Following is the full text of author Bronnie Ware’s talk titled “Regret-Free Living” at TEDxGraz conference. She is the author of the international bestseller, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello, and thank you for sharing your time here today.
Time is a really very precious gift that we are all given. Something we all have in common. The length of time obviously differs.
Regardless of whether we’re here for a short life or a long life, time is a gift. How we choose to use that gift will determine whether we are creating a life of regret or a life of joy, and the choice is ours.
For about eight years on and off, I looked after dying people. I didn’t consciously go into that role; I was looking for a job with heart. One that would keep rental or mortgage out of my life.
So I took on a job as a live-in carer. The lady I was looking after became terminally ill. So after I looked after her, the agency I was working with said I did a good job.
But I’d like more training, so suddenly I found myself in this field. I’d never worked in a medical field in any way, and I found a real calling to it.
My basic job description was personal care. I was looking after meals and showering, wiping people’s backsides, helping them with their medications. All the things that just become too hard when you are terminally ill.
So the people I was caring for, with those who knew they were ill, and were in their last three to 12 weeks of their life, and they knew they were dying. So they’d gone home to die, and I was there in their home.
What I found over time though was that my role, the physical duties I did were just a byproduct of what I was really there for.
Because I had some of the greatest teachers. These were regular, humble people, but they were just like all of us. The difference was that they were at the end of their lives. They were looking back over their lives. A lot of them had regrets, not everyone, but a lot more did than didn’t.
And those common things just kept coming at me again and again, and had a profound effect on me personally. I listened to their regrets, and I witnessed their anguish, their heartache, and I learned from them.
I realized that I was being blessed with these lessons for my own life. If I didn’t try to incorporate them, I too would regret that. So having seen the anguish and the pain that these people suffered, I wasn’t willing to do that.
So whatever was going to take to go in a different direction, I was willing to do it.
So, how do we do that? How do we actually get the courage? Almost every regret came down to a lack of courage.
How do we actually get the courage to start living true to the song that our own heart is singing, and to honor that calling?
One of the first things we can do is face the fact that we’re going to die. You’re going to die, I’m going to die. There’s no negotiating on this really. I mean, maybe times will change, but history shows it. You know, generally we are going to die.
Perhaps with reincarnation, we can think, “It doesn’t matter, if I don’t get around to it in this life, I’ll get around to it in the next life. I’m going to come back.”
What if you don’t come back? What if you come in a body that isn’t going to enable you to do things that you want to do in this life? What if you come back as a duck? You don’t know.
Regardless of your beliefs beyond death, the fact is that in this lifetime as who we are right now, we’re on limited time. Rather than face death as a huge and terrifying aspect of something gloomy, and shut the door, and don’t deal with that until we have to, let’s use it as a tool for living.
Let’s talk about death and accept it. It’s a big part of our soul’s journey. It is a part of the process. If we can look at death and realize, “We are going to die.” Some of us won’t be here in a year’s time. Some of us won’t be here in 10 years’ time. Normally, it is unlikely to be here in 100 years’ time that are here today or listening.
What do you want to do with that time you’ve been given? You want to live true to your heart, you don’t want to deny who you are, and who you’re here to be, so it takes a lot of courage.
One of the first things, other than facing the fact that you are going to die, is finding ways to honor that courage and how to be brave enough. You’ve got this calling in your heart. Every one of us has it. It doesn’t matter how — you can suppress it through busyness, or through addictions, through whatever else works for you.
Ultimately, you’re not going to silence that song. You can put all your energy into trying to silence it and to serving fear, or, if you want to create a life at the end that doesn’t have regret, then you need to find the courage to start honoring that.
One of the first things we do besides, as I say, the first fact that we’re dying, is use that through as a tool for living. But start being more gentle on ourselves, start with compassion. Compassion for everyone is such a powerful force within the world.
But compassion has to start with ourselves. We have to take the pressure off ourselves and realize that it’s OK to be vulnerable, it’s OK to be not perfect.
Look back on things that we’ve done with gentleness and compassion. Just think ,”OK, that’s who I was then.” I’m going to look back on that person. If there is something that you could regret now, plenty of people, most of us will think, “Oh, gosh, I really regret that.”
But don’t regret it, just look back on it with compassion. And think, “That is who I was, that’s not who I am anymore. I’m going to have compassion for that part of myself because if I can recognize that is a regret or a so-called mistake in what I’ve done previously, I’m obviously not that person. I’ve evolved, I’m more emotionally mature to even recognize it.”
We start by being really gentle on ourselves. Some of the ways to do that, there’s endless ways, but start giving yourself permission to enjoy your life and to do some of the things that you love to do. This is not about abandoning your families. It’s not about being selfish.
Self-love is not about not caring for other people. This is something I want to be clear. You can often hear people, say, “Those people that are into self-love are selfish.”
“Bollox”, as we’d say in Australia, but it is not that at all.
If people are thinking that, they haven’t reached that openness yet to realize the whole conception of this. Self-love is not about not caring for other people. Self-love is about caring for yourself as well, and treating yourself with that same compassion, patience, and gentleness as you treat other people with.
So in order to do that, you have to honor some of your own needs. You listen to what your heart wants. Today, for example, I spent 15 minutes just lying on the autumn leaves over in the park because I loved being here, but in the lunch break, I thought, “I am a country girl, I need some connection here to feel myself.”
So, I could have stayed, and chattered, and done lots of things, but instead, I know for my own well-being. I have to honor myself by doing that. It takes saying no, it takes cleansing certain relationships from your life. Those relationships that are authentic, that are truly emotionally mature enough to allow you to be who you are.
They’re the ones you want to keep in your life because they will evolve with you. Others will come and go. It’s the law of impermanence, that things do change.
So you start honoring some of the things that you want to do. A lot of the things that you want to do. Because ultimately, the more you can face fears, get into the habit of saying no to things, setting your boundaries, giving yourself some of your dreams.
You will never achieve all of them because our dreams are always expanding. You don’t have to have the pressure that one day, you will reach this stage, your beauty, everything was perfect.
Perfection does not come by achieving this goal. Perfection comes in small moments on a day-to-day basis, by making conscious choices about how you are living your life. This is how you do it: on a daily basis, on a moment-to-moment basis.
Just think, “OK, if I do this, am I going in the direction of my heart? Or am I going in the direction that is going to create regret?” We have a choice here. You just keep going one step at a time, in gentleness, with compassion, you can take the pressure off yourself.
Then in time, because you become such an example of that to yourself, you naturally do that to other people as well. But if you only serve other people, and you don’t want to serve yourself, then obviously, this is going to become unbalanced. It can lead to resentment, it can lead to regret certainly. It can lead to burn-out, and I say that from experience.
After eight years with dying people, I was just giving, and giving off myself, I went through a major burn-out after that. Life forced me to learn how to receive. Not only to receive from others and to be humble enough to admit that I needed help, including fruit vouchers from charity shops, sleeping in my car because there was no roof over my head.
Life teaches you to receive, but it also taught me how to love myself with the same gentleness, and patience, and compassion as I had given to my patients.
One of the beautiful things, one of the numerous beautiful things about learning to treat yourself with that same gentleness is that in time, you still get called to serve because your heart will always want to serve.
But we need to serve ourselves first in order to serve in our fullest potential. There is so much we can give, and give, and give but if we have the courage by facing death and accepting we’re going to die, “I want to live this really very authentic life. I want to honor where my heart is leading me.”
You might think, “My heart is leading me to spend one month in Australia, on a surfing board.” Beauty! Do it.
The best reverence we can show for this gift of life, and this gift of time is to enjoy it, it’s just to enjoy our lives fully. The happier you are, the more open you are to guidance anyway.
So get it out there, do your surfing holiday, do things that seem absolutely irrelevant to service of others, if that’s where your heart’s calling you, because ultimately, the more connected you become with your heart’s longing, the more it will eventually lead you to service anyway.
But it will be in a field that will bring you joy as well because service isn’t supposed to be about sacrifice in a way that is unbalanced. To serve with passion, love, enthusiasm is what it is about, because it’s not only the pleasure of giving, it’s learning to have the pleasure of receiving.
That receiving will come through the giving, but it will also come through the surprises that life will bestow upon you.
I’ve taken a lot of enormous risks because I know the difference, “I’m going to go this way, I’m going to regret it. Or I can go this way; I don’t know how the heck it’s going to turn out, but this is the way I’m being guided.”
I’ve done it, you notice this fear, and you don’t understand why you’ve been called a certain way, but eventually, it all reveals itself. You are rewarded in ways you cannot possibly imagine.
We couldn’t orchestrate how perfect life is lined out for us. We can look at regret, and we can look back at who we were already. We can look back at mistakes we’ve made.
I can certainly think of things I’ve done in my life and think, “Oh my gosh!” — the way I’ve treated my body, the way I’ve treated other people — but we can also look back on it with gentleness and compassion, and think, “I’m not perfect, I’m doing the best I can.”
But in order to be the best I can, I need to be courageous enough to honor this calling even though I don’t understand it. There is times, there’s billions of times we’ll go through, where we’re giving lessons in surrender, where we have to let go of the need to know the outcome, the need to try and control the outcome.
Just trust, “Our heart is leading us here.” We think, “This is the direct way to go.”
But life is saying, “Go this way.” We think, “This is not the way my heart is leading me.”
But for some reason it’s going there. I’ll have to let go of my version of what I think is ideal and perfect because there’s something in my heart pulling me this way instead of this way.
By doing so, you step back, you have faith in the big picture, and trust that somehow, in time, it will all be revealed. It is, in time, but in the meantime, you don’t want your whole focus to be working out why you have been called this way, when you still want to be going back that way.
Surrender is about trust, and it’s again, another form of courage that will be rewarded. So you go this way, and you just keep going one step at a time, but eventually, the more you start living this way, the more you actually let go of the outcome anyway, and come back to a place of presence, a place of gratitude because you realize that those moments of joy, and perfection, and bliss, are not about achieving this goal up there, or down here, or whatever.
They’re about having the courage to honor your heart. You can just be walking down the street, and for no reason at all, you just get hit by this wave of bliss, and think “I’m so happy, I’ve absolutely no idea right now why I am so happy,” but in this moment of 10 or 15 seconds, I’m just in a state of absolutely bliss and gratitude.
These are some of the rewards. There are so many physical rewards that fall into place as well, but those moments of bliss, and encouragement, and synchronicity, and the people you meet, and the connections you make with other people are the rewards.
In the end, they become far more important than the reward of achieving any particular goal, but you still will achieve the goal. It just may not look exactly as you first conceived it.
So to live a life free of regret, we need to face the fact that we are going to die… we are!… but we have power of choice. It’s up to us to use that power of choice as wisely and as consciously as we can from a place of kindness, and gentleness, and compassion towards ourselves which will then of course flow out to everyone else.
Thank you.
Resources for Further Reading:
Steve Jobs: How to Live Before You Die 2005 Speech (Full Transcript)
The Day Before You Die – Why Doing What Really Matters is So Important: Paddy Ney (Transcript)
Candy Chang on Before I die I want to (Transcript)
Talk About Your Death While You’re Still Healthy: Michelle Knox (Transcript)
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