Top Five Regrets of The Dying

It's 9:14 and I have done everything but what I should be doing which is study for my History of Photography test tomorrow. My brain is just not in it for whatever reason and oddly enough I'm not panicky at all. Maybe I should be more concerned. I'm not. I'm listening to my Mario Lanza playlist on Spotify and thinking about this article that Darnell posted on FB. Top Five Regrets of the Dying compiled by a Bronnie Ware, an Australian palliative nurse who counseled the dying for several years and put her observations into a book of the same name. It really got to me. One thing I do get panicky about as I begin to reach the (GULP) road to my 40s, is that I am running out of time, that I've wasted too much time.  I have several regrets already and I think of the top five listed in Wares book, mine has to be number 1.

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

"This was the most common regret of all. When people realize that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honored even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realize, until they no longer have it."

I know now that we are all dying, all the time, all dying and being reborn every day, maybe every minute but our culture is so saturated with falsities about the meanings of birth and death that we spend most of our time missing these moments. We're much too busy living up to some expectations we never had a hand in making. It's something that's preoccupied my mind on and off for along time but much more in the last four or five years. Reading the regrets of these people just as they die, it really confirms so many of the suspicions I've always had about the things in life which truly kill us in the end. The body takes it's cues very heavily from the mind. And that being the case, it's no wonder that people often pass away with so many regrets. While I feel that there probably comes a point in time for us all when it is very definitely too late for an ailing body to be turned around, the mind, whose mysteries, intelligence and magic we have only barely scratched the surface of, is still a place where dormant hope can spark the fire of awakening.

Okay, it's time for me to study now.