No ragrets? Really? Do you want to reconsider that statement, Big Boy?
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Grateful: to honor my body and the feeling of sleeping in past 5:30! Good for me
Intention-feel the fall vibe with football, leaves crunching under foot in my memory
First-put on some Winston Rodney, Burning Spear morning
Things-Yoga Shack 9:30
Morning Meditation from The GratiDude
Eugenia’s(My Mom’s) final stop as a place to live was a newer assisted living and memory center very close to my house called Aravilla in Sarasota.
I watched it get constructed over a few years when my mom was still relatively lucid, and the thought never occurred to me that when it was finished being constructed that my mom would end up moving in there. It was a great solution for a lot of reasons, including the fact that it also had a memory care facility so that folks could move to a facility with greater care in the same building without feeling the shock and discomfort of having to make a physical move to a new location. Having the same people, the same set up, the same the same hallways and everything really eases the change of moving to a new part of the building or a new room and it’s far less disruptive as patients need more and more care as the cognitive dissonance increases and the grip of this visible reality loosens and things get fuzzier and fuzzier from a reality standpoint.
What DOESN’T get fuzzy, for these folks on Death’s Doorstep, is REGRET.
Yup, and there are PLENTY up in the Assisted Living Facility.
The question is, are YOU going to be one of them talking about regrets?
OR
Be like the Ancient GratiDude in 2064, as I plan to be telling the same story, repeatedly (sound familiar old friends?) about meeting Mike Tyson in the Maui Airport right after he got his face tattoo…. but getting the story confused with the time I met Ice Cube at the 2000 NBA All Star Game.
Anyway, the Nurses will be patient because I’m going to be happy AF, chilling in my own pee again like it’s like it 1970.
Don’t take my word for it, Bronnie Ware is the Guru of studying the emotions of dying patients and she has documented everything in every language possible.
She believes it is important that the Living should know what’s coming.
Life’s reckoning.
Yours.
Bronnie Ware, a former in-home caregiver for dying patients, documented many of their regrets in her book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Some of the most common regrets include:
Living a life true to oneself: Many people wish they had the courage to live a life that was authentic to them, rather than one that others expected of them.
Not working less: Many male patients expressed regret over working too hard.
Not expressing feelings: Many people suppressed their feelings to maintain peace with others.
Not staying in touch with friends: Many people didn’t realize the value of old friends until their dying days, and it wasn’t always possible to find them.
Not being happier: Many people wished they had let themselves be happier.
Ware first shared her insights in a 2009 blog post that was widely shared and read by millions of people. In 2012, she expanded the blog post into a book that has been translated into 27 languages.
As I’ve written about before, we can learn a great deal about the clarity with which the dying see reality. And they don’t have the time or luxury to bullshit anymore. There are some things that are very, very, very clear even in the mind of folks approaching their very own deathbed.
They are clear as to what they have done right and where the regrets lie, and regardless of people’s background or economics the regrets are always the same and they are right here in this video.
These are exactly the things that my mom housemates at Aravilla cautioned me about when I would take the time to talk to them about their lives as they were cruising around the hallways or being chased down by nurses for their mischievous behavior.
Once you got to the point of being what they called internally “a flight risk” or not really clear as to where you were and what was going on, they would move you to the second floor that you couldn’t just walk out the door when you decided that you wanted to drive your 1975 Chevy that you still think you had out in the parking lot.
Obviously, there are not a lot of messages encouraging us to slow down and contemplate. What’s really important in life.
You will not see a commercial during the football game that advises you on the importance of not purchasing something and just sitting quietly in your backyard and listening to the bird’s chirp.
There won’t be a Superbowl Ad that encourages contemplation, stillness, or introspection.
In fact, those practices are bad for business and will probably be ridiculed as being esoteric or even blasphemous, depending on your religious organization.
However, at the end of life, regardless of what they did during their life who they voted for, and what kind of money they made it all comes back to wishing they had spent more time with the people they love and doing the things that their heart, and that God had prescribed for them as being their program to be joyful and happy.
The regrets are always the things you didn’t do or the misplaced allotment of time relative to economic pursuits and ego, accomplishments versus personal relationships and emotional connections.
When you look around and you see people that are truly joyful content and happy the key ingredient is never the type of car they drive or their tax bracket as much as it is the quality of the relationships in their life and what type of emotional contentment and satisfaction they feel when they shut their eyes at night.
We get into our later stages in life. It gets revealed to us exactly where the truth has been told to us, and where we may have been misled a bit regarding what matters at the end of the day.
Covid helped us realize how off track many of us were relative to our daily practices. However, there are still big gaps in helping people understand how to find both a mindset and ways to make a living that work well with their personality types and their emotional make up.
This is another reason why I love working with TypeCoach (https://www.typecoach.com/) to help people understand the ways that folks communicate, taking information and give off and receive energy.
When it comes time to make a time/value choice during your day, and you have the option of either doing more work or spending more time with friends and family, we can learn from the older folks that were on their deathbed and know that the right choice is always friends and family.
When we do that, we will never be disappointed looking back, and this is how we live now with an attitude of gratitude.
EVERY DAY:
Love
and
Gratitude
https://www.instagram.com/GratiDude_abides
KevinACarpenter@gmail.com/941.894.8030
Thank you sincerely.
IN LIFE AND GOLF, GET BETTER…..NOW!
HERE: https://grateful4.org
Every day, every way, grateful.
KC
I am here to help, add somebody that needs a “check up from the neck up”
KevinACarpenter@gmail.com
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