28 June 2024 : Living Life To The Fullest!

Alice Morse Earle
We may never have heard of “Alice Morse Earle”, but if you have watched “Kungfu Panda”, you would definitely have heard of her famous saying above. Many of us spend too much of our time dwelling on regrets, asking the “If only”s. We constantly spend time looking back at our lives and debating if we could have chosen different paths in our live journey thinking we could have been better off despite knowing that “yesterday is history”, something we cannot change! On the other hand, we often spend time procrastinating decisions that have to be made with the excuse that we need to consider all the “What If”s. We would all like to believe that despite “tomorrow being a mystery”, we are nonetheless in control of our future, which we all know is a fallacy! Another perspective of seeing how we forget to live in the “present” is to be filled with worries, worries about all kinds of bad that can befall us in the future, asking too much of the “What If”s of the possible worst case scenarios, and this can often lead us to be “frozen” and unable to move forward wisely! Both of the above rob us of the happiness we could have enjoyed! And so we spend many of our “today”s wasting time going from “If only”s and “What If”s, and before we realize it, we have squandered our “today”, i.e., in Alice Morse Earle’s words, we are constantly throwing away our “presents”. Have I been guilty of the above wasteful behaviour myself? Of course! Many a times, we dwell on regrets of poor decisions or actions that we have taken. Some of us even have recurring nightmares of our past regrets, robbing us of good sleep! Instead of wasting our time “licking our wounds”, we should instead be enjoying “the present”, taking positive actions that can improve our future. Additionally, when we start to worry about our future, we are expending our time wastefully with all the various “What If”s, and this takes us in spirit out of the “present moment” experience, and before we realize it, we have squandered our precious lives away! Many of us have experienced the feeling that our bodies may be physically with our families during vacation time for example, and yet worries about of our jobs and all our heavy responsibilities rob us of being “present” with our families! I write the above as a reminder to myself as well, to live life to the fullest, I have to always be in the “present” state and enjoy every wonderful moment that I can with my family, my friends, my job, my life so that I will not have any regrets about the past, and that I will not have to worry about the future! Carpe Diam!