تفسیر درس

Life Review - VIP Commentary

Hi, this is AJ. Welcome to the commentary. Let’s talk more about this activity. So I hope you actually did this activity. You may be familiar with another variation of this, which I’ve seen in many different places. I don’t know. It’s a popular one with counselors and social workers, motivational people and all that. It’s like the funeral thing. You imagine you’re at your own funeral watching it and then you imagine what other people will say about you. What do you want them to say about you?

I like this one better because that one is more about other people’s opinions, right? It’s a little more external. This one is more internal. It’s really more about focusing on what is meaningful to you. What’s most meaningful to you in life and so the whole point of this activity is to try to pull that out a little more because, again, remember I talked about point of view. When we’re constantly focused on today and this week and this year we sometimes forget to look at our life from a bigger point of view just because we get busy.

We all do that. We have a lot to do. We’ve got family and work and all kinds of stuff going on and so we tend to focus like maybe on this week, this month, maybe this year and we often do not look at our life from the point of view or the perspective of decades where let’s look at it in 10 years at a time. You know from the past and into the future or a 20-year span and what’s our life like over that kind of a time span or 50 years or if we’re lucky and healthy 100 years, something like that, really looking at the whole thing.

I think we think about things differently when we do that. I do. If I look at this year ah, then I’ve got all this big list of things I want to accomplish and I can get really focused on achieving this and achieving this and doing this and having this big long to-do list and I can get really upset if I don’t accomplish one of them. It’s this kind of short-term perspective, but if I sort of step back more and look at it you know five years or 10 years or 20 years or more then a lot of that stuff just kind of fades away.

It’s like oh, who cares. It’s not really important at all. It doesn’t actually add meaning to my life when I look at it from a wider perspective. It doesn’t mean you know maybe I still need to do some of those things right now, but it lets me look at them in a different way.

Like that’s not so important. Just relax. It doesn’t matter. Let me give you an example.

My car needs new tires, okay? So right now that feels like ah, I’ve gotta go and find a place and buy the tires and then I’ve gotta go and wait. It seems like a big hassle, but obviously if I look at my life from a five-year perspective I won’t even remember it. As soon as I get the tires two days later I’ve forgotten about the whole thing. So it’s kind of pointless to really get all worried and upset about it. It’s not a big deal.

So that’s the whole point of this exercise is to help you because sometimes if we only focus on one year then we can end up living like 10 years or 20 years and we miss the really important stuff because we got so caught up in right now, right now, these little things that seem important but aren’t. That’s when you get that feeling and it’s a bad feeling we’ve all had at some point where you realize oh, I’ve neglected something important in my life. ‘To neglect’ means you don’t take care of it. You don’t focus on it.

Relationships – when I did this activity and just kind of imagined it that’s what came to me is that the relationships were the most important. It was my family and my friends, my close friends that I’ve had for a long time, that’s what was obviously to me the most important and the most meaningful. When I imagined who would be around me that’s who it was. When I imagined my past what was meaningful to me was the closeness of those relationships, caring about those people, them caring about me.

When I imagine what I would want to say at the end it was mostly about that. You know gratitude to certain people in my life or an awareness of my connection. It was that kind of stuff, right? It wasn’t a lot of the stuff I think of week to week like with the business or even teaching or even Effortless English. Even though this is a great huge passion of mine doing this, when I really look at it from a big perspective the parts that are important about that are just the people I’ve met. It’s not so much this lesson or that lesson, I don’t even think about that. So it’s important.

It’s not that the little things aren’t important also, but it’s important to see what’s truly deeply meaningful and to remind yourself of that. Then you can adjust maybe the present moment to pay more attention to those things. So that’s the whole point of all this and why I want you to do it. I really hope you’ll do that and then as part of the next step, the thing to do this month, is I want you to really review those answers that you wrote down.

If you struggled with this…you know some people think this is very morbid. ‘Morbid’ means kind of depressing and the more direct meaning is focused on death. So a lot of people are like oh, I don’t want to think about that, push it away, push it away, but it’s not meant to be depressing. It’s meant to be quite the opposite. It’s meant to give you a feeling of appreciation so that you can appreciate what is truly meaningful and important to you and discover what that is and remember it.

So if you had trouble, you thought it was depressing, try again. Try again. Keep trying to get yourself into that emotional state of wow, it really is, this is the end. Oh, what’s important and then write those answers down because you’ll get better answers if you do that and then, again, this month the next step is I want you to really review those answers. Read them. Think about them. Take some time. We don’t do this enough where we just sit and think about sort of bigger things. Instead of watching TV and running around doing stuff, really take time to look at your answers and think about it and see wow, that is important to me. That’s what I care about. That’s the kind of life I hope I’ll have at the end that I’ll look back upon and see. These are the people that are most important to me.

So do that and then, step three, after you’ve done your answers, you did the activity, you’ve looked at them, reviewed them, thought more about them, now step three what I want you to do is to focus on those big important things this month. Every day I want you to look at those answers again that you wrote down and I want you to do something that is connected to those big answers. What do I mean by that?

I mean let’s say that one thing you imagine or realize is that your parents are really important to you. Yeah, you’re busy. Maybe you live in a different town and you kind of don’t really talk to them that much right now. Well, if you realize that then this month what I’d like you to do is start thinking about your parents. Think about why they are so meaningful to you and then take some action this month. What might that be?

Well, maybe you call them every day this month and maybe even talk to them. Wow, you know I thought about this and I just really appreciate you guys and thank you.

Whatever, whatever it is you want to say or do. You don’t have to say anything serious to them. You can just pick up the phone and just chat with them. Just establish that connection this month. Really focus on them if they were one of the really important things that came up for you. Or, you know maybe it’s your child or your children. It could be a friend.

So when I did this I mean there were a lot of different people. Certainly, it was Tamoa my wife and my parents and my family and then it was certain friends too like my friend Kristen who’s my best friend who I’ve known for like ages and ages and ages and her boyfriend Joe who I’ve known now for many, many years. We’ve traveled together.

We’ve done all these things together. Shared all these experiences and I really realized wow, they are really important to me so I can make an extra effort to stay in touch with them, to contact them. You can even go beyond just contacting them. You can write a letter to someone if you want to. I don’t know. It’s up to you, but the point is take some action.

Maybe you thought about living a very active, vigorous, adventurous life. Maybe that’s what you really imagined, that you were just out there doing bold amazing things, taking chances, fully living life ever moment. Maybe that’s what you see as the deeper meaning of your life or the deeper happiness of your life. That’s great too. Well, if that is the case then, of course, you would review that. You’d see that and what would you need to do? You need to take action. You’d say well, I haven’t been doing that lately or not as much as I want. So you’d get out there and start doing some adventurous things.

Buy a plane ticket, go skydiving, whatever it is for you, get out there and do it more. This month get focused on that again.

I can go on and on. I don’t know what the answer is. You have to do this. Think deeply about it and then, of course, the last step, as always, share this. I think this would be really, really interesting and powerful to share this on our website. I would love to hear about your answers to this and I’d love to hear about the actions you take, how you’re refocusing on the truly important meaningful things in your life. I know the other members would love to hear from you and I’m sure you would love to hear from them. I mean this is a very inspiring topic and the more we share it the more powerful it will be for all of us. We might remind each other of some good answers.

All right, so I’ll be reading about your answers soon on our site. This is a very uplifting topic, a very positive topic if you do it, so do it and I’ll see you on our site. I look forward to hearing your answers, bye-bye.