I’ve been doing hospice and animal therapy work with the dying and the aging for more than a decade now. In all of that time, I have never heard a person on the edge of life say their biggest regret is not having saved more money for retirement, or given up the life they wished for more money than they managed to earn.

The most common regret I have heard from those on the edge life is that they did not live their life to the fullest, and did not live the life of their dreams.

In recent years I have faced the very difficult question of what I would sacrifice to go confidently in the direction of my dreams, as Thoreau suggested, and live the life I imagined. I made my decision. I decided I would give up everything I had, if necessary,  to live the life of my dreams.

And it was necessary, in many ways.

I won’t lie to you. I have worried about it, even regretted it at times. I would do it  again in a heartbeat.

There are three elements to my idea of a good life now: authenticity, continual learning, and continual service. My world is my life,  my religion is not to be good, but to do good.

Joseph Campbell wrote that we must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. I got rid of the life I planned, and now have the life that was waiting for me. It feels quite glorious.

For me, working only for money and security is a form of slavery imposed on unsuspecting people by the greedy and the powerful. They can never see past measuring life in terms of money, or frightening more vulnerable people into doing the same. I will never be a slave.

A decade ago, I had to decide what I would sacrifice to live my life.

For most of my life, I had earned a lot of money and spent a lot of money and my wife at the time was mature and responsible, she saved a lot of money, mine and hers. When I got divorced in 2008, we had hundreds of thousands of dollars in an IRA’s put away for retirement.

After the divorce, I had $5,000 in savings, and I soon spent all of that during our disastrous efforts to sell the first Bedlam Farm, which took all the rest of my money over the next few years and then some.

I have no regrets or complaints to make about my settlement or my  wife then, I made the decisions I made knowingly and in good faith,  I am totally responsible for them. I blame no one else.

Between the recession, the divorce, and the collapse of publishing as I knew it, I understood that the decisions I made would shape the rest of my life.

I understood I was casting off the very idea of a safety net and rejecting the widespread obsession most Americans now quite understandably have about money and security. It costs a lot of money to die and grow old in America. This was scary.

I knew I was giving up the idea of a conventional retirement – I have no plans to ever retire, not as long as my fingers and camera work – or the kind of security we are always being told we need as we age.

A number of people, including a psychotherapist, cautioned me that most people my age – I was 61 at the time – would not undertake such change and risk. He said I was taking on more change than any patient my age he had ever treated. You don’t have to make these changes he warned, there may well be a time when you need or want the money you have saved up.

You can just keep things as they are, he said, and those words sent a shiver through my spine. No I can’t, I thought, no I cant.

There in that chair, in that office, I promised myself that I would not die in the way that I was, I would change.

I understood that this kindly therapist was afraid for me, as if he knew some great truths I could not yet see.

Most people fear and hate change, they will do almost anything to avoid it.  I knew that divorce could be rough, and I knew that long-time marriages were among the toughest, although I had no idea just how difficult it would  be, or how long it would take.

I got the message. I risked losing my savings, my family, my friends, my bearings, my own history. To some extent, all of those things were lost.

But I was determined to change. Most people are content to exist, I wanted to live.

Around that time, Maria came into my life and I came to believe that I wished to spend the rest of my life with her.

I had to decide – and own –  just how much I wanted to move ahead with my life, put my previous life behind me, settle the divorce in any way I could, seek new relationships, work on my writing and photography, and live the life I very much wished to live: the life I imagined, a loving life, a creative life, a life with nature and animals, a life of service.

I had been married for 35 years,  a lifetime for many people, and that made the divorce all the more brutal and panful. I was wracked with guilt and regret, separating from my marriage took five difficult years and was the most painful experience of my life. I thought it might kill me, it nearly did. Out if it came a kind of resurrection, a rising.

I remember taking a long walk in the woods with Rose, my border collie walking ahead of me, scanning the path. I remember thinking I would give anything for the life I wished to live, to find a person to love who would love me, to live in nature with animals on a farm with me, to start a blog, to take pictures, to write that I wanted, rather than submit to what others told me to write.

There were all sorts of spirits inside of me banging on the door of my soul to be free. I pardoned them, I let them out.

When Maria and I were in New Mexico, a place we both love, I had a flash of regret for the money I lost and let go of. That money would have made it possible for Maria and I to visit New Mexico regularly, even to buy one of those enchanting adobe houses we kept seeing and go there part of the year down the road to write and make art.

I am at an age where I know a lot of people who live like that, who get to a warm place in the winter, who never have to worry about the hole in their health care donut, who paid off their mortgages years ago, who take vacations with big and fancy cameras whenever they wish for as long as they wish.

Who have beautiful motor boats anchored at lakes in the Adironacks, condos along the ocean,  who built log cabins in the woods.

I gave that up, call it a sacrifice if you will.

But for me, that is not a life, those are pleasures, and pleasure can be found in all sorts of ways, from a walk in the woods, to a night in a deliciously seedy motel with the woman I love, to holding hands in a movie theater.

Pleasure is buying a bra for a poor woman at the Mansion too embarrassed to ask, bringing groceries to a refugee mother who husband was butchered, and who came to America along, the pleasure of bringing a camera to a boy from Afghanistan who has never been given anything in his life and who is on fire to become a photographer.

What a beautiful journey that all is to a beautiful place.

It was a moment, really, that stab of regret in New Mexico. i know how much Maria loves it there, I loved it too,  it would be wonderful to be able to go there whenever we wished. This was the first time I had ever allowed myself to think about it in some years. It’s okay, I told myself to have doubts and fears, it is a gift to be human.

But much more important was my realization of the importance of having freedom and living fully, of not taking any of the days remaining in my life and wasting them or taking them for granted. I wasted a lot of days in my life.

Einstein said there are two ways to live in life.

One is thought nothing is a miracle. The other is as though every day is a miracle.

Tomorrow is yet another.