Why Do Some People Find Meaning and Die Happy?

What are the secrets to finding happiness and living wisely? What really matters if we want to live a worthy human life? These are the questions this book seeks to answer.

With this are five secrets we must discover about life before we die. These secrets are the foundation of a fulfilling and purposeful life. They are a gift from those who have lived wisely to those of us who are still climbing the mountain
One will learn from the old people that wisdom means reflecting more, asking again and again whether your life is going in the right direction, and making constant adjustments to move closer to the life you deserve to live.

What separates those who live well and die happy from most of us is that they continually asked themselves whether they were living the life they wanted to live and following their heart toward the answer. The first secret is to be true to you, yourself, and live with intention.

Regret is possibly the one thing we all fear the most; that we might look back on our lives and wish we had done things differently. When we have lived life fully and done what we hoped to do, we can accept death with grace. What we fear most is not having lived to the fullest extent possible, to come to the end of our life with our final words being “I wish I had.”

To leave no regrets, we must live with courage, moving toward what we want rather than away from what we fear. To leave no regrets we must overcome the inevitable disappointments that life hands us.

Love is a word with a great deal of baggage. It is necessary to make a distinction between the emotion of love and the choice to love. Love is commonly perceived in our society as only an emotion. The secret to a happy and purposeful life was to choose to be a loving person, to become loved.

Living in the present means recognizing that we have no power over the past or the future, none at all. The past has already occurred and is behind us. Whatever happened, we have no power to change it. Any regrets we had, and any joys, are forever frozen in time. Focusing on the past, especially on regret, has the power only to rob the present moment of its happiness. When we find ourselves in regret about the past we must tell ourselves that we have no power over it, none whatsoever.

Living the moment is easy to say but hard to do. To practice living the moment we must train our minds, often over a number of years. Meditation is great practice for training our minds to be present.

Happy people are always givers not takers. They may not have been as selfless as Mother Teresa or Gandhi, but they discovered that the more we give, the more we find happiness.

One of the reasons that giving more that we take is one of the secrets to happiness and purpose is because we have a great deal of control over what we give. Each day, we have the power to give without limit. We can choose kindness, to serve, to love, to be generous, and to leave the world better in some way.

When we give more than we take we connect ourselves to a story bigger than our selves. And in the act of doing so, happiness finds us.