For the record (for my record, lol) I didn't particularly love this book. I left it a very lukewarm review on Amazon. But there were still a few thoughts worth recording.
"I believe that it is not dying that people are afraid of. Something else. Something more unsettling and more tragic than dying frightens us. We're afraid of never having lived. Of coming to the end of our days with the sense that we were never really alive. That we never figured out what live was for.
--Harold Kushner
...he (Harvard professor) stressed the fact that if his students really thought they only had a short time to live, they'd be spending it mending their relationships with friends, family, and God. Deep down, they know it's about relationships. But there they are, about to spend their next thirty years in a made scramble for family and fortune, with are antithetical to their declared values.
What keeps most of us from focusing on the things that matter is all the things that don't matter but add cost, particularly the cost of our most precious asset--time. We end up spending ourselves dry, adding small increments to our "money and status" accounts--which we already have plenty of--while depleting our "meaning" accounts, including our relationships with God, marriage partners, kids, lifelong friends, and others we're called to serve.
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