If we can make peace with dying, we can finally make peace with living.
The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn’t the family.
All younger people should know something. If you’re always battling against getting older, you’re always going to be unhappy, because it will happen anyhow.
If you don’t have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don’t have much at all.
Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too – even when you’re in the dark. Even when you’re falling.
Keep your heart open for as long as you can, as wide as you can, for others and especially for yourself.
When you look at it that way, you can see how absurd it is that we individualize ourselves with our fences and hoarded possessions.
Death ends a life, not a relationship. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on- in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here.
As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed as ignorant as you were at twenty-two, you’d always be twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.
The culture doesn’t encourage you to think about such things until you’re about to die. We’re so wrapped up with egostical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks. We’re involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going. So we don’t get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, Is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?
Now is the time to work on becoming the kind of person you would like to be.
If you’ve found meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more. You can’t wait until you’re sixty-five.
I believe that even though each person has an individual and unique self, the self means nothing outside the context of community or meaningful contact with other people.
When people die, you always hear the expression, “You can’t take it with you.
You don’t have to be nice all the time – just most of the time.
Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it. Reminisce about it, but don’t live in it. Learn from it, but don’t punish yourself about it or continually regret it. Don’t get stuck in it.
Resist the temptation to think of yourself as useless. It will only lead to depression.
You can find joy in practically any situation if you are open to the experience of happiness.
The best preparation for living fully and well is to be prepared to die at any time, because impending death inspires clarity of purpose, a homing in on what really matters to you.
Here’s how Polly Francis expresses her sense of a spiritual connection. A new set of faculties seem to be coming into operation. I seem to be awakening to a larger world of wonderment – to catch little glimpses of the immensity and diversity of creation. More than at any other time in my life, I seem to be aware of the beauties of our spinning planet and the sky above. And now I have the time to enjoy them. I feel that old age sharpens our awareness.