Top Five Regrets

Ms.Ware's final sentence should be written in stone.
It takes every person a lifetime to learn (many never come to understand) the wisdom she has gleaned and generously shared, from the experience of those at the end of their lives.

Life is a choice. It is YOUR life. Choose consciously, choose wisely, choose honestly. Choose happiness.

looksee wrote: »

Twenty/twenty hindsight is a wonderful faculty in situations like this.

Choose consciously - choose what consciously? Sometimes its the decision that doesn't seem too important that leads to the choice which may seem conscious at the time, but is limited by the decisions made before. And it may seem like a conscious decision when you are 20 but 40 years later you might become aware that there were more options than you realised at the time.

Choose wisely - wisdom is wonderful, you gain it by learning throughout your life. Chances are that when the foundation decisions were made you had no idea what 'wisdom' meant.

Choose honestly - be true to yourself? Wisdom is a great help there. See above.

Choose happiness - what is happiness. At 14 it can be meeting a pop idol. At 24 it can be a good night out with your mates. And often, at any age, you have to live with what life throws at you, and choosing happiness does not always bring you happiness. Sometimes you are grateful for occasional contentment.

You mostly don't have any choice about whether you have good health, you find your ideal life partner, your children have to emigrate, you have to care for an ailing child/ spouse/ relative, you lose your job.

I think would say, I would have liked more happiness, but I did my best with what I got.

To be perfectly honest, I read those conclusions, thought to myself; 'How wise' - and promptly forgot all about them.
A bit like something you'd see printed on a mug.
But they are more than that. They are universal conclusions, drawn from a pool of wisdom which few of us will ever experience and as such, deserve to be treated with respect.

I agree with 99% of what you say, most of these principles are entirely aspirational. Unless you were a shaman or high priest, it is unlikely that your life would ever slot in nicely with these principles. Life throws all sorts of bumps and knocks at us and many of them are completely unavoidable.
But as they say; that's life.
As I get older, and review some of the events in my life, especially the more negative ones, they somehow lose their negative impact and I understand that they shaped me, made me who I am, they are my experiences, my life, and I should be grateful.
It has taken me a very long time to truly understand a statement made by a lecturer of mine in Philosophy many years ago. He was one of the few truly happy people I have ever met. He said simply that 'It is a privilege to suffer.'
I think the point is less the destination, than the journey. Very few of us will ever have the (good?) fortune be given the conditions in life which would make these aspirations achievable. So, we've got to make the best of the cards dealt to us, as you have, but the thing is to keep these aspirations in our minds as principles. Live our lives by them.
What is happiness? I think it is a state of positive consciousness and that it is something we can choose, regardless of the circumstances.
The physical principle that each action has an equal and opposite reaction, does not apply when it comes to emotion. The event does not determine our emotional state - we do, or at least we can. There is always a choice in how we let the event affect us. This is a very empowering thing. When you realise or learn that you can be in control of how happy you are, you reach a level of freedom.
There was a popular self help book some years ago, whose author and title I have forgotten. The overall theme was that we can, and should control our emotions. The syllogism went something like this:
I can control my thoughts.
My emotions come from my thoughts.
Therefore I can control my emotions.
For some reason, we have an innate desire to believe that our emotions are something which 'happen' to us, and there is an innate resistance to changing this - but as a life principle, it works very well indeed.

looksee wrote: »

I think the book you are referring to is possibly Choice Theory by William Glasser.

Here's the book I mentioned.
http://www.archive.org/details/yourerroneouszondyer00dyer
You can read it online or download a PDF from this site.

I hear what you are saying, and there is a lot of truth in it, but he has a caveat on the cover write up - 'barring sever poverty or untreatable illness'. So he is himself saying there are exceptions to being able to choose happiness. Anyone who is living with the long, ongoing stress of a family member's illness, for example, can be upbeat and positive for so long, but if eventually exhaustion takes over then it is very difficult to have happiness as even an aspiration, it is more a matter of trying not to drown.

Yes, maybe that is extreme, but lots of people live with variations on that theme, whether it is unemployment, illness, being a carer, or poverty and it is rather facile and unfair to tell them that they can decide to be happy. It is just putting another responsibility on top of what they are trying to cope with.

Very often, we can't change our circumstances. We can change how we respond though.
The exhaustion you speak of I know only too well. It is the end product of fatalism.
I don't think it is facile at all to say that we can chose happiness, quite the reverse, it is difficult. There's the resistance I mentioned in my previous post.
It has to come from deep within and it has to be deep seated and genuine - it is not a matter of putting a brave face on things - that is admirable but ultimately self deceiving.
The realisation that you can choose happiness is not an additional burden to an already challenging life, it is a liberation.