“Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There’s a crack – a crack – in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” – Leonard Cohen
Travels With Maggie
I don't want to stay forever young, like Peter Pan, who is shown here through Epcot's imaginative gardeners, I just want to live life to its fullest. -- Photo by Pat Bean
I have a purple, business-card sized, magnet placed where I can see it daily. It reads: “Destined to be an old woman with no regrets.”
Some people get it, some people don’t.
I suspect the foggy ones never woke up at 40 to realize the only regrets they had in life were the things they hadn’t done, which is exactly what happened to me.
Perhaps I went a little too far the next few years trying to catch up, but I didn’t do anything to cause me regrets, like hurting someone or stop being a person who truly cares about others, including wild animals. .
I simply stopped being perfect and afraid of living my life instead of the one society said a southern woman should live. After all, I had already done the barefoot and pregnant thing.
A motto to live by. -- Photo by Pat Bean
So what does living with no regrets mean to me?
Mostly it just means being myself and not letting fear of doing something I truly want to do keep me from doing it, regardless of who might disapprove. It means not lying, because lies eat away at one’s soul. It means laughing at myself often. It means loving people even if they don’t love me back.
And it means, to paraphrase a toast my youngest son gave at his sister’s wedding: Living so that when I die, I’ll know the difference.
Bean’s Pat: Fabulous 50s: Five Regrets From the Dying http://tinyurl.com/8xtgjhj Great blog, and the one that got me rethinking the foolishness of living with regrets.
Pat Bean's blog 