Time We Have Wasted on the Way

When you meet people and consider relationships as you get older you start to realize that relationships are not the same as when you’re 20 years old or even 30 years old later in life you start to think about who you want to spend the rest of your life with and it’s not about raising kids or building home or any of that stuff anymore.

Life is really about the time and you realize how short that time is because by the time people are around 50 years old, they lived maybe 2/3 of their life. Let’s face it we are not living to 100 years old.

Most of us will be lucky to live until we’re about 80 to 90 years old at best. You wait until your 65 or 70 to retire only to enjoy what will be 10 to 15 years of your life or do you try to retire as early as possible, age 55-60 and do some things while you’re still physically able and mentally able to remember somethings. Who do you do those things with and who do you wanna spend those moments with?

I was talking to a friend the other day and we were having that most philosophical conversation about what is life all about, and someone had told them that life was about falling in love and doing good things for other people. My mind went in a different direction, after all we’re just base human beings that are about eating and living and dying. We internally can come up with some amazing idea of what life means to us because we are intelligent beings, but when you take a step back and look, we’re just like any other animal on the planet. We live, breathe, procreate, and die. It’s weird to think of it that way, but it is true.

People who don’t know you never know how much you love them or how much you meant to somebody else. There are millions of people on this planet billions of people on this planet and not every one of them will touch more than a handful of people in their life. Does making a difference count and how do you make a difference? I don’t know.

You hope that your efforts will leave a legacy and then other times you think it was just a flash in the pan. Part of our conversation was talking about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and I said your purpose is at the bottom and my friend said your purpose is at the top. You can’t get to the top unless you have the bottom all worked out, if you’re lucky you get to the top. It depends on where you are in your station of life and where you will be on the hierarchy.

So many of us are just wasting time, breathing air, eating food, and really not doing anything but using up resources on this planet. Yeah, we enjoy our TV shows and going out and socializing here and there, but is that our purpose in life? Or is our purpose in life to help other people so that they can be more successful in there so that they can move up the pyramid. What are we doing? What are we doing?

People in your life

I spend time thinking about the people who have made an impact in my life. You know, the people that matter. We have a lot of social media out there and it’s easy to scroll past people, see some post and move on. But there are certainly people who are the one’s who make the difference. They have an impact like Thor’s hammer, Mjölnir, so it’s honestly impossible to forget them.

Losing people in your life

Probably one of the most difficult things is losing people in your life. That could be by argument or by death. Being separated from people you love is probably the most painful thing ever. Emotional pain is worse than physical pain because there is really no way to mask or remove it. You can take drugs to remove the physical pain and that can help relieve the suffering, but not really so much with the emotional pain.

You can miss someone so badly that you just don’t know what to do. Losing a child to a drug poisoning can cause serious grief, and no amount of medication can bring that person back. I had a friend who was estranged from her daughter, and she loved her very much. Her daughter refused to speak to her, ever, even to the point where she didn’t even attend her grandmothers funeral. My friend turned to alcohol to numb the pain of that relationship. Eventually at age 50 she succumbed to the effects of alcohol. She died in hospice with a failed liver.

Sometime there is nothing you can do.

You can’t save people as I have learned. You can sometimes just try and be a friend, if people will let you. You support your friends in an altruistic way and hope for the best.

Don’t be resentful. You can spend a life time working trying to be helpful to watch someone walk a different path. We have to be on our own path, and all we can do is bring love. Sadly people will reject love from us, even when we bring our “A” Game.

Amo, Amas, Amat!

All I know is that love is something really hard for me to let go of. If I fall in love, maybe I let go, but I’m alway going to love you.

Rick never stopped loving Elsa

Romantic? I don’t know, but there have been a lot of movie and references to this movie, this story, that it obviously means something to a lot of people. People can leave your life, then come back in. Rick loves hard, unlike Captain Louis Renault.

Love is what makes us human. When we stop caring about others, we lose our humanity. Love is what separates us from everything else.

Life’s Journey’s

Where are you going?

I would have to say, over the course of my life, I’ve taken time out to look around, see where I’m at, where I’ve been, and ponder, where am I going? This time in my life has really given me cause to pause. I’m 52 years old and there are some milestones that I start to think about. Retirement age will come sooner than I would imagine. Early retirement at 55 is possible, and anywhere between 55-60, I could consider doing that.

Restarts

Do you ever think about what you would do if you could have a “do-over”. I don’t know if there are so much “do-overs” as I believe in restarts. I think that you can end one career or passion and put yourself into something else. We think about that passion that we have for whatever it is, and wonder, why am I not making money or following my dream doing what makes me happy? We do get stuck doing the job that puts the money in our pocket and enables us to live the life we think we want to live. Pay the bills, enjoy some entertainment, and breathe, so we hope.

What would you do if you had the support and willingness to try and know you might fail? It’s scary to start something new. As the saying goes, “…but what if you fly?” I think that confidence is great, but knowing that other have confidence in us is a special kind of strength. YES, believe in yourself, and having friends along the way that believe in us is important as well.

A Goal is a Dream with a Deadline.
Multiple Sources have been quoted.

End of Life

That title sounds a little morbid, but there really is 3 major phases of life for most people:

Childhood from 0-(until you leave your parents home) 26.
Adulthood (Work life on your own until Retirement) and
Retirement (Your “Golden Years”).

Retirement is End of Life for many people. The idea you stop working and you are done seems to be what a lot of people are living for. Living to die. And some people never stop working and never get to retire. So what do you do so you’re not just moving into an old age home to eat soft food and have your kids or grandkids wait for you to die so they can collect an inheritance.

You Choose When You Die

If you aren’t thinking about what you want to do in that last phase of life, and planning for it, you will never get there. You need to try and own your home if possible, get yourself as debt free as possible so you have live on a limited income if you’re not working, if you can. OK, easier said than done.

Let’s go way beyond that, because once you stop worrying about the basics, then what?

Will you travel? What hobbies and interests do want to develop or maintain? You look at someone like former President Jimmy Carter, who is still building homes with Habitat for Humanity and have to ask stand back and think how amazing that is. He’s not some administrator, he’s a guy on a job site with a hammer.

We have to find our passion, our love and keep the people and things in our life that matter to us. The point, as many have said, is to never grow old, and live a life on fire and with passion.

Mental Health Breaks

Everyone needs time to themselves to decompress and get a break. We all have been under a lot of mental strain lately with news more than ever. Covid has mostly been the one thing that has directly affected the world. For me I have found that a lot of darkness has surrounded me; the death of a few friends albeit not from Covid, a friend’s Mom, and other people that I have put a lot of energy into helping. And still I have a job and my own life to live.

So I took a mental health weekend to relax just a little bit without having to be a tour guide and have any pressure to do things or figure out what to do and entertain. Just living in the moment. It’s something to be able to live in the moment and know that everything is going to be ok. Sometimes you need to just let things go a little bit.

Florida sadly is a “Hotspot” so for me, it didn’t really matter if I stayed in my own locality or not, I could go to a more rural location and probably be safer which I believe I accomplished.