You come into this world with nothing. No expensive watch, no designer glasses, not even pockets to put them in. If material things truly mattered, wouldn’t you expect to arrive with at least something built in? But you don’t. You show up as sheer human being, and that’s where your family finds all the joy, simply in the fact that you exist. Then one day, you take your last breath, maybe in a hospital bed, maybe in a senior home, and once again you have nothing with you, no watch, no possessions, just yourself. And you become part of the earth again, the same way you arrived. Nothing wrong with having nice things along the way. But if the two bookends of your life have nothing to do with material wealth, maybe that tells you what the baseline should have been the whole time. And here’s the thing, the truth tends to surface when you actually have time to reflect before that last breath. Obviously that’s different if it’s sudden, an accident or a heart attack. But when you’re lying there at night, the visitors have gone home, and it’s just you, there’s no question in my mind what surfaces. A palliative care nurse named Bronnie Ware recorded this from years of sitting with dying patients, and the same five regrets came up again and again. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings. I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends. And I wish I’d let myself be happier. Notice something, not one of them is about the watch, the glasses, or the money.
When it’s just you left with your thoughts, no visitors, no distractions, what do you think you’d wish you had done more of? And the second one, are you living a life that’s true to who you actually are, or one you’ve built to meet what everyone else expects of you?