A nurse who had worked for many years in palliative care heard from her dying patients about their regrets in life. Here’s what they said:
1) I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2) I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
3) I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings
4) I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends
5) I wish that I had let myself be happier.
An excellent way to learn how to live now and avoid having regrets later is logotherapy. Some reflections on how logotherapy helps avoid these five regrets:
1) Logotherapy teaches you to be true to yourself.
Don’t follow what society tells you to do. Don’t take up the values of your parents or teachers. Before you misunderstand let me rephrase that: Don’t follow blindly. Don’t reject blindly. Do what they’re doing because you believe in it too. Think deeply and carefully about what they have to teach you.
Take the time and effort to know who you are and to figure out what opportunities life holds in store for you.
Get in touch with what you long for in the depth of your being. Dare to follow your dreams and take risks and get up and start over when you fall.
Be honest. Be real with your feelings.
Have the courage to walk away from what’s hurtful to yourself or others. Listen to that still small voice inside that knows what’s right for you. So often I have heard people say “I knew I shouldn’t do this but I shut down that voice.” I’ve been just as guilty of this as anyone. Listen to that wise voice within. You’ll never regret it.
2) Logotherapy teaches the importance of receiving what life has to offer you. Life can be so beautiful. We rush through it so fast that we don’t stop to smell the flowers. Do what you enjoy. If you don’t do it now when will you do it? Work is a way of giving to the world but if you don’t also get filled and nurtured your giving will be with resentment. When you nurture yourself, giving comes naturally and brings an elated feeling of being part of something greater than yourself.
3) Logotherapy teaches you to be authentic and express your feelings authentically. Instead of holding in resentment tell the person who hurt you that what they did was hurtful to you. And when they apologize practice being forgiving. It doesn’t mean what they did was okay. It means it’s not worth wasting your energy on hate and resentment. It will only make you miserable and cause stress and illness.
You can never be in another person’s place and know what it was like for them. They’re probably not happy about their own weaknesses either. Be as compassionate to others as you would want them to be towards you.
Be authentic with your positive feelings too. Express gratitude and appreciation. It makes life so much richer.
4) Logotherapy doesn’t speak directly about friendship but Frankl writes a lot about love. One of my favorite quotes is: While the “shallow” person sees only the partner’s surface and cannot grasp the depths, the “deeper” person sees the surface itself as an expression of the depths. (The Doctor and the Soul p. 140) Friendships also make up community. In a healthy community every individual is treasured, including yourself.
5) Logotherapy teaches that happiness can’t be a goal. Happiness is a choice. Happiness is a side-effect of living a meaningful life. What makes like meaningful? What does “choosing happiness” look like?
Some people walk around saying “Everything is for the good.” The trouble is when things don’t look good it’s hard to convince yourself of this. It’s hard to believe there is even any sense or meaning in it. “Positive thinking” doesn’t work if your insides don’t believe it’s true.
Alternatively there’s a perspective that says life is intrinsically meaningless but you can make and impose meaning on it. But what kind of meaning can there be in a world that is intrinsically meaningless? Anything attempt to create meaning will be artificially contrived.
Logotherapy presents a third perspective. Meaning is objectively there but it has to be discovered and made real by you.
How is this any different from artificially contrived meaning? There’s a subtle point here that needs clarification.
Some people get to an obstacle in life and look at it as if it’s a boulder in the middle of the road. They start to kick it and curse and it doesn’t budge. They only come away with a stubbed toe and are no closer to their destination.
Instead of ‘obstacle’ you can see it as a challenge. Now you put your fists on your waist and say “I’ll be darned if I’m going to let this get in my way.” You go off and look for a tow truck to haul it away.
But then you can see it as an opportunity. Aha! I’ve always wanted to practice mountain climbing. Here’s my chance!
Even though this level is pretty good, you’re still accepting what you think shouldn’t be there and you’re reluctantly making the best of a bad situation. There is still a further level you can get to.
The word ‘obstacle’ can metamorphose into challenge, then opportunity and finally…invitation.
You can view this boulder as an amazing gift. Wow! I don’t know why I’ve been given this gift but I know it was given to me. It’s not by accident that this boulder is here. It’s there for a reason and I am here for a reason. I’m being invited to make good use of it. I’m being asked to consider what good can be done with it. No one else in the world can make something beautiful out of this. This boulder has been given only to me, especially to me as a personal invitation.
On the pathological side of life there are people who walk around feeling provoked to fight because someone looked at them the wrong way. They couldn’t possibly not fight. The other person’s existence was an invitation to a fight.
In a healthy sense you can feel ‘provoked’ by all of reality as an invitation to engage and respond to it. The meaning is intrinsically there but i
t’s locked away in the potential to make good use of it.
Only you hold the key.
When you live life as if everything is an invitation to do something good, to make the world a better place and to refine yourself, to constantly be learning and welcome the opportunity to learn – then you’ll be happy.