various rambling thoughts: Do not go gentle into that good night…

Dylan Thomas knew what he was talking about when he penned his powerful paean about dying to that stage of our lives which forces us to come face to face with ourselves with terrible clarity – the stage when the curtains are coming down on us

Open Culture, that wonderful website of all that is interesting on the web, posted this article – The top 5 regrets of the dying

At someone at my stage of my life, at the launch-board of a ‘career’, so to say, what this says especially strikes a chord – especially when we become very much aware of the much philosophized word – choice.

The choices that we make everyday – that extra hour at work, the postponement of the vacation, that extra effort to drop in a hello, choice to let something make us happy or not, the laziness to do what we like in place of what we must. All of this shapes us who we become.

All of this we know. All of this we have read in the innumerable books that purport to teach us to help ourselves. And yet, very few are able to reconcile theory to practice. I know I haven't yet.

It is almost tragically amusingly but instructive that at the end of our lives, we revert to the basics, we suddenly realize the things that would have made us happy. I think what we regret is not that this clarity comes as a revelation but that this clarity was always there, but hidden underneath layers of more immediate everyday, seemingly urgent problems.

I guess that at the very end when the usual problems of our lives cease to make any sense, we see inside ourselves much more honestly and what we have always known comes to the surface.

Maybe its a process of purging that gives a sense of closure to ourselves, the process of going in peace

So what does this mean to the ones, who should live for some more time yet? I think the more obvious answer to this – look at the regrets and try to see that we don't have any when our time comes.

Well, I don't think that is completely possible. I don't think it is possible to have absolutely no regrets at the end. At every major moments in our lives, when we realize that there may not be any going back, we have regrets of things not done, things not said. John Steinbeck observed the same in his war diary - “There was once a War”, in which he notes that the most common regret in the letters of the soldiers back home were the words that they could not say when they could have, words like “I love you”.

There will always be people we miss, miss times we could have spent, miss the things we enjoyed doing but did not do enough, miss enjoying ourselves more. Its as natural to living and regretting these is to dying. And the sooner we understand this, better for us, I guess..

I think that its a state of the mind that we choose for ourselves. I also think that it is a choice of how much honest we want to be with ourselves. I think that if we are honest with ourselves and slowly develop the strength to act according to that honesty and make choices accordingly, we go in peace with ourselves. Because one thing we all know deep inside – deep inside, we know exactly what will make us happy.

I also believe that we need to believe that regret will always be a part of our lives. The choices that we make will make someone unhappy, no matter how hard we try otherwise. Its a process of coming to peace with it – again a process of being honest with ourselves

But it was a wonderful article. And the barrage of comments, for and against, that this article has generated gives an indication of just much this topic touches us

In the end, whether we like it or not, we decide how we go…