From a Dying Person "Three Lessons In life"

A dying of cancer man handed me one of my favorite jokes I've ever read. He knew I was looking for a serving job, so I could leave and go back to school as a retirement home night chef.

"Today, I was looking at the classifieds," he said. "I have seen something that is great for you. The pay is not great, but the tips are enormous! ”

Oh yeah, Hank? Hank? About what job? ”

Circumcising the Denver Zoo elephants! Hank said, going on to cackle before his coughing cough returned. His wife chastised him pleasantly for being crass after the fit, and my half-hour lunch break was over.

Within a month, Hank will be dead from lung cancer. He was one of many people I met (and lost) in a retirement home during my time working.

In certain aspects, being so close to death taught me to live. After graduating high school in the fall of 2011, I left my dishwashing job at this same nursing home, and by January 2012, after dropping out of college, I was back.

I never truly spoke to the residents as a dishwasher. The ability of a monkey's foot, however, will get you promoted from dishwashing, so it wasn't long before I was encouraged to cook.

That's when Hank met me. In World War II, Hank was a B-17 tail gunner at a time when the survival rate for pilots was about one in three (according to him). During the many lunch breaks that I ate in his apartment, he told me story after story. For the worst-case scenario of being shot down in action, he showed me the "emergency kit" he was given in the battle (It was essentially cigarettes and a light snack).

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He had a catchphrase that he said over and over, "I have a million stories, and some of them are even true." Some of them were very far from true, such as when he swore up and down that on Christmas day, the Germans fired green and red anti-aircraft shells on his plane.

He was my hero for the brief time that I met him. He made me want to have stories, to forget some of the wonderful things I had witnessed because I had encountered too much to recall.

He persuaded me to quit that job and look for something more versatile so that I could return to school.

He encouraged me to Travel around the world.

He's taught me that happiness isn't just something you go out and search. It is the by-product of a life that is well lived. All you have are your memories and your stories to keep you warm while things are coming to a close. The longer you spend looking for gold, the less stories you'll have.

In that retirement home, I met a lot of people working, and we can easily split them into two groups. The "happy ones" and the "bitter."

I found, after spending a lot of time with both parties, that the happier ones appeared to have led varied lives. They had numerous jobs, lived in different locations, had fascinating stories to tell, and knew how to tell those stories in order to get a positive response.

Their optimistic memories of a well-lived life provided them with a stronger understanding of who they were. They were more likely to form relationships, be part of social groups, and were less likely to be unhappy about the day's soup. As the clock was winding down, their internal locus of control allowed them to live more fulfilling lives.

He was dying of lung cancer when I met Hank. Exactly one time, he brought the fact up, to tell me it was out of his control.

In words of his own:

What am I going to do now, starting to get pissed off? It didn't support me a damn bit any single time I got pissed off. Then he launched into one of his stories, another time when he thought he was going to die in a malfunctioning plane, he was pissed off. He put away the rage and landed.

Life is like that," he told me. "You always have to land the plane, no matter how pissed off you are, and being pissed off isn't going to help you one bit. You've got to get the most out of it.

The day he taught me this lesson was the same day that he made a joke about the circumcision of an elephant and laughed hoarse at himself.

Here are three lessons from Hank that I took:

Life (and the world) is a malfunctioning aircraft. The more angry we are, the more likely we are to crash.

Happiness is not a commodity that's consumable. By looking for it, it is not something you find. It is a byproduct of a rewarding, well-lived life that happens naturally.

Rather than anything else, a well-lived life has more to do with perspective. There is hope as long as you are able to joke.

These are insane times, but there is no monopoly on problems for our generation. New problems are simply posed by the modern world. Our wars, no matter how overwhelming they might seem, are not unwinnable or insurmountable. If we let the world make us angry, then we've lost the fight. Nothing will deter us if we tackle our challenges with joy.

>> Having some stress in your life is natural but too much is bad for you >> Learn Here how to Improve your self