We were busy chopping vegetables and chatting as women do while we prepared more freezer crockpot meals for our local food bank.  The conversation hovered over several topics, after peeling and cutting carrots there were some offside comments made about tiny orange hands and the laughter was abundant.

And then a comment was made that we all talked about but I thought about more and more on my drive home.   When she was younger,  the daughter of one of the women had asked her dad, “If you died tomorrow, would there be something you regretted not doing.”  That really stuck with me.

I have been pondering my past and my present and was extremely contented to feel that, if I died tomorrow, I would be extremely happy knowing that I have lived a good life.  I have made mistakes and learned from them.  I married for the wrong reason and got divorced for the right one.  I have always given 110% to everything I do and I have come to understand that doing things for others is the thing that makes me truly happy.  That should have come as no surprise to me since my career in Hospitality has been about taking care of other people.

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Some people spend most of their lives searching for happiness but that euphoric feeling is not as elusive as some believe it to be.  Do the thing that makes you happy.  If you love to read, read.  If you love to play golf, play golf.  If you love to do macrame, do macrame! By doing the thing that makes you happy, you have a much better chance of being happy.  Sure, life likes to throw in a curve ball every now and then to keep us on our toes but life doesn’t run us, we run our lives.

I am who I am and I where I am because I chose to do the things that makes me happy.  And if I cross over and am asked if I lived a good life, I will smile proudly and say “absolutely”.