Top 5 Regrets People Make on their Deathbed

A friend of mine posted this link on Facebook.  I found it very meaningful so I am including it here on my blog for future reference.  In case the page is taken down at some point, I am also copying the text in this page:

Top 5 Regrets People Make on their Deathbed
By Bronnie Ware (who worked for years nursing the dying)

For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives.
People grow a lot when they are faced with their own mortality. I learnt never to underestimate someone’s capacity for growth. Some changes were phenomenal. Each experienced a variety of emotions, as expected, denial, fear, anger, remorse, more denial and eventually acceptance. Every single patient found their peace before they departed though, every one of them.

When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the most common five:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people have had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.

It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.

2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.
This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.

By simplifying your lifestyle and making conscious choices along the way, it is possible to not need the income that you think you do. And by creating more space in your life, you become happier and more open to new opportunities, ones more suited to your new lifestyle.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.

We cannot control the reactions of others. However, although people may initially react when you change the way you are by speaking honestly,in the end it raises the relationship to a whole new and healthier level. Either that or it releases the unhealthy relationship from your life. Either way, you win.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved.Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.

It is common for anyone in a busy lifestyle to let friendships slip.But when you are faced with your approaching death, the physical details of life fall away. People do want to get their financial affairs in order if possible. But it is not money or status that holds the true importance for them. They want to get things in order more for the benefit of those they love. Usually though, they are too ill and weary to ever manage this task. It is all comes down to love and relationships in the end. That is all that remains in the final weeks,love and relationships.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have sillyness in their life again.
When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again,long before you are dying.
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originally posted at http://www.inspirationandchai.com/Regrets-of-the-Dying.html

You will succeed if you keep trying

A friend of mine sent this yesterday via email.  It's exactly what I needed to hear.  I've noticed that I've been getting really impatient with things (myself, others, and God) recently - when, in reality, I just need to keep at it and give things more time to come to fruition.  RF, thanks again for sending!

Keep Watering Your Bamboo Tree - Eric Aronson

In the Far East, there is a tree called the Chinese bamboo tree. This remarkable tree is different from most trees in that it doesn't grow in the usual fashion. While most trees grow steadily over a period of years, the Chinese bamboo tree doesn't break through the ground for the first four years. Then, in the fifth year, an amazing thing happens - the tree begins to grow at an astonishing rate. In fact, in a period of just five weeks, a Chinese bamboo tree can grow to a height of 90 feet. It's almost as if you can actually see the tree growing before your very eyes.

Well, I'm convinced that life often works in a similar way. You can work for weeks, months and even years on your dream with no visible signs of progress and then, all of the sudden, things take off. Your business becomes profitable beyond your wildest dreams. Your marriage becomes more vibrant and passionate than you ever thought it could be. Your contribution to your church, social organization and community becomes more significant than you have ever imagined.

Yet, all of this requires one thing - faith. The growers of the Chinese bamboo tree have faith that if they keep watering and fertilizing the ground, the tree will break through. Well, you must have the same kind of faith in your bamboo tree, whether it is to run a successful business, win a Pulitzer Prize, raise well-adjusted children, or what have you. You must have faith that if you keep making the calls, honing your craft, reading to your children, reaching out to your spouse or asking for donations, that you too will see rapid growth in the future.

This is the hard part for most of us. We get so excited about the idea that's been planted inside of us that we simply can't wait for it to blossom. Therefore, within days or weeks of the initial planting, we become discouraged and begin to second guess ourselves.

Sometimes, in our doubt, we dig up our seed and plant it elsewhere, in hopes that it will quickly rise in more fertile ground. We see this very often in people who change jobs every year or so. We also see it in people who change churches, organizations and even spouses in the pursuit of greener pastures. More often than not, these people are greatly disappointed when their tree doesn't grow any faster in the new location.

Other times, people will water the ground for a time but then, quickly become discouraged. They start to wonder if it's worth all of the effort. This is particularly true when they see their neighbors having success with other trees. They start to think, "What am I doing trying to grow a bamboo tree? If I had planted a lemon tree, I'd have a few lemons by now." These are the people who return to their old jobs and their old ways. They walk away from their dream in exchange for a "sure thing."

Sadly, what they fail to realize is that pursuing your dream is a sure thing if you just don't give up. So long as you keep watering and fertilizing your dream, it will come to fruition. It may take weeks. It may take months. It may even take years, but eventually, the roots will take hold and your tree will grow. And when it does, it will grow in remarkable ways.

We've seen this happen so many times. Henry Ford had to water his bamboo tree through five business failures before he finally succeeded with the Ford Motor Company. Richard Hooker had to water his bamboo tree for seven years and through 21 rejections by publishers until his humorous war novel, M*A*S*H became a runaway bestseller, spawning a movie and one of the longest-running television series of all-time. Another great bamboo grower was the legendary jockey Eddie Arcaro. Arcaro lost his first 250 races as a jockey before going on to win 17 Triple Crown races and 554 stakes races for total purse earnings of more than $30 million.

Well, you have a bamboo tree inside of you just waiting to break through. So keep watering and believing and you too will be flying high before you know it.

The Other Part of Forgiveness

There was a great one-page article in the December 2008 issue of the Ensign entitled "The Other Part of Forgiveness" (see also scanned PDF).  Since it's a relatively short piece, I've included it all here:

I was struggling to forgive some acquaintances who had hurt me. Each time I thought of the situation and how sad I was, I felt angry all over again. I decided to talk with a friend, a fellow Christian of a different faith, about my struggle.

I told him that I wanted to retain the lessons I had learned but not the pain or anger. I asked, “How can I let my bad feelings go—not just ignore them but actually let them go?”

He responded with another question: “What did Jesus tell us to do with our enemies?”

“Forgive them,” I said, “but I can’t seem to follow through with that, even though I want to.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “Jesus did teach us to forgive, but He told us to do something else, something that I think makes it possible for us to forgive.”

My mind went blank. I couldn’t think of anything. My friend reminded me that the Savior taught us to pray for our enemies. He then pointed out that if others are having a bad enough time that they are ready to hurt us, they too must be hurting inside. When we pray that they will be able to resolve their difficulties, that they will be able to find happiness, he said, we can’t help but feel kindness and love toward them.

A peaceful assurance fell over me. That was it! The Savior’s words—“pray for them which despitefully use you” (Matthew 5:44)—were the answer I was searching for. I took those teachings to heart. I found that in praying for the people who I felt had wronged me, I was able to feel peace rather than anger or resentment. Each time I remembered my hurt feelings, I said a prayer in my mind for my acquaintances, and I immediately felt better. In time, I actually started to feel concern and compassion for these people. I even had a desire to help them if I could.

I am grateful to have had this gospel-centered conversation with my friend of a different faith. It increased my desire to openly speak about my beliefs so that I could have more enlightening experiences like this one. I had been guided and comforted and was blessed to find an answer to a challenge.

I have tried to apply this teaching in my life as well and can testify that it is a true principle.

Poor but Cheerful

Here is another article that my mother sent me before my trip to India.  The subtitle of the article is "a day spent on a mountain of trash in the Philippines inspires a young man to ponder the meanings of privilege and deprivation".  This person's experience certainly supports the fact that a big part of how we evaluate our own situation, circumstances, and happiness is in comparison to other people.  If none of the people around us have much, we are content without those things also.  Where problems start coming in is when others around me seem to have more and I - by comparison - have less.  In business school, I remember having a conversation with one of my classmates where I noted how lucky we were.  Most of us would make more money per year than >99% of the world population.  In response, my classmate told me that he didn't compare himself to 99% of the world population.  He only compared himself to the people at HBS (and would only be happy if we did better than the rest of us).  A sad commentary on the human condition.

Spirituality, Not Religion, Makes Kids Happy

My brother sent me an article from U.S. News & World Report entitled "Spirituality, Not Religion, Makes Kids Happy". Here is the opening part of the article:

The link between spirituality and happiness is pretty well-established for teens and adults. More spirituality brings more happiness. Now a study has reached into the younger set, finding the same link in "tweens" and in kids in middle childhood.

Specifically, the study shows that children who feel that their lives have meaning and value and who develop deep, quality relationships — both measures of spirituality, the researchers claim — are happier.

Personal aspects of spirituality (meaning and value in one's own life) and communal aspects (quality and depth of inter-personal relationships) were both strong predictors of children's happiness, said study leader Mark Holder from the University of British Columbia in Canada and his colleagues Ben Coleman and Judi Wallace.

However, religious practices were found to have little effect on children's happiness, Holder said. Religion is just one institutionalized venue for the practice of or experience of spirituality, and some people say they are spiritual but are less enthusiastic about the concept of God.

Other research has shown a connection between well-adjusted and well-behaved children and religion, but that is not the same, necessarily, as happiness.

No huge surprises here. My one comment - at least from my last year of experience - is that a religiously-grounded world-view can certainly enhance one's spirituality and communal aspects - which, in turn, enhances happiness.

Everything's amazing, nobody's happy

A friend of mine turned me on to this video.  It's a clip of Louis CK on Conan (10/1/08).  He's talking about modern conveniences and how everyone takes them for granted.  I've made that observation many times before.  In particular, I think it's amazing (and a little crazy) that my kids will never know a world without cell phones, email, the Internet/Web, DVDs, DVRs, Microsoft Office, Google, video games, computers, etc.  Just as an example, I still remember going to the public library to do research for school projects, looking up books in a paper-based card catalog, photo-copying the pages I needed, and typing up my report in DOS-based Word Perfect and printing it out on a dot-matrix printer.  Now I could probably accomplish the same thing in 20 minutes using Google or Wikipedia without even having to leave my house - and have a much more polished result to boot.  Amazing how quickly things change - and I'm not even that old!

Randy Pausch Last Lecture

My brother-in-law DE pointed me to this video awhile ago but I just watched it tonight. The CMU professor giving this final lecture has since passed away but imparted some wisdom to a packed house. He also subsequently wrote a book.



The video wasn't what I was expecting - and was a bit slow at times - but I still think it was a good use of time to watch. I especially like the end.

The Science of Happiness

I just read an article in the January-February issue of Harvard Magazine called "The Science of Happiness". Apparently "positive psychology" is a new and fast-growing field, although some like Daniel Gilbert (author of Stumbling on Happiness) "don't think psychology needs a movement ... probably 85% of the ideas are worthless, but that's true everywhere in science." As I was reading through the article, I marked three passages that I thought were interesting:

Environs, too, affect mood. Settings that combine “prospect and refuge,” for example, seem to support a sense of well-being. “People like to be on a hill, where they can see a landscape. And they like somewhere to go where they can not be seen themselves,” Etcoff explains. “That’s a place desirable to a predator who wants to avoid becoming prey.” Other attractive features include a source of water (streams for beauty and slaking thirst), low-canopy trees (shade, protection), and animals (proof of habitability). “Humans prefer this to deserts or man-made environments,” Etcoff says. “Building windowless, nature-less, isolated offices full of cubicles ignores what people actually want. A study of patients hospitalized for gall-bladder surgery compared those whose rooms looked out on a park with those facing a brick wall. The park-view patients used less pain medication, had shorter stays, and complained less to their nurses. We ignore our nature at our own peril.”

“We evolved in a much different world, with much less choice and no sedentary people,” Etcoff continues. “We didn’t evolve for happiness, we evolved for survival and reproduction.” For this reason, we are sensitive to danger. “Pleasure and the positive-reward system is for opportunity and gain,” Etcoff explains. “And pleasure involves risk, taking a chance that can override some of your fear at that moment.”

Happiness activates the sympathetic nervous system (which stimulates the “flight or fight” response), whereas joy stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system (controlling “rest and digest” functions). “We can laugh from either joy or happiness,” Vaillant said. “We weep only from grief or joy.” Happiness displaces pain, but joy embraces it: “Without the pain of farewell, there is no joy of reunion,” he asserted. “Without the pain of captivity, we don’t experience the joy of freedom.”

I've seen a couple of authors make the distinction between happiness and joy before. I've also heard authors argue that we can't appreciate what's good in our lives within having some bad stuff for contrast.

There was one other passage from Daniel Gilbert that was thought-provoking:

The reason is that humans hold fast to a number of wrong ideas about what will make them happy. Ironically, these misconceptions may be evolutionary necessities. “Imagine a species that figured out that children don’t make you happy,” says Gilbert. “We have a word for that species: extinct. There is a conspiracy between genes and culture to keep us in the dark about the real sources of happiness. If a society realized that money would not make people happy, its economy would grind to a halt.”

That last sentence is pretty interesting. If people weren't interested in making more than a bare minimum amount of money, would capitalism still be able to operate or would it fall apart?

I wonder where all this research will take us - or whether it will be a passing fad with not much to show for itself 10-20 years from now.

Expectations

Expectations are a dangerous thing - the expectations others have of us, the expectations we have of ourselves (and others), and the expectations we have of the future. While these many forms of expectations deserve attention, let me concentrate on the last one for a moment - expectations we have of the future. I took my kids to a (minor league) baseball game for the first time this past weekend. We watched the San Jose Giants play the Stockton Ports and the kids got to go down to the field and run the bases afterwards (it was a promotional evening). It was my birthday a couple of weeks ago and this is one of the things I decided I wanted to do to celebrate. The other thing I wanted to do was take the kids to a movie. Rather than go to the theater, we borrowed Sesame Street Presents: Follow that Bird from the library and watched it at my work (in a large conference room with an overhead projector and ceiling-mounted speakers).

I had such high hopes for both events. I envisioned the kids being all excited about the special activities, sitting through them without too many interruptions, and remembering the events fondly afterwards - real father/son bonding moments. I think the events took on even more significance in my mind since it was the kids' first time doing either activity and since my family never did this kind of stuff when I was growing up.

In hindsight, it's not surprising that neither event lived up to my expectations. Charlotte Bronte said that "life is so constructed that an event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation". In fact, I can't think of a single situation in which I got my hopes up for something and the actual event met or exceeded my expectations. There are plenty of times where my expectations were low and I've been pleasantly surprised. But not a single event that I've expected to be off-the-charts good has lived up to that billing. I guess Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift were right when they said "blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed". I've often thought that I shouldn't get my hopes up since I'll only be disappointed in the end. But that seems like such a pathetic way to go through life that I haven't been able to fully embrace it.

I came across an interesting book the other day that sheds a little light on this. My friend GC is part of the TED book club and had Stumbling on Happiness sitting on his desk. It looked good - endorsed by Malcolm Gladwell (Blink), Steven Levitt (Freakonomics), and Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence) - so I asked GC if I could borrow the book. As the author explains in the foreword, "this is a book that describes what science has to tell us about how and how well the human brain can imagine its own future, and about how and how well it can predict which of those futures it will most enjoy." Given the frontal lobes of our brains, human beings are the only animal that think about the future - not just predicting what will happen next (e.g., "last time I smelled this smell, a big thing tried to eat me") but genuinely imagining the world as it isn't and has never been, but as it might be. This is a mixed blessing...

What is the conceptual tie that binds anxiety and planning? Both, of course, are intimately connected to thinking about the future. We feel anxiety when we anticipate that something bad will happen, and we plan by imagining how our actions will unfold over time. Planning requires that we peer into our futures, and anxiety is one of the reactions we may have when we do. The fact that damage to the frontal lobe impairs planning and anxiety so uniquely and precisely suggests that the front lobe is the critical piece of cerebral machinery that allows normal, modern human adults to project themselves into the future. Without it we are trapped in the moment, unable to imagine tomorrow and hence unworried about what it may bring. (pg 14)

Human beings actually spend about 12% of their daily thoughts thinking about the future. It's pleasurable to daydream about the future since we tend to imagine ourselves achieving and succeeding rather than fumbling or failing. As the author points out, though:

Although imagining happy futures may make us feel happy, it can also have some troubling consequences. Researchers have discovered that when people find it easy to imagine an event, they overestimate the likelihood that it will actually occur. Because most of us get so much more practice imagining good events than bad events, we tend to overestimate the likelihood that good events will actually happen to us, which leads us to be unrealistically optimistic about our futures (pg 18) ... In fact, the one group of people who seem generally immune to this illusion are the clinically depressed, who tend to estimate accurately the degree to which they control events in most situations. (pg 22)

Can't wait to read the rest of this book. I'm only 26 pages (10.9%) of my way through it so far but I think it will be a really worthwhile read.