Life Lessons: How Our Mortality Can Teach Us About Life And Living

by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Many of us think we were taught about love. Yet we do not find love fulfilling, because it’s not love. It is a shadow darkened by fear, insecurities, and expectations. We walk the earth together yet feel alone, helpless, and ashamed.

Everyone carries the seeds of greatness. “Great” people don’t have something that everyone else doesn’t; they’ve simply removed a lot of the things that stand in the way of their best selves.

We like people who are real more than those who hide their true selves under layers of artificial niceties.

If we measure love received, we will never feel loved. Instead, we will feel shortchanged. Not because we really were, but because the act of measuring is not an act of love. When you feel unloved, it is not because you are not receiving love; it is because you are withholding love.

Do you nurture your soul, do you feed it? What activities do you do that make you feel better about yourself, that you’re really glad to have done? When we love ourselves, we fill our lives with activities that put smiles on our faces.

When we love ourselves, we fill our lives with activities that put smiles on our faces. These are the things that make our hearts and our souls sing.

Most of us are easier on other people then we are on ourselves. Let’s practice being as kind to and forgiving of ourselves as we are to others.

This is so damn true for me

We can learn to love ourselves by letting others love us, and by loving them.

That was our last kiss, our last meal, our last vacation, our last hug, and our last laugh together. I realized you never know, until after the fact, which was the last evening out, the last Thanksgiving. And there will be ‘lasts’ in all relationships. I want to look back on all those events and feel like I did my best to be fully present, not just half there. I understand that Kevin was a gift I could keep for a while, but not forever. This is true for everyone I meet. Knowing this makes me take in these moments and people even more.”

There’s no such thing as an insignificant or accidental relationship. Every meeting, encounter, or exchange, with everyone from a spouse to an anonymous telephone operator, no matter how brief or profound, how positive, neutral, or painful, is meaningful. And in the grand scheme of things, every relationship is potentially important, for even the most trivial encounter with a passing stranger can teach us a great deal about ourselves. Every person we encounter holds the possibility of sending us to happiness, to a loving place in the mind, or to a place of struggle and unhappiness. They all have the possibility of bringing us great love and great relationships where we least expect to find them.

Instead of trying to find someone to love, let’s make ourselves more worthy of being loved. Instead of trying to get the partners we already have to love us more, let’s become worthier of being loved. And let’s ask ourselves if we are giving as much love as we wish to get, or if we expect people to love us dearly even if we’re not so lovable and giving. As the saying goes, if your own boat doesn’t float, no one will want to sail across the ocean with you.

if you want more romance in your life, fall in love with the life you have.

“If you truly want to grow as a person and learn, you should realize that the universe has enrolled you in the graduate program of life, called loss.”

if you dance at a lot of weddings, you’ll cry at a lot of funerals. This means if you’re present at many beginnings, you’ll also be there for many endings. If you have many friends, you’ll experience your share of losses.

Perhaps the only certainty about loss is that time heals all. Unfortunately, healing is not always direct; it’s not like an ascending line on a graph, quickly and smoothly carrying us up to wholeness. Instead, the process feels something like being on a roller coaster—you climb toward wholeness then suddenly plunge into despair; you seem to regress, then you move forward; then you feel you’re back at the beginning. That is healing. You will heal, you will return to wholeness. You may not get back what you have lost, but you can heal. And at some point on your journey through life, you will see that you never really had in the way you thought that person or item you were mourning. And you will see that you will always have them in other ways.

Sometimes when relationships end, we learn who we are—not in relation to other people, but just as ourselves.

Whether loss is complicated or not, we will all heal in our own time and in our own way. No one can ever tell us we should have been healed by now, or that the process is going too rapidly. Grief is always individualized. As long as we are moving through life and have not become stuck, we are healing.

We subconsciously put ourselves in situations that remind us of our original losses so that we can heal.

By guarding against loss, we incur loss. We ensure we don’t lose people by keeping them at a distance, but that is a loss in itself.

The key to healing is forgiveness. Forgiveness means acknowledging the past and letting it go.

You have been hard on others your whole life, and you have been even harder on yourself. Now it is time to release all these judgments.