Fragility of this natural life

On average, each person gets approximately 27,000 days to live. Some more. Some less. No one knows exactly how many days they get but you can be sure of one thing, it’s a finite number. As the Five for Fighting song goes, “We’ve only got 100 years to live”, and that’s if you’re lucky.

Bronnie Ware, a hospice nurse, wrote a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. For her book, Bronnie interviewed patients who were given six months or less to live about their greatest regrets. The main regret of her patients was living a life other people expected of them, and not the life they truly wanted to live.

How often do we do that? Our parents, our children, our bosses and our friends, all have expectations of us we try to juggle. It is so easy to get caught up in the busyness of our daily business. There is always another call to make, another meeting to attend, and so on… Sadly, sometimes we are so busy that there is no time left to sit quietly, enjoy our surroundings and find peace in the moment.

Our move to Kiama almost 10 years ago was to find a slower pace of life, to prevent burn-out and manage a more balanced lifestyle. Just the change of location wasn’t enough to achieve that though. It would have been easy to keep living the same fast-paced, city life. I also had to adjust my mindset, or my way of being. I had to consciously, purposely choose to build time for my own needs into my calendar for times of rest and reflection. 

What about you? Do you stop to chat to your neighbours? Do you smell the roses? Do you put your feet in the water at the beach or rock-pool every day?