When we’re young, we hear the phrase “life is short” and it seems so meaningless to us, doesn’t it? First of all, when we’re 10 years old or 20 years old, life doesn’t really seem short. It seems like we have the whole world and a million years in front of us. However, it’s true. Life is short. Before you know it, you’re sitting and counting the days and realizing that you have more years behind you than you do in front of you. I’ve read a few things in my life that really resonated with me and I’ve tried to write them down as I go about life so that I’ll remember them. Sometimes I even write them on a big piece of paper and put it on my wall. The list below is a list of things that people have said that will really stick with you and make you see life differently. Enjoy!
1. “You know you’re an adult when you can be right without needing to prove the other person wrong.”
2. “If you’re scared of doing it because you’re afraid that people will judge you, trust me they won’t even remember it after a year.”
3. Next year, you’ll wish you had started today.
4. I would much rather live a life of ‘oh wells’ than a life of anxious ‘what ifs?’
5. “A fool thinks himself to be a wise man, a wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
6. A good friend once told me “you have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable”
7. I was having a bad day one time and being all “Why me?” when a coworker said, “Why not you?”. I had never thought about it before, but it was a good point. So I shut up and got over it.
8. A small thing, but vastly more important than it sounds:
I was sitting on a bus once, and we came to the railroad tracks. There were some cars sitting in between us and the next red light, so if a train came, we’d be stuck until it had passed. That was always a couple of annoying minutes.
Then the light turned green, and the bus went across the train tracks without having to wait for a train. Pheew, crisis averted. Then, behind me, a mother said to her small child:
“That was too bad, we didn’t get to see the train today.”
That was the perfect way to frame that. Why not enjoy what you get instead of getting upset over something you can’t change?
9. My mom was dying. A friend told me “you have your whole life to freak out about this– don’t do it in front of her.”
It really helped me to understand that my feelings are not always what’s important. It IS possible to delay a freakout, and that skill has served me innumerable times.
10. “You are not required to set yourself on fire to keep other people warm”. In other words, don’t let your need to help the ones you love become a self-destructive trait.
11. I’m the oldest of three kids. I’m older than my little brother by 2.5 years and my little sister by 9 years.
When I was about fourteen or so, arguing with my dad in private about something I don’t remember, he, being the second-oldest of eight kids, told me:
“Any decision you make in this household, you make three times. Once when you make it, once when your brother makes the same decision after watching you do it, and once when your sister makes the same decision after watching you and your brother do it. How you treat your brother will tell him how he can treat your sister; and how you treat your sister tells her how she will expect to be treated for the rest of her life, even as far as her future boyfriends.”
That kinda shook me up and made me rethink my role as the oldest child; I started taking my responsibilities as the role model a lot more seriously after that.
12. “I learned to give… not because I have too much. But because I know how it feels to have nothing.”
13. People won’t remember the words you say but how it made them feel.
14. “It’s only embarrassing if you’re embarrassed.” As someone whos always been really shy and reserved, this changed my life forever.
15. I was 13 years old, trying to teach my 6-year-old sister how to dive into a swimming pool from the side of the pool.
It was taking quite a while as my sister was really nervous about it. We were at a big, public pool, and nearby there was a woman, about 75 years old, slowly swimming laps. Occasionally she would stop and watch us.
Finally, she swam over to us just when I was really putting the pressure on, trying to get my sister to try the dive, and my sister was shouting, “but I’m afraid!! I’m so afraid!!” The old woman looked at my sister, raised her fist defiantly in the air and said, “So be afraid! And then do it anyway!”
That was 35 years ago and I have never forgotten it. It was a revelation — it’s not about being unafraid. It’s about being afraid and doing it anyway.
