Comment by stan_rogers
15 years ago
It's not so much being satisfied that every choice you made in life is the best one, but, being satisfied with who you are today (on the whole), coming to understand that who you are is the sum of every choice you've made, every relationship you've entered into, and every experience you have had. Change anything in that chain, and you are somebody different.
As long as you haven't lived the life of Methuselah (nearly a thousand freakin' years to get on with something, and the only thing posterity has to say about him is that he had sons and daughters before he died[1]), as long as you've tried to participate in your own life and haven't found a reason to loathe who you are, then there is no room, really, for the what-ifs or the coulda-shouldas.
[1] I'm no Bible literalist (or believer, for that matter), but I think that was the point the writer was trying to get across as a moral lesson.
Yep, be satisfied with who you are today (on the whole) and who you are on the day of your death. Recogonize now, the urge to speculate on what more you could have done as just another urge. Naturally, when one is dying and their own life is becoming scare in their own estimation, their longing for meaningful activities is going to be heightened. I'd argue that the more one has experienced in life, the more intense this longing will be. How many times can one go around and say final farewells to cherished friends? Never enough!
I try to read a lot of fiction, old and new, but I know that when I'm close to death, I'm liable to be choked up about those dozen or so books that I never got around to reading. Someone who doesn't like fiction will probably not think at all about what they never got around to think about reading. We're all that way about our own set of cares and don't cares, so none of the wishes and regrets are ever cosmically meaningful anyway.