Most of us just don’t care to board the train of life when it is still there at our station. We let life pass us by as if it was not meant for us and tend to look at it as if we had another one in the bank.
Every morning brings to us the opportunity to learn, love, and contribute to help build a better world for all sentient beings. Most of us don’t choose how to spend this gift of the new day, consciously; our habits, social conditioning, myopic complacence and external compulsions hijack our day. We become so busy with our routine that we don’t take a pause to look at what we stand for or what our values, purpose, convictions and dreams are. We don’t care to examine if we would like the place where we arrive, three, 10 or 20 years from now if we continue to live the way we are doing now.
Most people behave like programmed robots and do not care to discover the higher purpose of their lives or to question any of their inherited beliefs. Disconnected with our inner-selves, what we keep pursuing and achieving is often akin to decorating a corpse. We may continue to breathe for decades, but the day our purpose dies within us, we die too.
We tend to realise the value of anything only when we lose, or are about to lose it. Same is true with life, too; we realise the value of life and what all we could/should have done with it only when we are almost on our deathbed.
On deathbed, we don’t remember our designations, our labels, our bank balance or our popularity—we remember, with inconsolable regret, a life that could have been lived with more love, compassion and purpose. Unfortunately, most of us die with our potential gifts still unwrapped.
Unless we wake ourselves up to our purpose now, we are likely to regret at our deathbed that we could have:
Spent more time to express our love to our near dear ones;
Lived our life more consciously and purposefully;
Lived our values (if we don’t live our values when alive, who will live them and when?);
Fulfilled our dreams (real dreams are about contributing—not about amassing wealth or worldly labels);
Spread more awareness about the wrong, unfair and unjust traditions and raised our voice against them; and
Contributed to the ushering of a more caring and compassionate world for all sentient beings.
What kind of a life and death are you choosing for yourself, this moment? You can prepare to die with pride (not regret), by gifting your life with the purpose you are born for, today.
Take a pledge today, to move from your favourite external distractions to your deeper purpose. Make every cell of your body breathe that purpose. Make this purpose the only religion that you follow. A life lived with a worthy purpose is the best form of prayer
When we choose the next activity (and the way we will perform it), we, knowingly or unknowingly, also choose with it the person we are deciding to become. Pause many times during the day to find contradictions between your values/purpose and how you are spending your day. Similarly, stop before you start any action to remind yourself of your values and purpose and view what you are about to do in the next moment from your deathbed. Ask yourself if what you are doing now will make you feel proud of yourself or it will make you regretful. View your actions from the eyes of the ones who will receive its consequences—and check if you are willing to exchange positions.
For example, are you willing to be killed as an animal for the sake of someone’s momentary pleasure? All this will help you progressively reduce the gap between your values-based purpose and your actions.
Deep down, we are fearless messengers of truth (and truth at its deepest level is nothing but compassion, love and contribution). We are on a heroic mission to raise awareness on this planet about these values through our own example, while serving our sentient brothers and sisters like humble, loyal and devoted servants.
Death is a time to take stock of how we lived our life. However, we should not wake up too late to experience death after eight or nine decades of life—the way we usually do. We should experience death every hour along with the feelings it brings with it, so that we could gift ourselves the opportunities to make the necessary course corrections when we still have time to do so. What steals our lives of purpose is our unconscious and relentless pursuit of approval, fame, power and money. Developing a habit of looking back from our deathbed at our lives, hour after hour, restores the sacred purpose to our lives.
Remind yourself of a lemon and aim to live your life in such a way that when you die you feel like a lemon squeezed to its last drop of purpose. The author is a leadership guru, keynote speaker, corporate trainer and an award-winning author of several books.
www.anilbhatnagar.com