Fulfilling Entertainment
You’re taught when you’re younger that you need to earn a living in order to be successful financially. Becoming financially sound isn’t a bad idea. But what can happen if you’re not careful is that you can become so focused on earning a living and accumulating material possessions that you forget to enjoy life as you live it.
This is the number one reason why people look back later life and have regrets. To live your best life, choose to do the things that give you a sense of fulfillment and make you happy.
Don't wait until you need it to make a bucket list. Only - instead of thinking of it as a bucket list - create a life list. Make a list of the things that you’ve always wanted to do but never made the time to carry through on regularly.
Today is the only day that you can say you have. No one is guaranteed tomorrow. Entertainment and sheer personal satisfaction shouldn’t be fleeting. It’s what we should make of every day.
Travel
When most people talk about retiring from their job, the first thing that they talk about doing with their time is traveling. The problem with that is that when you do get old enough to retire, you won’t always be guaranteed the health to be able to travel.
And sometimes, you won’t have the energy to do it, either. You can do things physically right now that in ten, fifteen or twenty years, you can’t handle. For example, if you’ve always wanted to spend time in a wilderness area, hiking up a long trail and spending the night sleeping outdoors in a tent is a lot easier on the young than on the elderly.
So many times, families put off traveling while they’re young or while their children are young because they think it will be better later. But too many times, later doesn’t come.
Life always seems to get in the way. Remember that life is made up of memories and shared experiences with those we love. So, start right now and live your best life by visiting the places you’ve always wanted to visit.
Traveling can broaden your horizons, it can enrich you culturally and it can give you a sense of accomplishment and peace that you’re doing what you always wanted to do.
One thing that keeps a lot of people at home instead of traveling right now is that they think they’ll have a lot more money to travel with when they get older. But traveling doesn’t have to be about five-star hotels and it doesn’t have to cost that much money.
You can learn how to travel affordably even if you have a large family to care for. You can find cheap transportation for traveling. Rather than always booking flights when you travel, spend less by taking the railway, the bus, use share travel or use a car relocation service.
Car relocation services are businesses that have a car in one area, but need to have it driven to another. For example, there could be a car in California that needs to be driven to Pennsylvania.
You pay nothing for driving the car like you would if you rented one - and often, the fuel allowance is included. These cars are protected by high liability insurance rates provided by the service.
Another form of transportation that you can us is taking an RV. You can rent an RV for a week, bring your own food - and you’ll still end up saving more than you would if you rented a vehicle and booked a motel room for the week.
You can travel now even if you don’t have the same kind of money you would have when you’re older – because, besides cheaper transportation, you can find cheap accommodations where you can sleep as well.
You can stay with your entire family at a hostel in Singapore for between $28-$38 depending on the sleeping arrangements you get. You get electronic keycards, access to laundry services and a kitchenette.
There are hostels in many countries as well as in the United States. If you’ve ever wanted to visit California, there are hostels with a view of the ocean that can provide lodging for your family for only $32.
If you’ve always thought you couldn’t afford to travel now, you may want to rethink how you view traveling. It’s not about how much you spend traveling that will matter - but how much you get to enjoy doing what you’ve always wanted to do.
If you do decide to start traveling now, you can make a list of all of the states, countries or specific things you’ve always wanted to see. Some people travel by choosing desired destinations - while others travel because of their desire to experience things such as seeing the Seven Wonders of the World or the top ten national forests.
Hobbies
Having a hobby can be good for your physical and mental health. A hobby helps you relax your mind, it gives you energy and it restores your creativity. By spending time doing what you enjoy as a hobby, it helps you handle the other areas of your life.
You’ll discover that having a hobby has cut down on the stress you encounter. You’ll have an outlet that lets you unwind from any daily pressures. Some hobbies will introduce new people into your life and you’ll broaden your social circles.
Having a hobby can get you out of the rut of simply working, coming home and dreading the end of the weekend because you know you have to go back to work on Monday.
Too many people spend their weekends just catching up running errands or finishing responsibilities around the house that they couldn’t take care of during the week.
Don’t wait. As you go through life, you may have expressed interest in learning a new hobby, but you put it off. You were waiting for when you were older and had more time.
What you might not know is that learning a new hobby can make you feel fulfilled and bring you peace - even if you have a hectic schedule now. Whatever hobby you choose should inspire you.
It should help you fulfill whatever it is you’re passionate about. For example, if you have some artistic ability and you’ve always wanted to explore that, but haven’t yet, you can enroll in art lessons and hone that skill.
Or, you can take a class in learning how to paint. Many artists learn how to express with art how they see life and create incredible paintings. You can take up writing or woodworking.
You can race cars or collect figurines. You can indulge your passion with crafts or archery. You can learn how to dance or compose music. The field is wide open and there are tons of possibilities.
What’s important is that you start doing whatever hobby your heart desires. Some people even learned how to turn the hobby they loved into a business that earned money for them.
So they ended up trading making a living for loving a living. There are so many tutorials and ways to learn about a hobby, that you’ll find that doing what you want to do isn’t expensive.
But how do you know which hobby is the one you want to undertake? After all, a lot of things might pique your interest but that doesn’t mean that it’s something you’ll want to stick with for the long haul.
The first way to tell if it’s something you really want to do is to see if the hobby moves you. Does it make you feel satisfied and give you an eagerness to get to it?
You just can’t wait to get done with your day to spend time doing your hobby. Another way that you can tell what interests you is by looking at the plans you have for your 'someday.’
You know the ones. They start with “Someday, I’m going to___” and end up with you listing what you’ve always wanted to do but you’re waiting for the right time, knowledge, money.
That waiting is a sure road to regret later in life and that’s why you should find a way to do the hobby you want to do now. Look at what you like to read about. If you like to read about dancing and you enjoy shows about dance steps, then it’s more than likely that you would enjoy a hobby in that area. Have a hobby simply for the fun of it.
Everyday Fun
You probably have to work so that you can keep a roof over your head and food on the table. Maybe by now you’ve decided that you won’t put off waiting until you’re older to do the things you want to do to enjoy your life.
You may have even decided to take up a new hobby. Those are great first steps to take in living your best life. But don’t forget that life should be filled with simple, everyday fun things that you can do to replenish your soul.
To enjoy life every day, there are some changes you may have to make. Too many of us go from getting up in the morning to hitting the bed at night and we haven’t done a single thing that made us laugh - or that made us pause and enjoy being fully present in that exact moment.
Ask yourself when the last time was that you got to watch the sun rise or set without feeling a sense that you should be doing something else besides just sitting?
When did you last have a block of time carved out of your schedule to do anything you wanted to do? Or nothing at all if you chose to? Stop living your daily life on autopilot and don’t look at your days as one big to-do list.
To make sure you have fun as part of living your best life, there are some tips that you can follow.
Don’t let one bad experience, a bad conversation or a bad day bleed into the next. You can’t change what happened. Live life with your hand open when it comes to negativity.
Just let it go. Take a deep breath and make a conscious choice that you’re not going to live with unhealthy thoughts or situations. Spend some time in your day doing what brings you happiness.
That may be something as simple as taking a walk or enjoying a classic movie. Maybe it’s creating a gourmet meal. There are a lot of little ways that you can have fun every single day.
Give yourself something to look forward to instead of putting it off. We all do that. We reward ourselves when we reach certain goals: that job promotion, that weight loss milestone, or that educational achievement.
Reward yourself sooner rather than later simply because life is meant to be enjoyed now, every single day, not ‘some day.’ Change those things that you don’t like that only bring stress and unhappiness to your daily life.
Hate sitting in traffic during your commute? Leave earlier and take the scenic route. Do what replenishes you rather than what depletes you on a regular basis. Remove any roadblocks in your daily life that prevent you from making time for fun every day.
For example, if you don’t have time to have fun every day because you’re spending too much time in the car going back and forth or you’re so busy at work that you have to bring work home, change it.
Delegate responsibility to others. Refuse to bring work home. Sometimes we take on more work than we should because we have a desire to do a good job and we want our achievements to be recognized.
Later in life, this will be one of those regrets unless you change it now.
Short-Term Adventures
If you’ve always wanted to travel, then you should go ahead and do that now. But if you lean more toward short-term adventures because at heart, you’re a homebody, then there are a lot of things you can do to have fun - and who knows?
Some of these adventures could even turn into a hobby!
While you can plan out many adventures, you can also do a lot of spur-of-the-moment fun things. You can take a hot air balloon ride. There are hot air balloon festivals in several states.
You can go skydiving or bungee jumping. But if those are too adventurous for your taste, then you can go surfing or rafting, fly a kite or go for a horseback ride. Go hiking.
Climb a rock wall or go bowling. Take a tour of the most haunted places in your city. Visit an animal natural habitat. Go to the high school or college sports games. Take in a local theater performance or visit an amusement park.
Stimulate Your Mind
When we graduate from high school or college, we often put learning on the back burner. Maybe you had to take core classes that you didn’t enjoy. But now that you’re an adult, you can study things that you really want to learn - things that entertain your mind.
This helps us grow and keep our minds active - which is needed for good long-term mental health. There are a lot of online colleges that offer free courses to adults - including Harvard and Yale.
In these extension classes, you won’t get college credits, but you do get to learn about subjects that interest you - ranging from math to Shakespeare to the Constitution.
When you complete some of the online subjects, you can get a certificate of completion. Visit art galleries and museums. Read a variety of books and listen to books on audio as you sit in traffic or as you travel.
Volunteer
One of the best ways that you can live your best life is to volunteer doing something for others that you enjoy doing. If you like working with your hands and building things, you can volunteer to work with Habitat for Humanity or other community-based services that provide housing repair for those who don’t have the means.
You can volunteer at a soup kitchen or at a shelter for women. You can also get involved with the Big Brother or Big Sister program. You can mentor a young adult or be a mentor to a young family that could use the wisdom you’ve learned from your life experience to help them change their lives.
You can help needy animals or children by getting involved in an advocacy program. You can start a food drive for the hungry or donate to food pantries. Many libraries have reading programs and you can volunteer to read to preschool children.
You can join a literacy program and give books to children in the United States or in foreign countries. If you enjoy sharing the love of literacy, you can sign up to tutor adults.
Whatever you choose to do to enjoy life more often and see the world as a comfortable place for your happiness, take the steps now to create a life that you enjoy to the fullest.