I regularly read the musings of an entrepreneur, writer James Altucher. He seems to have a really good perspective and gives good advice.
How do you prepare for a good death?
I think we live in four dimensions at the same time.
The physical world, where we can get stabbed in the heart and bleed. The emotional world, where we can get stabbed in the heart and cry.
The mental world, where we can get stabbed in the head and get demented. And the spiritual world where we get stuck living in the past, filled with regret and anxiety.
Stress is the knife of the emotional world. Stress leads to inflammation of the cells (again, I’m a doctor).
The major causes of death in the US: heart attacks, cancer, strokes, Alzheimers – all caused by inflammation. And then diseases caused by smoking. Don’t smoke.
If all you do is work on ways to reduce stress, avoid time travel (obsessing on past and future), and of course, don’t smoke, then you will start preparing for a good death.
Everyone wraps themselves in their dramas: their friends, their family, their divorces, their failures. We build up a mythology of our misery. The pantheon of people who “did this to us”.
Can you take a break from that for today? Just today please. And then maybe tomorrow. If you can’t, then text me why.
Because the truth is:
Nobody did anything to you.
Except your mother.
I did a workshop with a great life coach more than a decade ago, which focused on how people create their personal narratives, and she said she had a rule that she would only tell a story to other people 3 times and after that she’d let it go because to keep re-telling gave it far too much weight and life and kept her from moving on. I try to remember that rule when there is drama in my life; it really does minimize stress, regret and anxiety.