  The purpose of understanding life, specifically the regrets at end of life, is that we are meant to figure out how not to be that way IN life.  We are meant to figure out the way to live while we are here.

All the moments we hold ourselves back for one reason or another shape the very mold of our minds which creates the reality we live in.  We can’t go back so why do we insist upon living the highlight reel over and over again?  Looking at all the beautiful gifts this world has to offer, why would we waste a second fixating on the garbage?  Pick it up and move on.  Again, I know this is easier said than done—it takes practice.  And sometimes that programming is still so deep we find ourselves behaving with old habits without even being cognizant of it.  Presence is a tough when the brain fights reality.  Yet the brain is our greatest ally if we let it be.  If we spend some time with it with deliberate intention, se start to reform the patterns we’ve developed over the years.  The reshaping feels uncomfortable and uncertain at times.  I’ve even fallen victim to the feeling that alignment is “too easy” and that it doesn’t feel right when things flow.  We aren’t used to calm in our minds or bodies because we’re trained to constantly go/be/do something creating tangible results to prove our worth.  We don’t get a lot of time here in the grand scheme of things—we are literally a blip on the radar of time.  That doesn’t mean we are insignificant.  On the contrary, sometimes those with a short presence have the greatest impact.

The cliché that you don’t know what you got until it’s gone hits home at the moment—or at least it resonates for this piece.  Nonetheless, it’s true.  We spend our days wishing for the next thing, the better thing, the newest thing instead of resting in the presence of appreciation for what we have.  This life is a gift and the fact that we have a say in what we do with our lives is incredibly rare.  We get to play choose your own adventure on the grandest scale and there are a lot of possibilities.  Take the chance because it’s often said we regret what we don’t do, not what we did.  If we reach the end of our days wishing we had done something else, lived a different way, then we have been living a half-life.  We will lever know what that other potential could have been, but the taste of regret is bitter.  Or perhaps it’s because we know what could have been that it tastes sour. All we give up in the name of something else, all the work we do for the fleeting bit of attention, all the energy wasted on peacocking the lives we’ve created but don’t live masks the truth: we know who we are and we know we can’t keep doing this.  We just don’t know hat else to do.  So m answer is this: DO SOMETHING.  Pick something, any of the dreams racing through your mind while you sit at work wishing to be anywhere else.  Then do something with it.  If it doesn’t work, who cares?  If you succeed, who cares?  We are just a moment in time but the point is that it is OUR moment.  So live without regret, live fully, live with love so when our time comes, we can approach it with a smile and peace of mind that we can sleep having lived a full life.