Ending without regrets

When we get to the end of our lives, I would think we would not want to be filled with "shoulda, coulda, woulda's" but to be able to go peacefully without regrets. Life is to be lived and enjoyed - we should be doing what we want and having an enjoyable life-work balance.

Somebody wrote a book about dying with regrets and someone else blogged about it. So now I get to blog about a blog - how creative. Anyway, here are the five biggest regrets of the dying taken from listening to people in palliative care for years:

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.

What does this list teach us?

• Take time to stop and smell the roses
• Learn to express our feelings and do what makes us feel good.
• Surround ourselves with people we care about.
• Do what we enjoy.

No one has ever died saying 'I needed to work longer and harder for someone else'. We all need to do things we don't necessarily like but we also need to learn to fit in the things we want. So take a break and do something for yourself every so often. Its all about looking out for yourself.