It's Not About the Beginning or the End; It's the Journey That Matters

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Fulfilling a dream requires hard work, a good plan, flexibility, and time. Building strong relationships requires much the same. But what do you do when you're approaching the "end" of your time? Do you give up having dreams because you're just too old? Do you close off your heart from new relationships? Whether we have days, weeks, months or years, investments in dreams and/or relationships are never a waste of time, in my opinion. The only true waste is when we don't invest! Cliche' or not, I believe that a life worth living is worth living well and that the focus of our life should not be its beginning or end, but on the journey, the every day, no matter how much time we have. That is what living "the good life" means to me, but it looks different for everyone based on the things they value and the way they define what a "life well lived" looks like.

I recently read an article from Forbes magazine online about this very notion. The article, "The Ten Golden Rules on Living the Good Life", written by Panos Mourdoukoutas, is based on ancient philosophical ideals that I find compelling and transcendent to our modern age. They are as follows:

1. Examine life, engage life with vengeance; always search for new pleasures and new destines to reach with your mind.
2. Worry only about the things that are in your control, the things that can be influenced and changed by your actions, not about the things that are beyond your capacity to direct or alter.
3. Treasure friendship, the reciprocal attachment that fills the need for affiliation. Friendship cannot be acquired in the market place, but must be nurtured and treasured in relations imbued with trust and amity.
4. Experience true pleasure. Avoid shallow and transient pleasures.
5. Master yourself.
6. Avoid excess. Live life in harmony and balance.
7. Be a responsible human being.
8. Don't be a prosperous fool. Prosperity by itself is not a cure-all against an ill-led life, and may be a source of dangerous foolishness.
9. Don't do evil to others...Harming others claims two victims--the receiver of the harm, and the victimizer, the one who does the harm.
10. Kindness towards others tends to be rewarded.

Whether or not this is THE recipe for "living the good life", there is certainly not one of these suggestions that's a "bad" idea. I mean, just imagine what our world would look like if we all practiced each of them! I'm picking #2 & #4 as my focus this weekend! TGIF ya'll!

And if you have time, check out the full article. It's not too lengthy and gives logical reasoning for why each of these things on the list was chosen. You can find the article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2012/01/14/the-ten-golden-rules-on-living-the-good-life/2/.

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