"We must always give our best, and when we die we want to feel that our life has been lived as fully as we could have lived it." Billy Farrow in a letter to his mother, as a crew member of Jimmy Doolittle's raid on Tokyo, 1942.
The above quote was taken from the book Target Tokyo, by James Scott, a fascinating account of the first counter-attack on Japanese soil after Pearl Harbor. This was a suicide mission to put fear into the hearts of the Japanese and boost sagging moral in America, after Japan had marched easily over the Philippines, Burma, Manchuria, and much more of the South Seas and Eastern Asia. 15 B-25 bombers took off from an aircraft carrier, unable to come back for a landing, and with not enough fuel to reach safety in China. I have not finished the book, but read the index - Billy Farrow died as a prisoner of the Japanese after the raid. This was to be one of the last of his letters, and it made me wonder - how do we live our lives to the fullest, knowing as we do, just as Billy did, that death is never really that far away? Do we party hearty? Do we reach for an apex of material or professional success? Do we travel the world and see as much as there is to see?
May father was a gunner on a B-29 flying sorties over Japan during the war, and it was perhaps because of the book that I remembered him a few days ago on a warm and beautiful afternoon. The nostalgia was intense, not only for him, but for the whole of life. How I missed him! What an immature ass I was to him so many times! And how I missed also so many old friends, some now dead, others gone beyond my life. What great times we had, but for what? Had I lived my life to the fullest? Was I now? I would never have a chance to relive any of it, both from decades ago and from yesterday. It was not hard to see that I had not lived as best as I could have, and still do not. To this day I find ways to foul things up and to complain.
And to regret - another waste of time that I am dong now. Yes, I could have done much, much more, but that is now over. What I have left is the memories of life, which if inspected just might give me, give us, a clue as to how we can live our lives to the fullest. Looking at my own past, I find these traits as the essence of a good life: live life with a full heart, unafraid and open to possibilities, both of a professional and personal nature. As to the former, find a way that gives you the necessities that go with your style (as much as possible), and then give it your all - not for approval of others, but to live the most with what you have. Try to have no fear, either of failure or of criticism. That should not be the point to life. Work is both to provide a living and also something to simply live. The same goes for the personal: don't focus on your own or other's negatives, and don't hide away out of fear. As long as you are open and positive, if someone calls you a jerk, that is his own problem with negativity. Regret is the realization of not having lived fully, and not having lived openly with friends and relatives will become a regret.
All that is good advice, although it has been said so often as to appear hackneyed. It is still good advice, though. But the deepest essence of the full life is harder to grasp. It is something like this: life, simple life, is already full enough. There is no need to party or travel or excel to try to fill it up. It is enough to be fully open to it, to fully live whatever you have to make it worth while. Even then, we will wax nostalgic at times, but we will have the wherewithal to not regret, because that is wasting the fullness of now. Rather, nostalgia should be a reminder of how beautiful things once were - and how beautiful life can be, wrinkles and all, right now. FK
The above quote was taken from the book Target Tokyo, by James Scott, a fascinating account of the first counter-attack on Japanese soil after Pearl Harbor. This was a suicide mission to put fear into the hearts of the Japanese and boost sagging moral in America, after Japan had marched easily over the Philippines, Burma, Manchuria, and much more of the South Seas and Eastern Asia. 15 B-25 bombers took off from an aircraft carrier, unable to come back for a landing, and with not enough fuel to reach safety in China. I have not finished the book, but read the index - Billy Farrow died as a prisoner of the Japanese after the raid. This was to be one of the last of his letters, and it made me wonder - how do we live our lives to the fullest, knowing as we do, just as Billy did, that death is never really that far away? Do we party hearty? Do we reach for an apex of material or professional success? Do we travel the world and see as much as there is to see?
May father was a gunner on a B-29 flying sorties over Japan during the war, and it was perhaps because of the book that I remembered him a few days ago on a warm and beautiful afternoon. The nostalgia was intense, not only for him, but for the whole of life. How I missed him! What an immature ass I was to him so many times! And how I missed also so many old friends, some now dead, others gone beyond my life. What great times we had, but for what? Had I lived my life to the fullest? Was I now? I would never have a chance to relive any of it, both from decades ago and from yesterday. It was not hard to see that I had not lived as best as I could have, and still do not. To this day I find ways to foul things up and to complain.
And to regret - another waste of time that I am dong now. Yes, I could have done much, much more, but that is now over. What I have left is the memories of life, which if inspected just might give me, give us, a clue as to how we can live our lives to the fullest. Looking at my own past, I find these traits as the essence of a good life: live life with a full heart, unafraid and open to possibilities, both of a professional and personal nature. As to the former, find a way that gives you the necessities that go with your style (as much as possible), and then give it your all - not for approval of others, but to live the most with what you have. Try to have no fear, either of failure or of criticism. That should not be the point to life. Work is both to provide a living and also something to simply live. The same goes for the personal: don't focus on your own or other's negatives, and don't hide away out of fear. As long as you are open and positive, if someone calls you a jerk, that is his own problem with negativity. Regret is the realization of not having lived fully, and not having lived openly with friends and relatives will become a regret.
All that is good advice, although it has been said so often as to appear hackneyed. It is still good advice, though. But the deepest essence of the full life is harder to grasp. It is something like this: life, simple life, is already full enough. There is no need to party or travel or excel to try to fill it up. It is enough to be fully open to it, to fully live whatever you have to make it worth while. Even then, we will wax nostalgic at times, but we will have the wherewithal to not regret, because that is wasting the fullness of now. Rather, nostalgia should be a reminder of how beautiful things once were - and how beautiful life can be, wrinkles and all, right now. FK
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