Monday, January 31, 2022
Some say that the cemetery is the richest place on earth. There’s a famous motivational speaker who uses the cemetery analogy to illustrate that people’s dreams and ambitions die with them, and that your dreams and ambitions are your most valuable assets. It implies that if we knew of our impending death, we would regret all that we failed to do with our lives. But is that really what life is about – feeling guilty for what you haven’t done? I don’t think people die with regret. They die with ignorance, and ignorance is bliss.
The self-ignorance that you’ll be buried with is not something to feel anguished or guilty about. What you don’t know about who you are is actually a gift. In nature, things either grow or they die, and what you don’t know about yourself is part of your lifetime of growth. That growth into who you are is part of your life’s purpose. True growth is a journey of self-understanding. It’s not part of the regret of dying.
You are a process, an evolving being. The unknown part of who you are can never be fully realized anyway, so don’t feel guilty about not knowing who you are. There’s far too much to know about being human! So just get curious about where self-interest takes you, while you still have time to explore it. If you run out of time, and you end up in the cemetery, that’s fine too. The friction that life circumstances can sometimes create is the resistance that’s necessary for one to mature and blossom as a person. It’s the living who get the chance to grow and understand themselves through circumstance, not the dead. So take full advantage of what you can learn about yourself and how life is teaching you to grow. There’s so much to learn. That’s something to get excited about, not to feel guilty over.