If you had life over again: what would you do differently?

A bunch of 95+ers were asked this question and what they said is intriguing and instructive. Here are my thoughts on their thoughts.

Part 1: “I would take more time to reflect.”

Here are the three things they said. The fourth is what Charles Swindoll added (he is the author I was reading who cited the survey).

1.      I would take more time to reflect.

2.      I would take more risks.

3.      I would do more things that live on after I’m gone.

4.      I would have been more affirming.

“More time to reflect”—I was surprised by this one. They were saying, ‘I wish I had stopped more often and…idiom alert…smelled the roses.’

After getting over my surprise that ‘more time to reflect’ was first on the list, I had Saturday morning coffee again with my two friends. One is 86 years old and guess what he said about halfway through our coffee? He teared up as he was about to say something, so I sat back and really listened. To us two young guns, Greg, 67, and me, 64, he said, “You guys need to appreciate your stage right now…when your brains are working like they are, when your creativity is high and your energy is flowing and your spouse is healthy. It’s a beautiful time in life and it won’t always be this way.”

Greg and I sat there and drank in his words along with our coffee. Okay, okay, reflect on and appreciate this stage of our lives.

So that’s what I’ve done since Saturday. I’ve tried to be more reflected on this stage, spent time thinking about my energy and creativity and my healthy spouse; I’ve journaled about it, analyzed my blessings, then combed through them the next day to remove some tangles, changed some words, added others, made a list, expanded the list, consolidated the list.

Then I imagined a time, maybe when I’m 86, when I didn’t have energy and creativity flowing through my brain, and envisioned how I would feel looking back at this stage of life.

• Did I appreciate it?

• Did I maximize it and do something with the life-energy flowing through my veins in my sixties?

• Am I proud of what I did with what God gave me?

That’s what I do to reflect and really drive something home. I do just that: drive it home! I drill it into my brain and play with it, noodle it, untangle it, comb through it again…until finally, one day later, maybe a week later, maybe a year later, the tangles are removed and the comb flows through the hair unencumbered…ah…beautiful.

Six months ago, I wanted to process a lingering regret in my life. It was about something that happened over twenty years ago, but just hung there in my brain, bothering me, nagging at me, making me feel unsettled. It had to do with when I resigned from the ministry in which I served at the time. I wished I had done it sooner. I wished I hadn’t hung on and made it so difficult on me and my family.

So I journaled about it. I did what I described above…I replayed it, I noodled it, I reminded myself of conversations, I looked anew at the circumstances around those last days, combed through them, removed some tangles, slept on it, massaged it, then went back and combed through it again.

And finally, as never before, it was clear to me why I had done what I had done. I could articulate why I had dragged it out and remembered why I had waited. For the first time in twenty years, I felt resolved about it; I felt like I had done the right thing for the right reasons.

Since then, the old regret will pop in my brain and seek to trouble me. But I’ll immediately think back to my journaling, my combing, my tangle-removing, and the regret will evaporate as fast as it appeared. Yes! It’s taken twenty years but now it is resolved.

Now I’m hooked on this type of comb-through journaling. I’m using it to reflect deeper; I’m using it to solidify nagging thoughts in my brain; I’m using it to help demystify my life.

Try it! Ignore that entitled or awkward feeling you may have about journaling. And maybe it will help you do what the 95ers wished they had done more of: reflect.

Up next week: “I wish I’d taken more risks.”