Stasis

What's troubling me of late is a sense of stagnation, treading water. I am wasting time at a stage of my life where time is more valuable than it has been ever before. A slow-rising panic engulfed me. As I tuned in my CC-Radio to the BBC last night, an alarm bell went off. I pulled the ear phone plug out in time for Trophy Wife to listen with me to an interview of Bronnie Ware.

Songwriter and former nurse Ware spent years working in palliative care in Australia, looking after patients in the last three to 12 weeks of their lives. She has published a book of reflections on her experience as a care-giver, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing.


She listed and discussed them at length in the interview:

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 realize 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 had not honored even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made....
2. I wish I didn't work so hard. This came from every male patient that I nursed. . . . 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. . . . .
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.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. . . Often they would not truly realize the full benefits of old friends . . . 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 . . . .
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier. This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realize 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 . . . . .

Yeah, you could say this is timely.

Well, #1 certainly has me nailed. Until I made a relatively pivotal decision for myself at the age of thirty, I had no friggin' idea who the hell I was. Whoever I was at that point, I began to disassemble that person and reassemble and assume the callow youthfulness I had never been able to experience before. Dreams? Up from the ashes. I don't think I ever fully recovered from this early confinement.

#2 doesn't apply to me. Most of my vocational life was spent in sleep walking mode. I was so afraid of living down to my father's expectations that I would end up a ditch-digger, I settled for the first thing that came along which was steady and safe and guaranteed to keep me out of the ditches. I did not work very hard. I played hard. I was able to pay attention to my sons. And thank god they turned out better than I did.

#3? I have learned that only when one is centered within himself and truly alive can he act and react upon his community. There have been instances when I was not grounded, and I was blind to something occurring in my peripheral vision and conscious of it only when it was too late to address it. There are other instances when I was full of myself, as it were, when my reaction was instantaneous, pertinent, and spot on. Looking back, I treasure those instances. Learning from them gradually encouraged me into the direction of my self discovery.

#4: The thing of it is, I didn't make friends. Except for contacts in my frenetic sporting life of coaching and competing, I didn't make friends. I made temporary adversaries and teammates. Nothing lasting. Now and then I find myself Googling these names as they periodically surface in my wistful memory: "Whatever happened to so-and-so?" Did they die? Are they dying? They mattered hugely to me at the time I knew them. How could I have accepted that they passed from my life as if they were merely disembarking from my bus? We were not travelling to common destination? Is that it? Well, I can't recover what amounts to an unrecoverable loss. All I can do now is infuse friendship into my current mission.

#5: "Don't worry - be happy?" This last commandment leaves me puzzled. It's very much like the way Dora, a favorite Little League mother/rooter for one of my teams, used to parody what us coaches used to say to our players: "Hustle and Relax! Hustle and relax!" But this regret seems couched more against a state of comfort being confused as fear of growth and change. Contentment with comfort and fear of any change that would risk it, has surely afflicted me all the days of my life. Or most of them anyways.