Carla

Now I am still in my 20s but I can imagine what you mean as time goes by. But I do believe that some sense of personal/community growth always should remain part of one’s life until the mind/body allows. That personal growth includes giving back what one has learned or what one can do for benefiting a particular group of people. I have a feeling that life becomes stagnant and loses its luster if one stops having something worthwhile to strive for.

As Helen Keller said “Many people have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.” Of course it’s very ideal, but something to keep in mind when looking at one’s life.

Your comments were indeed very insightful…would love to hear more. Thanks!

For instance, there are many worthwhile things to be achieved in life, but some of them are mutually exclusive. Perhaps if there were an infinite amount of time available to us, we could achieve everything we want to or put our mind to … but even then we each have physical limits to our intelligence or skill.

But life isn’t nearly long enough to do it all. I think, with youth, everything is so new to one, and one has so much unexplored potential, that everything can be considered a “call option.” But not all of those opportunities do pan out, even granted the experience gained in pursuing them. As we get older, we see our limitations, and we notice time flitting past us at an ever increasing rate. True, we can develop a negative attitude and downplay much that we are still capable of achieving.

I think one important aspect to keep in mind is the idea of precedence and priority. Give time to those things that matter most. Also realize that the greater goods in life often require greater effort, and in choosing one, one necessarily chooses against others.

But I think the main benefit of such an approach is in the face of indecision – that deciding to act is always better than not acting at all, and for the reasons outlined above. One may regret that one chose path A over path B, but one cannot have any regrets over having made a choice versus having one’s choice made for oneself.