Skip to main content

Top 5 Regrets of the Dying

I saw this tweet by @SciencePorn today:
According to a study, these are the top 5 regrets of the dying(Just before death) pic.twitter.com/MsyIlCbyOE


I have been thinking about these 5 top regrets this morning. I am not sure if these are the answers I will give in my death bed. I can agree with "I wish I hadn't worked so hard." I am trying not to work as hard these days and I understand that every employee is dispensable. The company won't die because you didn't logon to your emails at night.

But I am not sure of the "I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself" -  what is a life true to myself? If there were no restrictions and no one expects anything of me, what is the life I will live? Stay at home and play PC games all day? That is not exactly what I wanted. I had being single for a big part of my adulthood, so I do have all the time and I while it away on PC games, comics, novels, drinking teh tarik with friends talking nonsense, watching TV series or movies and wasting more time at work doing mundane stuff. At that time, with no family commitment, I didn't know what was a life true to myself. How can I know in the next 30-40 years of my life? Now that I have a family, is it a life focus on the kids? If that is, is that true to myself? Is that living a life of what others expects of me?

What would you do if you don't need to be an actor in this world, acting a life not your own? Can anyone answer this honestly?

On "I wish I had the courage to express my feelings" - what about this? I have nothing to hide in terms of feelings to my wife and kids. Maybe the "express feelings" part would be to express to my parents. I think I didn't say "I love you" a lot but I also think it is not our Malaysian/Asian culture to do the same. I spend a lot of time at home, every Sunday visiting my parents with the kids. Is there still a need to express myself more? How would this be a regret?

"I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends" - ok, I can understand and appreciate this. I blogged about it here. Seriously, with convenience of technology these days, this should not ever be a regret. 

"I wish I had let myself be happier" - but what is happiness? Does anyone really know? Is it buying more things? More keyboards, more PC games, more Apple products? Those are temporary happiness; they are not lasting. Those are  what Buddhists called 'treasures of the storehouse' - materials stuff. Happiness is about accumulating 'treasures of the heart' but how many people understand this? I am still trying to comprehend this myself. So, how do you let yourself be happier? Let yourself - as though you are actively not letting yourself. Perhaps this is linked to 'living a live others expected of me'. Buddhism is about appreciating the dignity of life. Appreciating and respecting each living being as though they are the most precious thing ever. That, in turn, would accumulate a unshakeable life state within yourself and ultimately you will find happiness within you.

If you really want to know how to achieve happiness in this world, then I would recommend you listen to this study material by SGI USA Study Chief, Mr Greg Martin. I listen to this when I am down and get a huge encouragement every single time. It's a 50 minutes mp3 that I played in the car when stuck in jam and have gained a lot of encouragement and tips to find happiness, today! now!, in this world, not in the next life, not after you die. Download here: Happiness In This World.

Let's learn together!


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One million daimoku

In April 2008, Anne and I started our resolution to chant 1 million daimoku in one year. It's already Jan - and I am only one-third of the way. I really need to WORK HARDER - coz I made another 1 million resolution from Jan - Dec 2009. The chart you see on the right of this post is a chart that we put beside our butsudan. It tracked our chanting progress. Every 20 minute, we coloured one box. Mine is the one on top, Anne's at the bottom - you can see that she made much better progress than me! Hmmm.. come to think of it, I am not even at one third!! --- Edit 22 March 2009: Thanks to Google, a couple of friends in faith found this post and they want to know how many hours of chanting is required to achieve one million diamoku. Here it is. Based on our publication in Malaysia, 20 minutes of chanting is equivalent to 1,000 daimoku. So, one hour is 3,000 daimoku. 1 million would take about 333 hours. --- Edit 8 April 2018: Checking my blogger stats, this post is pretty hi
11 comments
Read more

Amazon Alexa in Malaysia - does it work well? A review...

Feels like Christmas in September. Thanks to Doktor Cinta, my friend who live in Australia. Back in July, Amazon Australia had a Prime Day. I joined the trial using my usual Amazon account and ordered an Echo Dot, Echo Plus (the taller one with a built-in hub) and a Kindle Paperwhite, shipping them to a dear friend in Australia. My friend visited Malaysia and brought the Echos with him two weeks ago. You can imagine my thrill to get my hands on Alexa and start using it... in Malaysia. As a side story, sometimes, you can't believe how events are aligned properly to prepare my place to be a connected home - I bought a superb new mesh network router, eero (by the way, I'd say it's one of my best electronic purchases after an iPhone! It is that good), which acts as a strong WiFi backbone as it blanket my double storey house with a reliable and fast WiFi. Then, maxis launched Fibernation program which let me to upgrade my internet from 6 Mbps (pathetic) to 100 Mbps wit
Post a Comment
Read more

Who is the official service center for Seiko watches?

The Great Blue; Kinetic Auto Relay 100M I have a 15 year old Seiko watch which I love very much. It's a Great Blue series and kinda one-of-its-kind, because Seiko discontinued it as soon as it was launch. So, there are very limited number of units. The watch I own is a Kinetic Auto Relay which means it is powered by my arm movement. And the nice thing about it is that if I don't use my watch, it hands will not move but the Kinetic capacitor which stores energy (up to 4 years of inactivity) will continue to keep track of the time. When I picked up the watch and shake it a bit, it will wake up and auto adjust to the correct time whether it is AM or PM. But my watch is 15 year old. At that age, the capacitor cannot hold a lot of charges. These days if I left my watch unused for 2 days, the watch stopped keeping time. I need to get the capacitor replaced. But who is the official service center for Seiko? The thing about luxury watches is that if you don't send it to
2 comments
Read more