Have No Regrets!
by Phillip Day
A Good Conscience is a Good
Pillow
Thomas à Kempis writes: "Very soon it will be over with
you here; then, see how things stand. Today we are, and tomorrow we are
gone. And when we are taken out of sight, we soon pass out of mind. Oh,
the dullness and hardness of our hearts that only think of the present
and do not look forward more to the future. This being the case, you ought
to master yourself in every act and thought as if you were to die today.
If you had a good conscience, you would not fear death so much…. If you
are not prepared today, how will you be ready tomorrow? …When that final
hour does come, you will begin to think quite differently about all your
past life, and you will be exceedingly sorry that you were so careless
and remiss."
Well said. Live life with no regrets. Drag any skeletons out of the closet and bury them under the patio. Forgive those who have wronged you. Ask forgiveness from those you have wronged, even if you do not receive it. Own a good conscience. Always be aware of the context of your life and where you are on the journey. Do you lack purpose? Dream goals that get you excited. Then reinforce them repeatedly in a state of positive emotion.
Live Life to The Full
…need not mean parachuting from the Eiffel Tower, swimming with sharks
or bungy-jumping from the Clifton Suspension Bridge. It's about enjoying
what you do, always aware of your context and where you are on the journey.
Goal-setting daily (What do I want to accomplish by bed-time tonight?)
is my personal favourite, for each day lived has been thought about in
advance. Achieving, on whatever scale, bestows satisfaction. Relaxation
and play provide pleasure. A life lived to the full is one where goals
have been met and pleasure and play abound with a clear conscience.
· Travel
· See the world
· Ask questions
· What does my photo album have in it?
· Am I smiling or scowling?
· Who knocked the Sphinx's nose off anyway?
· What happens when I press this at Cape Canaveral?
There are people near you who will die never having ever really lived. Fear holds them back. Fear to explore what they were told was a dangerous world. Fear they might fail. Fear they might not. One died a moment ago, a life of lost opportunities they probably wished they had taken.
Never Retire
When productivity ends, so can our will to go on. A gold watch and a pat
on the back can be interpreted as the golden boot: 'All right, thank
you very much. Make way for the young now.' Nothing but a corporate
human resource, off to the post office and then to the scrap-heap, drawing
your pension once a week and scratching down your lottery numbers while
other people's children squirt you with water pistols.
Retirement. I am against it. Stay at home and watch Jerry Springer? How utterly unproductive. Continue producing, you'll have more fun. The insurance companies embezzled your pension fund anyway.
· Never retire FROM something, always retire
TO something
· Now is the time to use your skills to start something you've
always wanted to do, something worthwhile
· If you are lazy and not working at eighty, GET A JOB
· In long-lived cultures, retirement is unknown! Everyone produces,
some still fathering sprogs at ninety
· Seventy-year-olds know a lot of stuff
· Dream - Plan - Deliver, and I don't mean pizza
· According to the longevity experts, at 65 you are approximately
55% through your genetic potential
· Sitting at home does nothing but provoke feelings of worthlessness
(big nocebo), owned up to even by lottery winners, who often face depression
or a return to work to do something useful
· Why not work for yourself? You captain, everyone else private.
Create! Produce! Serve! Show someone you are still alive. Blink.
·
Out of Our Minds? Avoid Psychiatry
A pointless life provokes depression. Mind, a mental health charity, believes
1 in 4 Brits have a 'mental health problem' at some stage in their
lives. By 2020, depression is expected to outstrip heart disease as the
leading human health catastrophe, we are told.
'What's the point of it all?' 'Why work?' 'What's it all been about?' 'What the hell will it all matter fifty years from now?' More people are 'mentally ill' today, the experts say, than at any other time in history.
Actually, we're not. Mostly, we're victims of lifestyle and circumstance, of what we do to ourselves, the hamster wheel spinning too fast, pathologised into a mental illness by psychiatry and then treated with drugs: Chronic Tax Anxiety Syndrome; Conduct Disorder; Lottery Stress Disorder; Organic Caffeine Mental Disorder; or, if you disagree with your psychiatrist, Denial Disorder. You get the picture.
I am the sworn enemy of a system which stigmatises people with fake mental illnesses, then doses them up. Our schools and retirement homes are full of pharma zombies. My book, The Mind Game, dishes the goods on psychiatry, this scoundrel industry, and why you need to stay as far away as you can from its clutches. A list of the main 'mental' illnesses is given in The Mind Game and The ABC's of Disease, which are mostly lifestyle, metabolic or toxin-related problems, which, you'll be delighted to hear, do not have their resolutions in electro-shock or the Prozac bottle.
It suits psychiatry to tell us we're victims of any one of the frauds in their 'disease' manual, the DSM. Psychiatry is the study of people who don't need to be studied by people who do. A big chunk of the pharmaceutical pie now comes from treating bogus 'mental' conditions. Today, plans are afoot to test every American for 'mental illness'. In Britain, as life speeds out of control on the rodent wheel, we're being taught it's nothing we did, it's merely a chemical imbalance which can be adjusted with drugs.
Yet hyperglycaemia, schizophrenia, depression, behavioural disorders, addictions, anorexia/bulimia, criminal violence, menopausal symptoms, etc. have all been found to have lifestyle/metabolic causations. Can a lifestyle problem provoke a medical problem? Of course. Anger, stress and fear can all stir up physical/mental reactions which can be interpreted as 'illness' (more so if they appear to be chronic). Here's one more entry for the DSM. Medical Testing Disease: If you think you're completely healthy, you've not had enough tests yet.
Thinks
Do you think there is anything wrong with you?
Are you living life too fast, jamming the needles to the red and smoking
the rubber to the cord?
When was the last time you took a break?
Is it really that bad?
Who can you talk the problem out with?
Avoid psychiatry.
Get Smooching
Love and caring affect us at a deep, physical level, the experts agree
(those that pucker up). They're right. Who's loving you? To whom are you
giving the keys to your soul and stationwagon? To GET the right person
you have to BE the right person, which, broken down, means it's all about
values and giving. Plants, animals, humans and even John Prescott have
all been found to respond to love. It's a squishy world out there, after
all, and one solidly grounded in give and take.
Those hurt by relationships, please take your place at the back of that long line (you might have a mental illness). Do your values match your partner's? If they don't, there will be conflict. Values are not the same as goals:
· Do you have friends who vex you?
· Do you share your partner's hopes, goals and values?
· Do you respect each other?
· Can you commit?
· Do you give more than you take?
I'm Outta Here - The Art
of Playing
Take four-week holidays! TAKE FOUR-WEEK HOLIDAYS! Take four-week holidays!
Take four-week holidays! Take four-week holidays!
'One in three British workers fail to take their full annual holiday entitlement, a survey has shown. Instead, they put in 36 million hours of free overtime, giving bosses almost £1 billion in unpaid work every year -'
And if we do go on holiday -
The survey of nearly 6,000 workers by the Chartered management Institute found nearly half stay in contact with their employer while they are away.' - Daily Mail, 15th June 2005
No! No! No! No! No!
Behavioural patterns are formed over a 15- to 30-day period through repetition and a state of emotional excitement. They break over the same period. Few of us take four-week holidays, which is why we still have bats in the belfry upon our return. Pavlov patterning relies on location, so clearing off somewhere nice geographically to break our stride makes all the sense in the world, especially if we go to play. Not for two weeks. Four weeks.
Take those who relax you. Leave the kids at home if necessary (straight-jackets are for this). Go forth and frivolate, you've earned it. The first ten days of your four-week readjustment are usually spent cussing out Spanish waiters and being thoroughly unpleasant to everybody as the mental puke gushes out. After, serenity and bliss prevail, or your travel agent will give you your money back.
· Now go and play
· Do not take the laptop or anything connected with work
· Do not phone home and get stressed
· Do not phone work
· Lose the mobile phone
· Do not ever tell your boss where he can reach you
· Eat real, living, organic whole-foods
· Exercise (more play)
· Behave inappropriately (even more play). It's a holiday
· Dreaming comes easier with a magenta sunset and a Mai-Tai. These
are the times of refreshing and cerebral inspiration. Get refreshed, sunshine
Laugh? Easy For You to Say
-
Laughter reduces stress. Laughter makes everyone look more appealing (apart
from Jack Nicholson). Laughter says, 'See, I can put on a red nose the
same as everyone else.' Laughter is actually pretty funny, so you should
do it. Often.
· Change your posture to portray confidence
and humour
· Plan laughter outings with friends which you know will be a riot,
e.g. comedy clubs, a funny film, the barricades at a G8 summit
· Get friends who know how to shake their bellies
· Then tell the Germans and French how to do it
Laughter is the best medicine. You cannot patent it.
Not much laughter in a doctor's surgery.
Money
Is a tool, not an altar. Those who worship money are stressed at the idea
of losing it and do not have loftier goals. Saying, "I wish to
be a millionaire" is like saying, "I wish to have a million
oysters". Oysters are a commodity. What do you want to do with
them?
· Do not be dysfunctional around money. It's
only money
· Expenditure rises to meet income. Are you living beyond your
means?
· Accept money graciously
· Give money graciously
· Use money wisely
· You can't take it with you
· The answer to a money problem is not medication, alcohol or kicking
the dog, it's money
· To get out of a money problem you need to increase your income
while decreasing your expenses
· Dream - plan - deliver. Stay/get out of debt
· A workman is worthy of his wages. Pay those who work for you
a little more than they deserve
· Nobody's last words were ever: "Darn, I wish I'd spent
more time at the office." (except Ricky Gervais)
· Your bank manager is not losing one wink of sleep over your overdraft,
unless you're reading this, Nick Leeson
Make Good Choices
What our lives become is down to the choices we make. A valuable pattern
to install is to practise making conscious choices for the first thirty
days on everything. What you eat, what you wear, what you say, etc. Some
people start in just one area and then expand the concept. For instance,
every day you have a choice about what to eat. But from a biochemical
standpoint, there are no choices. Make the wrong choice with food consistently
and nature will sharpen her sword for you.
Make good choices.
If faced with a difficult decision, rephrase the question:
What would Napoleon do? What would God do? What would your hero do? I
can speak better for them sometimes than I can for myself. Thus I change
the focus of a difficult decision and the answer is often before me. I
don't procrastinate. Procrastination's linking pain to taking action,
a sure sign you're a sissy.
Simplify! Simplify! Simplify!
Most attitude problems, 'mental illness', anger, stress, road rage, toilet-seat
rage, etc. derive from the hamster wheel spinning too fast. Some try to
hang on for grim death (Whee!!), while others cause the onlookers to duck
as they fly off into the water dish. Usually a psychiatrist fishes them
out.
Learn More About Yourself
· Are you stressed?
· Are you doing too much?
· Do you have road rage? Hotel rage? Parking rage?
· Do you have free time when you can do nothing?
· What comes out of your mouth?
· Do you surround yourself with noise at every opportunity (TV,
radio, parties, computer games, Graham Norton?)
· Try driving around in the car with nothing on (the radio)
· Try switching off the TV
· Exercise 60 - 90 mins a day outside (play)
· Allocate at least an hour each day/evening simply to veg
· Re-acquaint yourself with the names of your children
· Discover your spouse
· Rule your domain
· Be
Thinks
· The body and mind are one. Medicine does not teach this.
· How healthy are your thoughts?
· What you believe and what is important to you guides your actions
· Love and caring affect you at a deep, physical level
· Pain in, pain out. Pleasure in, pleasure out
· Surviving stress is knowing when to walk away
· When was the last time you took a consecutive, four-week holiday?
© Copyright Phillip Day 2005
Excerpted with permission from The Little Book of Attitude
www.credence.org
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