Better three hours too soon than a minute too late.
William Shakespeare
It was Carol’s fiftieth birthday, and Jim had two plane tickets to Hawaii in his pocket. He was going to surprise her. Instead, he was killed by a drunk driver.
“How have you survived this?” I finally asked Carol, a year later.
Her eyes welled up with tears. I thought I had said the wrong thing, but she gently took my hand and said, “It’s all right; I want to tell you. The day I married Jim, I promised I would never let him leave the house in the morning without telling him I loved him. He made the same promise. It got to be a joke between us, and as babies came along, it got to be a hard promise to keep. I remember running down the driveway, saying ‘I love you’ through clenched teeth when I was mad, or driving to the office to put a note in his car. It was a funny challenge.
“We made a lot of memories trying to say “I love you” before noon every day of our married life. “The morning Jim died, he left a birthday card in the kitchen and slipped out to the car. I heard the engine starting. Oh, no, you don’t, buster, I thought. I raced out and banged on the car window until he rolled it down.
“Here on my fiftieth birthday, Mr. James E. Garret, I Carol Garret, want to go on record as saying I love you!”
“That’s how I’ve survived. Knowing that the last words I said to Jim were ‘I love you!’
http://www.inspirationalarchive.com/246/the-last-i-love-you/
Saying “I love you” can become routine. I never speak the words unless I mean them, but the feeling is not always distinctly alive with their speaking. With those I care deeply about it’s a habit to end a phone call with “I love you” or for those to be parting words. There’s nothing wrong with that and it’s a good practice. What matters is to make sure the feeling behind the words is present within them being spoken.
In a romantic relationship, I have had a tendency to say “I love you” too frequently. It’s healing to admit I realize sometimes such words are spoken with the unconscious hope to hear the sentiment returned. I’ve had the experience where the other person is not one who expresses their feelings as easily and frequently. The attitude was ‘I said it yesterday. My feelings have not changed. You know how I feel about you.’ Within those tendencies we are both playing directly to our self and probably not as cognizant of our partner’s need as we could be. I no longer have expectations of hearing love expressed with any particular regularity and am grateful for the heartfelt times it is expressed. Guess I have grown up!
Within a small wake-up call alive in my head this morning it’s important to remind myself to cherish every moment with each loved person in my life. I don’t know when it will be the last time I see one of them. It is not the words that matter so much as the feeling behind them. I am grateful for a new flame of awareness flickering within.
Life isn’t a choice or an obligation,
it’s a gift,
so embrace it as much as you can.
You never know how much time you have left…
Nishan Panwar
The quip goes “time is money” but I have grown to see that “money is time”. Seems like I’m only playing with words by flipping them around. But there’s a deeper meaning with a closer look.
Definitions:
Time = one’s lifetime; a temporal existence, an irreversible succession
Money = a measure of value; a medium of exchange; value that degrades over time
Building sentences with alternate interpretations for “time is money” and “money is time” based on those definitions:
One’s lifetime is a measure of value.
A measure of value is one’s lifetime.
A temporal existence is a medium of exchange.
A medium of exchange is a temporal existence.
An irreversible succession is value that degrades over time.
A value that degrades over time is an irreversible succession.
Round and round we go until boiling it down for myself the meaning in a material world that comes is: 1) Life is of great value 2) Life can be exchanged for what one chooses 3) Life evaporates quickly and what it is traded for materially loses value.
Philosophers say idealism is the opposite of materialism. So often we trade what we believe in for what we believe we have to have or what we think we have to do for others. Then it is usually our dissatisfaction of what we give our life for that so much of our discontent stems from. Simply we get what we went after, but once we get it satisfaction is temporary, at best. Maybe that’s why in the consumer driven economy of the United States mental illness is the fastest growing sickness.
Spending our time/money in trade for cars, houses, clothes, electronics, jewelry, entertainment, filled bank accounts and what others want brings little more but momentary contentment. Anyone who believes differently is delusional and addicted (the majority).
On the other hand spending our time/money for happiness, joy, fulfillment, bliss, gladness, wonder, delight and being true to one’s self are investments that always grow with time. Anyone who agrees has a clarity of what matters and is inspired (the minority).
Nothing has been written here that we all have not heard a thousand, maybe even a million times: it’s time that matters, not money; being true to our self is the best way to be true to others. Maybe that’s the reason most give it little more than lip service. We’ve all heard the thinking so many times, we are mentally and spiritually constipated with all the “have to have’s” and “should do’s”. What good is unpracticed wisdom? NONE!
Without a doubt,
the greatest riches other than love
is time spent being true to one’s self.
It’s not money.
It’s not success.
It’s not fame.
It’s absolutely nothing material.
I readily accept the practical issue that everyone has bills to pay and responsibilities, but beyond what is really necessary most waste our too much of our “time” chasing things that are all so temporary. Time passes quickly. The value of money degrades quickly. Things done for others are soon forgotten by most people.
Written today this piece is really a “memo to self”. Soon to scale down my standard of living, this has been placed here as an easy to refer to signpost that I can come read again and again when I need to. I am grateful for the courage to take steps out of monochrome and into full color; away from money and toward my dreams; away from money and toward love.
What really matters
is what you do
with what you have.
H.G. Wells
Originally Posted here on January 8, 2013
Obey the principles
without being bound by them.
Bruce Lee
ORIGINALLY Posted on June 19, 2011
Dear Nick,
Vivid in memory are the emotions I experienced just after you were born. The day after you arrived I wrote in a journal about the joy I felt, the gratefulness within for you being ‘normal” with the proper number of fingers and toes, the awe that filled me for life and the hopes I had for you. I described your birth as “the most incredible thing I’ve ever witnessed” and also wrote “No child could be more wanted or more loved.” Those thoughts have aged sweeter as time has clicked by.
Frequent have been musings of how I could have been a better Father. Had I not chased with such vigor the emptiness of dysfunctional illusion, success and money I could have been there for you more. There were too many of your games I missed,weekend outings that never were and small events at school that were big happenings for you when my presence was missing. I never did build the treehouse I promised you.
Your Mother and I went our separate ways when you were sixteen which took you hundreds of miles away. One of my deepest regrets is your high school years when seeing you only every couple of months I became a sideline spectator of your life. Yet, as I mature and learn I have come to know regrets past making sure you’re aware of them, have no good purpose.
There are so many wonderful memories I have of your growing up. No child has ever been more curious about the world than you. You never crawled and began to recklessly walk at 7 months old. Such determination you have always had!
In school you did well and had the respect of most of your teachers. You made good friends and some of those relationships are healthy and thriving today. The only time you ever really got in trouble at school was through protecting a friend from a bully. How the game of hockey worked when you started to play at seven was unknown to me, but no father was ever prouder than I was to watch you. The lessons that came at you in college were hard ones, but you learned from your mistakes. I can not begin to express my admiration for your determination and stick-to-it-ness to get the education you wanted.
On this father’s day I hope these borrowed words express clearly to you the feelings of my heart and the wishes of my soul.
Until you have a son of your own… You will never know the joy beyond joy, the love beyond feeling that resonates in the heart of a father as he looks upon his son. You will never know the sense of honor that makes a man want to be more than he is and to pass on something good and useful into the hands of his son. And you will never know the heartbreak of the fathers who are haunted by the personal demons that keep them from being the men they want their sons to see.
We live in a time when it is hard to speak from the heart. Our lives are smothered by a thousand trivialities, and the poetry of our spirits is silenced by the thoughts and cares of daily affairs.
And so, I want to speak to you honestly. I do not have answers. But I do understand the questions. I see you struggling and discovering and striving upward, and I see myself reflected in your eyes and in your days. In some deep and fundamental way, I have been there and I want to share.
I, too, have learned to walk, to run, to fall. I have had a first love. I have known fear and anger and sadness. My heart has been broken and I have known moments when the hand of God seemed to be on my shoulder. I have wept tears of sorrow and tears of joy.
There have been times of darkness when I thought I would never see light again, and there have been times when I wanted to dance and sing and hug every person I met.
I have felt myself emptied into the mystery of the universe, and I have had moments when the smallest slight threw me into rage.
I have carried others when I barely had the strength to walk myself, and I have left others standing by the road with their hands out stretched for help.
Sometimes I feel I have done more than anyone can ask; other times I feel I am a charlatan and a failure. I carry within me the spark of greatness and the darkness of heartless crimes.
In short, I am a man, as are you.
Although you will walk your own earth and move through your own time, the same sun will rise on you that rose on me, and the same reasons will course across your life as moved across mine. We will always be different, but we will always be the same.
This is my attempt to give you the lesson of my life, so that you can use them in yours. They are not meant to make you into me. It is my greatest joy to watch you turn into yourself.
To be your father is the greatest honor I have ever received. It allowed me to touch mystery and to see my love made flesh. If I could but have one wish, it would be for you to pass that love along.
I love you,
Pops
You are my son-shine.
Author Unknown
A man is but the product of his thoughts.
What he thinks, he becomes.
Mahatma Gandhi
On the day when
The weight deadens
On your shoulders
And you stumble,
May the clay dance
To balance you.
And when your eyes
Freeze behind
The gray window
And the ghost of loss gets into you,
May a flock of colors,
Indigo, red, green
and azure blue,
Come to awaken in you
A meadow of delight.
When… a stain of ocean
Blackens beneath you,
May there come across the waters
A path of yellow moonlight
To bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And, so may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life.
“To Bless the Space Between Us”
by John O’Donohue
My life is good beyond what I could have ever imagined it might be. It’s not easy. Challenges often come. What is different now than earlier in my life is I don’t expect a trouble-free existence. Difficulty is just part of this wonderful cosmic ride called living. I am grateful to realize that… so very grateful.
My philosophy is:
Life is hard, but God is good.
Try not to confuse the two.
Anne F. Beiler
Bronnie Ware, a palliative care nurse, who worked exclusively with the terminally ill wrote a book titled “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing Regrets of the Dying”. For many years she was with patients during the last three to twelve weeks of their life and from her experiences came a list of the regrets people make most frequently on their deathbed:
1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
In the article Ms. Ware was especially emphatic about most not realizing that happiness is a choice until it was almost too late. Fear of change was the number one reason patients cited for pretending to themselves and others they were happy. At the same time most secretly longed to laugh more and better and to simply have more silliness in their life.
With gratitude for the chance encounter with Ms. Ware’s article (thank you to my friend Katie for bringing it to my attention), I commit to laugh easier and be silly more often. With that in mind, the rest of the week is going to be a lot more fun that the first half (and it was pretty darn good!).
The same view you look at every day,
the same life, can become something brand new
by focusing on its gifts rather than the negative aspects.
Perspective is your own choice and the best way to shift
that perspective is through gratitude, by acknowledging
and appreciating the positives.
Bronnie Ware
Good Morning Gratitude 