Life is too short to watch it fly by in a whirlwind of emotion. Slow Down. Cherish nature, smell the roses, connect on a deeper level. Why waste your time with someone who doesn't respect you on a personal level? Go to your favorite band's concert. Relive your childhood at a drive-in movie theater.
Although it is almost impossible nowadays to do anything without the aid of a smartphone or tablet, it doesn't mean we can't ditch technology and remember what it is like to truly live. Read a book, learn to play an instrument, join a club. In some cases, we have completely forgotten our human instinct to connect on a more basic, human level and ditched our own brothers and sisters in a quest for a technological counterpart. None of these electronic devices are capable of fulfilling our emotional desires and eventually, will leave us feeling lonely and alone just like any other inanimate object would. Play a board game. Learn about your genealogy. Slow Down. Visit family. Volunteer at a local animal shelter. No matter social status, race, ethnicity, gender or religion we all are only given one life and it is up to us to cherish and make the most of it.
Take the million hobbies you have and condense it into two or three that you really cherish and do them to the best of your ability. Write a poem. Watch your favorite movie for the thousandth time. Realize that above all you need to find happiness and peace with yourself. To borrow a quote, “There is more to life than increasing its speed.” -- Mohandas K. Gandhi.
If I could use one analogy to slowing down and cherishing life, then it would be slowing down a movie to look for mistakes. When you watched it through the first time, you missed a majority of the mistakes, but when you played it back the second time, you had more time to go in depth, searching for the hard to find mistakes. Let this be a lesson. Don’t wait for the second time around to look for the mistakes and wastes in your life because we only get one chance and why should you go through life without making the most of it? Live in the moment.
Stop worrying about things that don’t matter and focus on the things that do matter: friends, family and fun. While we are young, the energy we possess is because of our youth. Unleash this boundless potential while we still contain it because with old age, this energy dwindles. Most of our grandparents and our elders, when asked, will consistently say one thing, “ I regret not the bad choices I made, but rather the good opportunities that I missed.”
If we live our life in constant fear of rejection, ostracization and disapproval, then we will never succeed in anything we do because of the overwhelming fear of utter failure.
