3 Words to Change Your Short Life

Life is short!

That’s what was the unanimous answer of respondents (aged 70 to 100 and above) in a survey, when asked — “What are the most important lessons you have learned over your life?”

“Life is short,” a retired engineer told the researcher. “It passes in a nanosecond.” A 99-year-old woman said, “I don’t know what happened, but the next thing you know you are 100.”

Well, this research study has led to thoughts on the more essential things in life — lessons on how to live life.

Here are the 10 most important lessons:

• You could be very happy with almost nothing if you had a loving family, and you weren’t competing with a lot of other people who had more than you did.
• Don’t be a starving artist, but don’t be ruled by possessions or an overwhelming urge to make money.
• You don’t want your things to own you.
• Live within your means. Avoid debt. If you can’t pay for it now, don’t buy it.
• Be ready to tell this to yourself soon — “Enough is enough!” Time spent earning enough money is time reasonably well spent. Time earning an excess of money far beyond that required to meet one’s needs, however, is time wasted.
• Material things are useful, but good relationships with God and the people around you make life worth living.
• Money isn’t everything. Take time to have some fun in life. It’s not all dreary and dog-eat-dog. Stop and smell the roses.
• Accumulating stuff is of little importance. What is important is accumulating love of each other, of your children and of life-long friends and extending that love to those less fortunate than you are.
• Life is short, so find work you love. Work ought to be chosen for its intrinsic value, and for its sense of enjoyment, sense of purpose. Life is much too short to spend doing something you don’t like, even for a few years.
• Focus on gratitude and giving thanks.

Life is short
It’s ironical that it often takes us a lifetime to learn to live in the moment.

We seem to think that we’ll live forever.

We spend time and money as though we’ll always be here.

We buy stuff as though it matters and is worth the debt and stress of attachment.

We put off “living happily ever after” for another year, because we assume we have another year.

We don’t tell the ones we love how much we love them often enough because we assume there’s always tomorrow.

And then, we fear. Oh yes, we fear!

Just because we are afraid of the risk of moving out of our comfort zones, we stick it out in miserable jobs and situations.

Just because we are worried we will fail, we don’t reach high enough or far enough, often forgetting that it’s better to fail spectacularly while trying than it is to succeed at something we never really wanted in the first place.

These three words — life is short — are what I tell myself almost each passing day.