One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure it’s worth watching.
Life’s short. How many times have you heard or said that? For me, too many. I must be surrounded by negative souls, or maybe I need a younger set of friends.
Being an avid reader and admirer of the works of Shakespeare, I can share with you that it was he who wrote:
“life is too short, so live your life to the fullest..every second of your life just treasure it..”
and
‘Life is too short to love you in one, I promise to look for you in the next life’
Beautiful and thought provoking messages. With a potential 7 billion different answers, as I am yet to meet 2 people who share the same opinion on this topic, I find there is never a day when I don’t come across advice on how to get the most out of life. There are even ‘life coaches’ — people who have made a career advising others how to get the most out of their lives given their skills and potential. Are these life coaches ‘born-again?’ — do they know more than we do? No. They are usually people who failed in their own career and lives and most likely trying to live their lives through others; lost souls.
When a baby dies within the first 28 days of life, this is called a ‘neonatal death’. The first month is the most crucial period for child survival. Neonatal mortality continues to remain high with little improvement over the years in Sub-Saharan Africa, including Ethiopia. For that child, life is short. Not a chance to see the outside, go to school, play with toys, write a letter to Father Christmas, score a goal, set foot in a plane, learn how to tie a shoe-lace, have an ice-cream….all the things we take for granted each and every day of our lives. Yes, life is short when a baby didn’t even get the chance to experience it. Not a single word uttered. Life can be cruel and neonatal is a topic close to my heart. Why does God give a baby hours to live, and others 100 years to live? Where is the demarkation? Are we not all children of God? Is this Karma for past mistakes?
The oldest person ever to have lived is Jeanne Calment (France), who lived to be 122 years and 164 days. So what was her secret? The food, transport, education was primitive back in those times; Shilpa Shetty was not teaching Yoga and Sadhguru was not impressing us by telling us things that we already know (yet people still watch and listen as though he is preaching us a miracle each day). Did Jeanne enjoy her life? Was she too old by the time modern technology was introduced and fine dining and seven start hotels? Did she live life to the full?
So, that is the question: how do we ensure we live life to the full? We cannot determine when it will be our last day. We don’t know when we will breathe our last breath. So, why don’t mystics enlighten us on this? Why don’t scientists enlighten us on this? Quite simply because no-one knows the answer. We can spend an eternity climbing the wrong ladder, only to realise we should have made a change 10 years before, yet it is too late now.
Regret — a horrible word. This should be banned from the dictionary. We should not have regrets. Life is a teacher. We learn and if we make mistakes, one needs to learn that lesson and not repeat. What will having regrets achieve? Nothing. Just an emotional roller-coaster and we are hurting ourselves with such negative thoughts.
Living life to the full — does that mean we live a life like Pablo Escobar or El Chapo — life on the edge, billons of dollars, beauty queen partners, houses the size of English towns? Or does it mean we all aspire to be Elon Musk or Ratan Tata or Jeff Bezos (but better looking — his billions cannot bring back his hair)? Or do we follow the teachings of Mother Teresa and Thich Nhat Hanh?
Mr. Thich Nhat Hanh is far far superior in my opinion in giving life lessons than the arrogant likes of Sadhguru. Mr. Hanh says:
“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.”
“Waking up this morning, I smile. Twenty-four brand new hours are before me. I vow to live fully in each moment and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.”
“We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive.”
We have become slaves to social media; I see people showcasing pictures of them eating in different restaurants, running on different beaches, driving different cars….why do they do this? Did you ever see Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mukesh Ambani do that? No. Real wealthy people do not showcase their earnings and possessions. They see beyond material gain. They dress the same each day, because they don’t want to waste precious time of their lives deciding whether to wear Armani or Turnbull & Asser underwear or which car to drive. They see and treat each day as an opportunity to seize the moment, and smile and give as much as they receive in terms of attitude. They are different to those on Facebook who want the whole world to see that they ate at a restaurant or bought a new set of shoes. Perhaps they feel successful only after everyone has seen their new belonging. I pray for their suffering, as that behaviour comes about from emotional suffering and a gap in their lives. Perhaps they don’t have close friends, or are unhappy in their lives. It is our duty to help one another. Practice compassion.
Compassion is a verb.
If we smile each day, have enough money to eat and drink and purchase the basics of what we need, have a family, buy a small house….are we not living life to the full? Perhaps not. If we did, there would be 7 billion identical houses, and 7 billion identical cars, and 7 billion children at one school! Choice comes into the equation. We can teach our children how to behave, what to learn and how to dress to a certain age. After that, life is about choices. Making the right choices at the right time and living the consequences.
There is absolutely no diet in life that will guarantee you to live 122 years. There is no guarantee that if you get all ‘A’s at school in every exam, that you will become wealthy. Having the best clothes from Loro Piana, who source the finest cashmere fibres from Mongolia, and vicuña, which was once reserved solely for the Incan emperor will not heal a skin allergy, though I equally not get any rashes from it either (Vicuña fibre comes from a small member of the camel family, closely related to camels, alpacas and llamas, that lives wild in the Andes at an altitude of over 4,000 metres). But by making choices, it makes us happy, whether temporary or long term and that is our way to living life to the full. The perfect cake is made of the correct proportion of ingredients, and in our case, may be going to a school with good teachers, or having good loyal friends, having a well paid career, but working with good people who are honest, smile and helpful. Perhaps it travelling the globe and meeting good people, helpful and welcoming people. Even if we buy the latest Range Rover SVR, we get more satisfaction when our sincere friends endorse purchases. There is a common these in living life to the full….
…..being with sincere, loyal, happy, honest people.
People shape our lives. The environment is not the sun or the length of grass….its people. If we spend our lives with jealous people, we also start to see life that way, but not conscious of our changing personality. I know many people who are jealous of others success, yet they will do nothing but stay home all day and just want the worst for everyone else. If we spend our lives with happy, honest, sincere people, then we are in effect avoiding evil and jealousy, and we also become honest, sincere individuals. Helping each other and being compassionate, smiling, self-effacing, kind…..waking up and being surrounded by a world of similar characters…..now that is living life to the full.
If you only had 20 days to live, what would you do? If you only have 20 months or 20 years to live, what would you do? If you were given 20 months to live, you would probably leave school, travel the world, eat different foods, not care about saving £1 million in the bank, wouldn’t buy 10 different pairs of shoes, spend 4 hours a day on the mobile phone…would you? No. One would ‘optimise’ the time one has. That is living life to the fullest…..optimising our time so that we do as much as we can, and as much breadth of activities as we possibly can. Not everything can wait until tomorrow, and not everything can be done today; there is a balancing act. There is not a wrong answer, nor right answer, only the best answer.
I don’t agree with the phrase ‘live everyday like it is your last’. If I did that, I would need the bank balance of Jeff Bezos. However, one day that statement will be correct; will I have satisfied all my desires and goals?
I came to the realisation that when the final day comes, and your life flashes by in your mind, I won’t think about the countries I travelled to or the food I ate, or the delayed flights, or the rainy days, or incompetent people I worked with, or queuing for toilet rolls during 2020, or all the cars in my garage…no way. I will think about people…..people I was with during my youth…and people around me during my good years. But not any people. The good people…the honest, loyal, sincere, warm-hearted people. People with boundless compassion.
It is they who make me feel I lived life to the full.
