Today I watched a very interesting TED talk by Ric Elias titled Ric Elias: 3 Things I learned While My Place Crashed. Ric Elias was one of the passengers on the infamous Flight 1549, the plane that crash-landed in the Hudson River in New York in January 2009. He has a front row seat and he remembers distinctly when pilot Chesley B. Sullenberger came on the loud speaker and said three clear, emotionless words, “brace for impact”. This is when Ric realized three things. He learned that it all changes in an instant, that he had one regret, and that he had only one wish in life. After that crash-landing Ric said he no longer wants to postpone anything in life. He says that “We have this bucket list, and all the people I wanted to reach out to but I didn’t, fences I wanted to mend, experiences I wanted to have but never did.” That urgency and purpose has changed his life. This teaches me as a young adult to not postpone anything, to live it up while I can and to never turn down a good opportunity because I think I will be able to do it later in life. Sometimes fate steps in and we have less time on this world than we originally thought we would, less time than we thought we were entitled to; so we as human beings cannot continue to put things off. Regardless of whether you have as much time as planned, if you put off every good opportunity, there still will not be enough time to get any of these things done, because it would literally be a lifetime’s worth of opportunity.
Ric said that the second thing he learned was that he had one regret. While living his life, he allowed his ego to get in. Rick says as the plane was going down he realizes that he regretted the time he wasted in things that did not matter with people that matter. After the crash he decided to eliminate negative energy from his life, and that he is no longer trying to be right, that instead he has chosen to be happy. If everyone could live by this same motto, the world would be a much better place. Everyone is so stuck on the fact that they are right that it creates an abundant number of problems, fights, and issues. Whereas if we all realize that sometimes we are wrong and give up the idea that we are always right, we could be a lot happier. In addition eliminating all the negative energy from life would create fewer problems. During my freshman year I had a friend who brought so much drama with her that it was overwhelming. At the time I couldn’t see this, but after her drama became too much for me and I was no longer good enough for her, I decided that I was done trying to hard to please her and fix the problems that she had created. In other words, I eliminated that negative energy. Since then my life has improved, and I feel extremely relieved to be done with that. If we all could live our lives in this same way, we could all be happier, and in turn not only would we have to deal with les negative energy, it might even start to disappear.
The last recognition that Ric had during the 15 seconds before impact was that dying wasn’t scary because in reality dying is what we have been preparing ourselves for our entire life. But at the same time, while not scary, Ric says that it was really sad because he loved his life, and he didn’t want to leave it. This is when he came to what he says was his most important realization, he realized that he only wished for one thing, he only wished that he could see his kids grow up, that the only thing that matters in his life is being a good dad. While I can’t empathize with this, I do sympathize. While I don’t know what it’s like to want to be the best parent I can be, I do know that I try to be the best child I can be. I also know how hard it is to achieve this, and I imagine that it is the same difficulty for a parent. As long as my dad can look back on raising me, and think to himself that he thinks he did the best job he could have done then I will be happy. No parent is perfect, but as long that they try their hardest to be the best they can be, that is all their child can want and need.
Ric says that he was given two gifts that day, he says he was given the miracle of not dying, and the gift of being able to see into the future and come back and live differently. While I cannot achieve this, Ric’s TED talk provides very good insight and advice on how I can live differently. I don’t want to get to the end of my life, whenever that may be and know that I didn’t achieve everything that I wanted to, or have a lifetime’s worth of opportunities piled up in front of me. I don’t want to regret the time I wasted in things that did not matter with people that matter. I want to know that I gave the best of myself to the important people who mattered to me, and didn’t waste my time bantering, fighting, and hurting my relationships with them with petty problems that weren’t worth either of our times. I also want to know that I was the best child and if possible mother that I could have been. In any aspect of life, I want to look back and know that I tried my hardest and gave it everything I had, and I was the best that I could be. When the pilot came on the loudspeaker and said those three words, “brace for impact” it applied both literally and figuratively. We should live our lives bracing for impact or in other words, preparing for the end and making sure that when “impact” comes, we don’t look back and think we didn’t do it right.
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