Don’t Take Life For Granted & Start Living
Don’t take life for granted and start living.
I start this blog with this thought-provoking comment… We’re all going to die. This is a fact of life.
One of the biggest things we take for granted is life itself. We all know it will end, but we don’t really appreciate what we have until we’re not around to enjoy it anymore.
Life can turn in a second.
We never realize how much we truly have until it’s gone.
Tragedy can happen anytime. Don’t take your loved ones or your friends for granted. Life is so short and we need to make the most of it now because that’s all you’re really guaranteed.
Speaking of not taking life for granted, I want to enlighten you on a recent fact I learned about our current life expectancy in today’s world.
Per Healio Primary Care: “the COVID-19 pandemic may wipe out life expectancy gains that took more than a dozen years for the United States to achieve, according to researchers.”
Source: Healio Primary Care
Per pbs newshour, the ongoing and insidious virus known as covid, is responsible for the biggest drop in U.S. life expectancy since WWII.
Would it surprise you to learn that in these last couple of years enduring this pandemic, we have lost almost 2 years of our life! Let me repeat this… the average American has lost 2 years of life expectancy.
Source: Centers for Disease Control & Prevention
Do YOU still want to take life for granted or would you rather live the life you do have to the fullest???
So, what do you need to do to live a happy, healthy, and productive life?
Life is too short to spend it wondering what could have been. So live your dreams and chase them with all your heart.
If you’re feeling stuck, or are struggling to create a plan for the future, then this is the blog post for you.
Don’t Take Life For Granted Meaning
“Any man, who does not think that what he has is more than ample, is an unhappy man, even if he is the master of the whole world.”
Epicurus
Basically, in a nutshell, the meaning of not taking life for granted is simple. It is when one does not value something or someone. They take it too lightly.
They fail to properly notice or appreciate the special traits or things that in reality, are of immense value in the broad scheme of life. For example, as an American, I wonder how many of us take our democratic freedom for granted.
Or perhaps you have a friend that has always been there for you, but yet you take them for granted. You believe they’ll ALWAYS be there for you. But will they? Life is precious. Life can end at any moment.
So yes, it is soooo important to never take life, never take people, never take things for granted in your life. Instead, you need to realize how much life is a blessing.
Take a moment and watch this inspiring video featuring a motivational speech by Fearless Soul:
Don’t Take Anything In Your Life For Granted – Motivational Speech by Fearless Soul©
Start Doing Today Things Like Gratitude & Become Happier
The following are four proactive steps you can begin immediately to make your life more meaningful. In fact, by doing so and beginning today, you’ll be glad you did tomorrow, 2 weeks from now, a year from now, 5 years and so forth.
1. Start Being Grateful
Feeling grateful is one of the most immediate things you can do. Doing so brings you powerful feelings of emotion when expressing gratitude.
It elevates your mood, and it fills you with happiness. You have to start making it a practice to be grateful for your life, because the truth is, we often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
Life isn’t about having what we want. Never let the things you want make you forget the things you have.
For continued reading, check out this earlier blog, “Master the Art of Gratitude“.
2. Become More Disciplined
In order to focus in on whatever our personal goals are, you must become more disciplined. Discipline gives us the freedom to put all our focus into achieving those goals.
It’s not about willpower. It’s about establishing a routine you consistently do daily. In other words, discipline is simply choosing between what you want now and what you want most.
And remember… anyone who ever did anything important in their life was disciplined.
3. Fight for What You Want
Yes, I want you to fight for what you want in your life. To achieve something significant, you have to be fearless in the pursuit.
Sure, there may be those who won’t believe in what you’re doing. You have to ignore them and you have to do what it takes to make it happen.
You have to be determined. You have to have tenacity. But the rewards will be justified and your life will be so gratifying.
Don’t be afraid to give yourself everything you ever wanted in life.
For additional reading, check out this blog entitled: “Discovering Your Life’s Grand Purpose”.
4. Start Making Happiness a Priority
Living life to the fullest means making happiness a priority in your life. Please don’t waste another second on the things that drain your energy or make you feel fatigued—start noticing what makes you feel happiest and work hard on achieving it.
There’s so much to enjoy in life. So don’t miss out on anything. So yes, become the person who lives life to the fullest. Become the person who’s in pursuit of happiness always.
Don’t Ever… EVER… Take These Things for Granted
As mentioned earlier, we never truly realize how much we have until they are gone. As a reminder, I feel it is very important to take time out and discuss the following so that you NEVER, EVER take anything for granted again in your life.
Per Creative Healthy Family, a professional blog, the author, Ursula, states:
“We humans are a very “wantful” species. We want more. More money, more time, more energy, more friends, even more shoes. Just more. We take for granted all the things that we do have, never really learning to appreciate just how privileged we are on so many levels. … We can take a good hard look at our lives and learn to appreciate what we have in which we should never take for granted.”
The following is my own personal list of what I feel should give you pause and think strongly about. Make note of these important five things you should never take for granted…
1. Have meaningful conversations with your parents, your grandparents, etc.
Let me ask you something. When’s the last time you actually had a heart-to-heart, one on one conversation with your parents. Or your grandparents or a favorite aunt or uncle… even a teacher perhaps?
It is so important to stay connected with the people we love. But even more so, when they’re you’re own family. Too often we take our parents for granted, our grandparents, etc.
Don’t wait until they are ‘gone’ to spend quality time with them. Ask them about their childhood. Ask them what their dreams and aspirations were. Ask them what they learned from their experiences of life.
Do it now. Don’t put it off.
2. Cherish quality family time.
Don’t ever take for granted your family. One of the most important things you can learn to do is to consciously ‘cherish’ spending quality time with your family. Make events and celebrations special and memorable.
Learn to appreciate the little things… even the sound of your children’s voices. And yes, not just their laughter and giggles, but their fussiness, their boisterous loudness from time to time, and even their silence (whenever that happens, right!).
3. Clean water.
Yes, water is important to our own survival. But how many of us take this incredible creation of God for granted? Think about it.
We use water for cooking, drinking, bathing, and for recreation. How many of us are privileged to live in countries where there is clean and an abundance of water?
Think about those under-developed countries that struggle to have this.
4. Be grateful for our health and ability to make good choices.
I would be amiss if I didn’t point out that a lot of us do indeed take our health for granted and we should not. But the point I want to make is this… self-care is important to have a happy and joyful life. So I ask you, do you from time to time, make ‘unhealthy’ choices in what you select to eat?
Or perhaps are we taking for granted our physical self and not taking care of it as we should? Do YOU do regular exercise? Well if not, now is the time to start. All you got to do to begin is ‘take a walk’. I promise you, you won’t regret it.
5. Knowledge is power.
Yes, you heard me. Knowledge is power. How many of us are just too lazy to go beyond what we already know and pick up a book? Or attend a lecture… or take a class or even watch a ‘YouTube’ video that increases our knowledge? Yes, we take knowledge for granted when it is so accessible to us, especially in today’s high-tech society.
Let’s take it one step further, shall we? We talked about ‘discipline’ earlier in this article. Discipline also refers to our free will. We have the ability to choose how we live our life.
Each day we can either take for granted everyday life experiences OR… we can discipline our mindset and use our free will to make proactive, positive choices in living life to the best of our ability.
Do you want to live your life towards achieving happiness, love and joy? What do you want to experience? Laziness or joy?
Don’t Take Life for Granted Quotes & Sayings
The following are 11 powerful and thought-provoking quotes and sayings about not taking life for granted. Hopefully one or two will resonate with you
“Never take today for granted, tomorrow might never come.”
Matt Vella
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“Appreciate what you have, while you have it, or you’ll learn what it meant to you after you lose it.”
Frank Sonnenberg
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“Life is a series of pulls back and forth. You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else. Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn’t. You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted.”
Mitch Albom
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“It’s not a bad idea to occasionally spend a little time thinking about things you take for granted. Plain everyday things.”
Evan Davis
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“Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.”
Emily Dickinson
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“How quickly we forget God’s great deliverances in our lives. How easily we take for granted the miracles he performed in our past.”
David Wilkerson
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“We take life for granted, sleepwalking until a shattering event knocks us awake. Zen says, don’t wait until the car accident, the cancer diagnosis, or the death of a loved one to get your priorities straight. Do it now.”
Philip Toshio Sudo
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“When something does not insist on being noticed, when we aren’t grabbed by the collar or struck on the skull by a presence or an event, we take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.”
Cynthia Ozick
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“The more often we see the things around us – even the beautiful and wonderful things – the more they become invisible to us. That is why we often take for granted the beauty of this world: the flowers, the trees, the birds, the clouds – even those we love. Because we see things so often, we see them less and less.”
Joseph B. Wirthlin
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“When it comes to life, the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.”
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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“The richness of what you focus on determines the richness with which you feel life.”
Unknown
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Important Last Words to be Reminded, Inspired & Appreciate …
NEVER… EVER… TAKE LIFE FOR GRANTED…
Don’t take life for granted and start living again.
Life is too short to waste it living the way we think we should. If we could just see the truth, we would never be unhappy again.
The only person who can live your life for you is you. You have to take control of your own life and learn to become the kind of person who makes the world better by just being alive.
Life is about you, not others. Please don’t waste your life waiting for someone else to make you happy. Go find the happiness yourself.
People who don’t take life for granted have a plan for their lives. They want to live life to the fullest. They want to experience all that life offers to them.
And the one thing that makes them stand out is their conviction that ‘God’ has put them on this planet for a reason and they want to find out what that reason is… their life purpose and get on with living towards that end.
So I leave you again with these important last words…
NEVER… EVER… TAKE LIFE FOR GRANTED…