The Mind Body Project
The Mind Body Project
MM Ep 33: Highlight Reel
We reflect on how public tributes contrast with the quiet, personal highlights that define a life. A simple daily question—“Is this choice highlight‑reel worthy?”—becomes a compass for kindness, empathy, and legacy.
• Seeing public highlight reels spark a deeper look at private legacy
• Rethinking age and what counts as accomplishment
• Defining a personal highlight reel built on values
• Choosing daily acts of kindness, patience and help
• Practicing empathy, gentleness and repair over perfection
• Letting words others use about us guide our priorities
• Using a simple question to shape choices and habits
• Closing challenge to add one worthy act each day
Thanks for joining me on this week's Mindful Moment. I look forward to seeing you right here next time on Mindful Moments.
Welcome back to a mindful moment. Thank you for taking a moment to join me today. A couple weeks ago, I was watching the news and really all day that day, as I'm up here at the studio, TV's on. There's not really any uh sound on, but see subtitles. But anyhow, a couple weeks ago, Val Kilmer passed away. You might remember him as Ice Iceman in Top Gun back in uh whatever year it was. I don't remember what year, so I'm not gonna say. But if you remember him, he passed away just a couple weeks ago. And on the TV, most of the day was pictures of him, his highlight reels, pictures, little clips from Top Gun, clips from his other movies, pictures with him with different stars, all sorts of things. It's uh kind of like celebrating, telling all he did. Tell a little bit about his being sick and passing away, but a lot of it was um what we'd call the highlight reels. And I was watching that and I was thinking about his life. I think it was in his his early 60s when he passed away. And you know, when you're younger, you think that's kind of old, but now it's we think of that as as we get older, it's it's relatively not that old. As I near 50, I think, well, 60s isn't that old. When I was 20, I thought, well, that's really old. But it was talking about all the things he did. And there's a lot of other things that they didn't cover, but that was really his highlight reel. And as I thought about that and I thought about life and I thought about our own lives, I thought, if when we pass away, what would be our highlight reels? What would be the things that we did that really stood out? Really, that's what a highlight reel is. It's it's all his kind of major accomplishments of the things he did. And I thought about that. And and you know, his his highlight reels were showing those that were very public. And I thought about our own highlight reels. And our own highlight reels wouldn't even be necessarily a public thing. It would be those things that that we said we wanted to do and we were proud of. I think most of those things that came up on his highlight reel, he would probably say he's proud of. But chances are none of us, not many of us will, or any of us will ever have a highlight reel like that on national TV. But what would we want our highlight reel to be? What would we want people to talk about at the day we depart this world? What would we want them to say? And maybe it's even those things that people don't know about. It's those things that we do for others that we don't get accolades for, we don't need to spread around, we just do those things out of kindness, out of love, out of understanding. So my challenge is simply this. As we go day to day in life, think about your highlight reel. Is this something you want to add to your highlight reel? And I think when we when we always are looking for things to add to our highlight reel, it's a way of looking. How can I be more gentle? How can I be kinder? How can I be more compassionate? How can I be more helpful? How can I be all these things? And it continues us to try to find things to add to our highlight reel. And what happens when we go through life doing that? We touch people's lives, we affect others in a positive way. That on that day they celebrate us for the things that we did, that we, and it may not even be the money we have, it may not even be the material things that we left behind, but the words of he or she was understanding, so compassionate, so sympathetic, so empathetic, so kind, so always had a smile. All these things that when our time is over, is things we would be proud of. Well done, good and faithful servant, is the words we want to hear. It's those, what do we want to leave behind? Our memory, our legacy, what is our highlight reel? So my challenge is to you each day look for what can be added to your highlight reel, because in the end we will have one. But how big do you want it to be? It's in those moments, in those times, that you get to create your own highlight reel. Thanks for joining me on this week's Mindful Moment. I look forward to seeing you right here next time on Mindful Moments.