You might not choose your seat. But you can always choose a front row experience.
Jon loved the back row for many reasons. The seats are less expensive. You don’t have to fight the crowd when nature calls and when the show is over, it’s easier to find an exit. No one can see you. It feels safe. The only problem is the cost it comes with.
In 2005, Jon attended a Jason Mraz concert. As usual he felt very comfortable as he took his seat in the very last row. It was his birthday and with his girlfriend by his side it was a great night. The venue seats over 500 people and it was intimate. Jon couldn’t help but notice the four girls in the front row were having a blast. They were singing, dancing and throwing their hands in the air while shouting song requests to Jason. Jon looked around at the people sitting around him and he saw they were the exact opposite of those in the front. They seem to be checked out as if they were counting minutes rather than making most of them. Their body language spoke volumes. As Jon wrote:
“I wonder how those people got seats. Once I asked the question, I thought of some possibilities. Maybe they camped through the night to hold their spot in line. Maybe they have great connections. Maybe they had the money to pay top dollar. Maybe they didn’t even have front row tickets but saw open seats and took them.”
If you don’t like your seat, you can change it. If you can’t change it, make the most of it. That’s how you earn a front row experience, no matter where your seats are in the theatre.
Celebration is active. Entertainment is passive.
People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating, we seek to be amused or entertained.
Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state, an act of receiving pleasure afforded by an amusing and often short-lived spectacle. As Abraham Joshua said, celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions.
What are your front row moments? Nurture them, cherish them and above all, celebrate them.
Live every single day in the front row.
Every evening at your dinner table or every night before you to bed, ask yourself “What are my front row moments today? What was one failure I experienced and what did I learn from it?” No matter what happens, we can always choose to celebrate and learn from them. We can turn any failure into a valuable life lesson.
Without asking yourself and consciously celebrating front row moments, it’s so easy to miss what’s going on with your life. The question allows each of us to notice something wonderful about our day, so we can pay attention to it and further solidify the memory.
“Each day is your gift. It’s neither earned by you nor owed to you.”
Yes, you can eat well. Exercise well. Avoid risky behavior. But when your time’s up, it’s up. Death may be something completely outside of your control. So live in the day. Today is not to be wasted.
You can’t take action in the past or in the future, only now.
Take out a paper and put a small dot on the left hand side of a page. Under the dot, write ‘birth’.. Draw a line across the page where and connect it to a second dot. Under that, write ‘death’. If you’re 40 years old and assume you’ll live a healthy life of a hundred years, put an X about halfway through the pine. In front of you, you’ll see a representation of your life. You could see the whole thing – birth, death and everything in between on a single line on a piece of paper.
It is scary just by looking at it. Second by second, minute by minute, we’re racing against the clock. If you want to do something big in your life, it has to be now. There’s no other time. If you need more family time, spend time with your family now. You need to act with courage and do the thing you’re born to do now. That’s how you live your life to the fullest without regrets.
‘Now’ is when we have the greatest power.
Palliative care nurse, Bronnie Ware, shared the most common regrets people have on their deathbeds in her great book “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying”. They are:
- I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself (not the others expected of me).
- I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
- I wish I had the courage to express my feelings.
- I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
- I wish I had let myself be happier.
‘Now is when we have the greatest and the only power. We can find fault with any moment, person, place or whatever is in front of us. At the same time, under the same circumstances, we can also find what’s good if we’re willing to look for it.
The most necessary man is he with whom you’re, for no man knows whether he’ll ever have dealings with anyone else. The most important affair is to do him good. Because for that purpose alone was a man sent into his life.
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