Top 10 Regrets In Life by Those About to Die
October 8, 2012 | 2 Comments » | Topics: Life |
I never pursued my dreams and aspirations
The number one regret that people have on their death beds is that they were never brave enough to pursue their dreams, but settled for what others expected of them. When they look back at their lives, they tend to recall their unreached goals and aspirations. They are often haunted by decisions that resulted in the lives they ended up with.
While you still have a lot of years to live, be sure to make some time for reaching your dreams. Start working toward your goals now; don’t keep putting things off until it’s too late.
I worked too much and never made time for my family
Excessive dedication to work causes a person to spend less time with their loved ones. Parents can even miss out on the lives of their children, because they spent their best years pursuing careers and making money.
It would do you good to determine what is really important. Do away with unnecessary expenses and things that only crowd your life – this will make room for improved relationships and better lifestyle choices.
I should have made more time for my friends
When health and youth have faded, people realize what are truly valuable – they find that all their income and achievements amount to nothing in the end. What really matters in those last few moments are the people who are dear to them. At that time, they tend to miss their friends.
It’s so easy to get lost in the daily grind that you forget to take care of your relationships. If you don’t intentionally stay in touch, you may lose contact with your friends through the year.
I should have said “I love you” a lot more
The importance of love becomes more pronounced towards the end of life. At this time, unreturned of love will also be more painful.
It can be hard to tell someone that you love them, especially if you fear rejection. But not being able to express those feelings will leave an unsettled need in you, and possibly affect all future relationships. If you are afraid of getting hurt, remember that it’s better to make your love known than to spend the rest of your life dwelling on what could have been.
I should have spoken my mind more instead of holding back on resenting things
A lot of people choose not to confront those who offend them, thinking that this would keep things civil. In truth, suppressing anger breeds bitterness, which leads to various diseases. Harboring bitterness also makes you emotionally crippled and prevents you from fulfilling your true potential.
If you want to have healthy relationships, honesty and confrontation are necessary. The common misconception about confrontation is that it creates division. In reality, if it’s done kindly and constructively, confrontation deepens mutual respect and understanding.
I should have been the bigger person and resolved my conflicts
A lot of times, death beds and funerals are more miserable because of broken relationships that were never restored. Relationships are ruined when misunderstandings are not dealt with immediately; this may result in a lifetime of hostility.
Conflicts are a part of life; you can’t avoid them, but you should never let your anger last more than a day. Choose to forgive. Right the wrongs that you can, while you can.
I wish I had children
As people age, they often feel lonely and long for the company of their sons and daughters. Those who never had children often have regrets about having no one to comfort them or inherit their legacy.
With today’s modern thinking, kids may be viewed as inconveniences or hindrances to pursuing your goals. But keep in mind that your children will be the ones to show you love when you are old. They will also be the ones to whom you will entrust everything you’ve worked hard for after you’re gone.
I should have saved more money for my retirement
Failing to plan for the retirement years leaves people destitute in their old age. When that happens, their last moments on earth can be very difficult and miserable.
While you are young, you might not yet grasp the reality of retirement, but it’s important to make a plan for yourself. Be careful not to spend too much on things you think you need now; think about providing a comfortable life for yourself in the future.
Not having the courage to live truthfully
Looking back, people would wonder whether things would have been better if they were truly honest about who they really are. They think about the distress they caused themselves and others by pretending to be someone they’re not. You will naturally have concerns about whether people would reject you or accept you if you came clean; you might find it easier to compromise yourself just to be liked or loved. If you don’t yet have the courage to be truthful to others, you can start being truthful to yourself.
Happiness is always a choice, I wish I knew that a lot earlier
People rarely realize that they can choose to be happy. It’s so easy to play the victim of circumstance and prevent yourself from moving on in your life. You tend to settle for mediocrity because it’s familiar; you pretend to be content because you’re too afraid to explore.
Make a choice to have a happy life. Be unafraid of change, and don’t worry about what others think of you. Learn to relax and appreciate the good things.
Your life is what you make it! Don’t allow yourself to be plagued by regrets in your old age. A well-lived life begins today.
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Detoxify Yourself: 101 Tips to Remove the Poison from Your Body and Your Life
October 4, 2012 | No Comments » | Topics: Life |
By Megan Jones
With air pollution, harmful pesticides and an unhealthy diet, your body is probably full of chemicals and poisons that you don’t even think about. If you want to detox your entire body, mind, spirit and life, turn to this list, which has over 100 ideas from medical professionals for removing the poison.
10 Goals for Every Day
Keep these 10 tips in mind each day for a regular detox session.
- Watch less TV: Watch less TV, if any. Your mind will be freer to concentrate on more important things than annoying commercials, celebrity gossip and superficial materialism.
- Limit your online activity: It’s pretty much impossible not to log on to your e-mail accounts everyday, but limit the rest of your online activity, including going to fluff sites and playing online games. You’ll be more productive and will probably end up using the time you would have wasted on something more important and fulfilling.
- Stop gossiping: Always thinking and spreading nasty thoughts about others brings your own mood and self-confidence down.
- Use non-toxic cleaners: Using non-toxic home cleaners helps rid your home of unnatural substances that can be harmful to your health.
- Quit smoking: Cigarettes contain over 4,000 different chemicals, including nicotine, tar, hydrogen cyanide and even arsenic, all of which are poison to your body.
- Exercise: Exercising helps purify your mind and your body by releasing aggressive emotions and endorphins. Exercise also helps your body take in more oxygen and pump your blood faster.
- Sleep better and longer: Learn valuable techniques for getting a more relaxing, effective sleep each night in order to let your body fully recuperate from the previous day.
- Introduce organic produce into your diet: Fresh, organic fruits and veggies are free of toxins that harm your body and interfere with great taste.
- Limit the number of pills you pop each day: If you have a chronic health condition, we’re not asking you to stop taking pills. But if you pop several pills every time you have a teensy headache, you’re putting way too many kidney-damaging chemicals into your system.
- Breathe deeply: Breathing deeply increases the flow of oxygen into your body and relax your mind.
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15 Awesome Pieces Of Life Advice
October 3, 2012 | No Comments » | Topics: Life |
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25 Thought Provoking Questions
September 28, 2012 | No Comments » | Topics: Life |
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An 87 Year Old College Student Named Rose
September 27, 2012 | 3 Comments » | Topics: Life |
The first day of school our professor introduced himself and challenged us to get to know someone we didn’t already know. I stood up to look around when a gentle hand touched my shoulder.
I turned round to find a wrinkled, little old lady beaming up at me with a smile that lit up her entire being.
She said, “Hi handsome. My name is Rose.
I’m eighty-seven years old. Can I give you a hug?”
I laughed and enthusiastically responded, “Of course you may!” and she gave me a giant squeeze.
“Why are you in college at such a young, innocent age?” I asked.
She jokingly replied, “I’m here to meet a rich husband, get married, and have a couple of kids…”
“No seriously,” I asked. I was curious what may have motivated her to be taking on this challenge at her age.
“I always dreamed of having a college education and now I’m getting one!” she told me.
After class we walked to the student union building and shared a chocolate milkshake.
We became instant friends. Every day for the next three months we would leave class together and talk nonstop. I was always mesmerized listening to this “time machine” as she shared her wisdom and experience with me.
Over the course of the year, Rose became a campus icon and she easily made friends wherever she went.
She loved to dress up and she reveled in the attention bestowed upon her from the other students. She was living it up.
At the end of the semester we invited Rose to speak at our football banquet.
I’ll never forget what she taught us. She was introduced and stepped up to the podium. As she began to deliver her prepared speech, she dropped her three by five cards on the floor.
Frustrated and a little embarrassed she leaned into the microphone and simply said, “I’m sorry I’m so jittery. I gave up beer for Lent and this
whiskey is killing me! I’ll never get my speech back in order so let me just tell you what I know.”
As we laughed she cleared her throat and began, “We do not stop playing because we are old; we grow old because we stop playing.
There are only four secrets to staying young, being happy, and achieving success. You have to laugh and find humor every day. You’ve got to have a dream. When you lose your dreams, you die.
We have so many people walking around who are dead and don’t even know it!
There is a huge difference between growing older and growing up.
If you are nineteen years old and lie in bed for one full year and don’t do one productive thing, you will turn twenty years old. If I am eighty-seven years old and stay in bed for a year and never do anything I will turn eighty-eight.
Anybody can grow older. That doesn’t take any talent or ability. The idea is to grow up by always finding opportunity in change. Have no regrets.
The elderly usually don’t have regrets for what we did, but rather for things we did not do. The only people who fear death are those with regrets.”
She concluded her speech by courageously singing “The Rose.”
She challenged each of us to study the lyrics and live them out in our daily lives.
At the year’s end Rose finished the college degree she had begun all those years ago.
One week after graduation Rose died peacefully in her sleep.
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Kimo’s Hawaiian Rules
September 27, 2012 | No Comments » | Topics: Life |
Never judge a day by the weather
The best things in life aren’t things
Tell the truth – there’s less to remember
Speak softly and wear a loud shirt
Goals are deceptive – the unaimed arrow never misses
He who dies with the most toys – still dies
Age is relative – when you’re over the hill, you pick up speed
There are two ways to be rich – make more or desire less
Beauty is internal – looks mean nothing
No Rain – No Rainbows
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21 Habits of Happy People
September 26, 2012 | No Comments » | Topics: Life |
1. Appreciate Life
Be thankful that you woke up alive each morning. Develop a childlike sense of wonder towards life. Focus on the beauty of every living thing. Make the most of each day. Don’t take anything for granted. Don’t sweat the small stuff.
2. Choose Friends Wisely
Surround yourself with happy, positive people who share your values and goals. Friends that have the same ethics as you will encourage you to achieve your dreams. They help you to feel good about yourself. They are there to lend a helping hand when needed.
3. Be Considerate
Accept others for who they are as well as where they are in life. Respect them for who they are. Touch them with a kind and generous spirit. Help when you are able, without trying to change the other person. Try to brighten the day of everyone you come into contact with.
4. Learn Continuously
Keep up to date with the latest news regarding your career and hobbies. Try new and daring things that has sparked your interest – such as dancing, skiing, surfing or sky-diving.
5. Creative Problem Solving
Don’t wallow in self-pity. As soon as you face a challenge get busy finding a solution. Don’t let the set backs affect your mood, instead see each new obstacle you face as an opportunity to make a positive change. Learn to trust your gut instincts – it’s almost always right.
6. Do What They Love
Some statistics show that 80% of people dislike their jobs! No wonder there’s so many unhappy people running around. We spend a great deal of our life working. Choose a career that you enjoy – the extra money of a job you detest isn’t worth it. Make time to enjoy your hobbies and pursue special interests.
7. Enjoy Life
Take the time to see the beauty around you. There’s more to life than work. Take time to smell the roses, watch a sunset or sunrise with a loved one, take a walk along the seashore, hike in the woods etc. Learn to live in the present moment and cherish it. Don’t live in the past or the future.
8. Laugh
Don’t take yourself – or life to seriously. You can find humor in just about any situation. Laugh at yourself – no one’s perfect. When appropriate laugh and make light of the circumstances. (Naturally there are times that you should be serious as it would be improper to laugh.)
9. Forgive
Holding a grudge will hurt no one but you. Forgive others for your own peace of mind. When you make a mistake – own up to it – learn from it – and FORGIVE yourself.
10. Gratitude
Develop an attitude of gratitude. Count your blessings; All of them – even the things that seem trivial. Be grateful for your home, your work and most importantly your family and friends. Take the time to tell them that you are happy they are in your life.
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The World As I See It, An Essay By Albert Einstein
September 25, 2012 | No Comments » | Topics: Life |
“How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving…
“I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves — this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts — possessions, outward success, luxury — have always seemed to me contemptible.
“My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude…”
“My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality… The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.
“This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor… This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man… I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence — as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.”
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Life Summed Up In One GIF
September 25, 2012 | No Comments » | Topics: GIF, Life |
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A Date With Mom
September 24, 2012 | 2 Comments » | Topics: Heartwarming, Life |
After 21 years of marriage, my wife wanted me to take another woman out to dinner and a movie. She said, “I love you, but I know this other woman loves you and would love to spend some time with you.”
The other woman that my wife wanted me to visit was my MOTHER, who has been a widow for 19 years, but the demands of my work and my three children had made it possible to visit her only occasionally. That night I called to invite her to go out for dinner and a movie. “What’s wrong, are you well?” she asked.
My mother is the type of woman who suspects that a late night call or a surprise invitation is a sign of bad news. “I thought that it would be pleasant to spend some time with you,” I responded. “Just the two of us.” She thought about it for a moment, and then said, “I would like that very much.”
That Friday after work, as I drove over to pick her up I was a bit nervous. When I arrived at her house, I noticed that she, too, seemed to be nervous about our date. She waited in the door with her coat on. She had curled her hair and was wearing the dress that she had worn to celebrate her last wedding anniversary. She smiled from a face that was as radiant as an angel’s. “I told my friends that I was going to go out with my son, and they were impressed, “she said, as she got into the car. “They can’t wait to hear about our meeting.”
We went to a restaurant that, although not elegant, was very nice and cozy. My mother took my arm as if she were the First Lady. After we sat down, I had to read the menu. Her eyes could only read large print. Half way through the entries, I lifted my eyes and saw Mom sitting there staring at me. A nostalgic smile was on her lips. “It was I who used to have to read the menu when you were small,” she said. “Then it’s time that you relax and let me return the favor,” I responded. During the dinner, we had an agreeable conversation – nothing extraordinary but catching up on recent events of each other’s life. We talked so much that we missed the movie. As we arrived at her house later, she said, “I’ll go out with you again, but only if you let me invite you.” I agreed.
“How was your dinner date?” asked my wife when I got home. “Very nice. Much more so than I could have imagined,” I answered.
A few days later, my mother died of a massive heart attack. It happened so suddenly that I didn’t have a chance to do anything for her. Some time later, I received an envelope with a copy of a restaurant receipt from the same place mother and I had dined. An attached note said: “I paid this bill in advance. I wasn’t sure that I could be there; but nevertheless, I paid for two plates – one for you and the other for your wife. You will never know what that night meant for me. I love you, son.”
