Is A Rich Life Better Than All of Your Life?
We dream, live, remember, regret, change direction, see it all clearly – and die
You live your life — of course you do, what else is there? And I am not talking about not living or living someone else’s life, but what alternative you could have for your own life that you can live.
When we are young, we have no idea of what a good life is — how to make life rich. We listen to others, find our gurus, some to follow. Maybe our parents, but often their lives do not look like what we dream about.
We think for a while that being wealthy is the way forward, so we spend part of our lives ruining every chance for actually living, just because we have a goal for the future.
Or we can’t make it, can’t find the resources to aim for that big goal we have been led to believe is good. And we feel sorry for it. Sad. Feel that we owe an apology to the world for just living, which we then do not allow ourselves to do. We punish ourselves for only living — by not really doing it, just moving through the time that should have been life, in regret and shame.
When we do that, we miss the things that we would later be happy to not have missed. But there is no return, so if we do not grab it while it’s available, it’s lost.
The good side of that is that whenever you take a step in a wrong direction, that becomes the journey. You’ll find something along that journey that will fill your life. It will become your life. That hypothetical life that you wanted to live but didn’t, remains a dream.
Dreams of a parallel universe, a world that could have been, tend to sadden you. You may have such impossible dreams all your life, but the older you get, the further from reality they get.
You’ll have to reach out for what you would like to get, whenever you understand that you want it — or even if you are in doubt. In life or love. In every respect of everything that matters or could matter.
People and places, wildlife and the universe. That sudden understanding of where you want to live, what you want to do, what you can do for others, what you may be able to do for the world.
Everything counts. Only, life is not a race. There is no particular goal of it, nothing you need to do just because it must be done.
Life is rich when you try things that you want to try, make decisions you want to make, because they will improve something or send you in a possible better direction.
When you are 20, it’s easy to try and fail, because you can look ahead to many more years, many more things to try. So, do it! Later, it will be difficult, and you may end up in regret for not having tried.
A special thing about people: they are not there forever. Be with them while you have them.
Now, even though I’m a great spokesman of looking for the good in life, making everything you do a rich experience by simply looking for the rich elements in it, I also must say that life in retrospective does not consist of only the rich details, not only the good moments.
It’s okay to be sad, as my mother used to say. While not being the goal of life, you’ll get something out of that too. While not being enjoyable to go bankrupt or breaking a leg, such things may happen as a result – or just a side effect — of trying something that may lead to other results and other side effects as well; or perhaps just a memory.
Don’t be afraid of life. Use it. All of it.
I agree. Life is about the moments. I often look back, and I had the best time at the simplest of moments. We need to decide what "rich" means for each one of us. What an inspiring Saturday post!