I hope you had a great Christmas and New Year. Failing that, I hope you just survived it all.
We’re mid-January and by now you would’ve come to realise that the “New Year – New You” thing is probably not going to happen.
Not magically anyway.
Your (unrealistic) New Year’s resolutions of running 10 km every day, never shouting at the kids (yeah right. You forgot it’s school holidays, didn’t you?), not arguing with your partner, never overeating, or drinking alcohol or whatever have now been broken.
A new year but – bummer – the old dysfunctions remain.
For Christmas I got a number of interesting gifts. Among them was a book from a very good friend of mine. It’s called: “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying”.
A somewhat morbid Christmas present you may be thinking and my friend, it must be said, was almost apologetic when giving it to me. I, however, was thrilled because I thought such a book is the opposite of morbid. It is life-affirming.
If we can learn from the wisdom that seems to grip some people as they’re dying and use it to enrich our lives and get our priorities straight wouldn’t it lead to a better life and – ultimately –to fewer regrets when it’s our turn to die?
I realise that I’m not in the majority here but I think the standard way of dealing with our mortality – avoidance in its many various dysfunctional forms – is a morbid way of dealing with life. That is, while we’re busy avoiding the fact that we’re limited beings, life passes us by. As the write of Lolita-fame Nabokov said: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at about forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).”
According to Bronnie Ware, the author of “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying” the main wishes of the dying, as they looked back over their lives were:
- The wish that they had had the courage to live a life true to themselves, not the life others expected of them
- The wish that they hadn’t worked so hard
- The wish that they had had the courage to express their feelings more
- The wish that they had stayed in touch with their friends
- The wish that they had let themselves be happier
My advice: print this list out and put it on your fridge and let it be your New Year’s resolutions.
Forever.
Amazing!