Who Will Cry When You Die\?: Life Lessons From The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari pdfdrive com

63.
Have a Living Funeral
When I was doing research for The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, I came across
the story of an Indian maharaja who would engage in a bizarre morning ritual:
every day, immediately after waking up, he would celebrate his own funeral,
complete with music and flowers. All the while, he would chant, “I have lived
fully, I have lived fully, I have lived fully.”
When I first read this, I could not understand the purpose of this man’s
ritual. So I asked my father for some guidance. His reply was this: “Son, what
this maharaja is doing is connecting to his mortality every day of his life so he
will live each day as if it were his last. His ritual is a very wise one and reminds
him of the fact that time slips through our hands like grains of sand and the time
to live life greatly is not tomorrow but today.” One’s sense of mortality is a great
source of wisdom.
While on his deathbed, Plato was asked by a friend to summarize his great
life’s work, The Dialogues. After much reflection, he replied in only two words:
“Practice dying.” The ancient thinkers had a saying that captured the point Plato
made in other terms: “Death ought to be right there before the eyes of those who
are young just as much as before the eyes of those who are very old. Every day,
therefore, should be regulated as if it were the one that brings up the rear, the one
that rounds out and completes our lives.” Having a living funeral will reconnect
you to the fact that time is a priceless commodity and the best time to live a
richer, wiser and more fulfilling life is now.

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64.
Stop Complaining and Start Living
Stop complaining about having no time for yourself and get up an hour earlier.
You have the option, why not exercise it? Stop complaining about not being able
to exercise given all that is on your plate these days. If you sleep seven hours a
night and work eight hours every day, you still have more than sixty-three hours
of free time every week to do all the things you want to do. This amounts to 252
hours every month and 3,024 hours every single year to spend on life’s pursuits.
There has never been a more exciting time to be alive in the history of the world
and you have the choice to seize the boundless possibilities that every day
presents.
If you are not as fulfilled or as happy or as prosperous or as peaceful as you
know you could be, stop blaming your parents or the economy or your boss and
take full responsibility for your circumstances. This will be the first step to a
completely new way of looking at your life and the starting point of a better way
to live. As George Bernard Shaw said, “The people who get on in this world are
the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they
can’t find them, make them.”
Make wiser choices about the thoughts you will allow to enter your mind,
as well as the attitude you will bring to your days and the way you will spend the
hours of your time. Stop complaining and start living. In the words of the poet
Rudyard Kipling, “If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’
worth of distance run, yours is the earth and everything that’s in it.”

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