There are only two people in this world whose pride in us and our lives we should care about.
And no, they aren’t our parents or grandparents. Although, when we do what’s best for ourselves, our parents and grandparents—who see our strengths—will certainly appreciate that we’ve chosen the best path, or at least the best direction to take in life. Our parents are sometimes the people who know us best in life. They were the ones who watched us grow up (in the vast majority of cases) and who accompanied us throughout our development. They were the people who continually showed us how to act and how to think in light of the situations we faced. They saw us fail in the face of certain difficulties, but they also taught us how to deal with the frustration of not always winning—or of losing sometimes. They taught us the value we have when we don’t achieve a particular result, but manage to learn a lesson from it.
Our grandparents are the parents who spoil us. As second-degree parents, their role is basically to bring joy to their grandchildren. To help them see life through the eyes of someone who has lived here for many years, yet who continually seeks out the beauty of the days that still surround them. With the sparkle in their eyes, the way they look at us—a reflection of reliving the experience of parenthood, but this time without the pressure of being parents… this time with the desire to experience everything they still have to live for, with their grandchildren by their side. Nor are these the people we should be proud of at the end of our lives.
Nor are they our spouses. The people with whom we share our lives, and with whom we build a future together, are indeed very important to us. They were the people who led us to “step out” of our comfort zone. Because of them, we changed something within ourselves, and they, too, certainly changed something within themselves. We’ve gone through many situations together, and we’ve overcome them together. Difficulties arose, and many of them were overcome by both of us. But these aren’t the people we should be proud of for the life we’ve lived, either.
The people we should make proud of the life we’ve lived are my “10-year-old self” and my 80-year-old self. If those two people are proud of the way you’ve lived your life, then that means you’ve lived it well.
Let’s think about this for a moment. When we’re 10 years old, we look at life with the eagerness of someone who still has so much to experience, but who is eager to discover the world, to discover themselves, to experiment, to taste, to listen, to see, to speak, to sing, and to dance. When our 80-year-old self is proud of how we’ve lived our life, it clearly means that we look back and see nothing we failed to do, or that we feel we shouldn’t have done in that way...
If we think this way, we’ll realize that when something comes up in our lives, we should ask our inner child and our inner elder how they would feel.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Original text written by 
