Response-Ability Our Dreams

What and How?

   Chris and I are traveling from Arizona to British Columbia in a few weeks.  We are going by car and taking our time along the western coast.  Chris has created an itinerary that includes daily driving time, overnight stops and special sights.  We have a desire to see all of this country and we have the ability to respond to that desire.

   Many of us have had dreams that we never really reached for because we just couldn’t see how they could come true.  We are such a task oriented society that we want to be able to see the whole road, from the first idea that struck us all the way to its final outcome; manifesting our dream.  We want road maps and time lines and motels along the way.  Launching our dream can be sort of like driving across country without a map or GPS.  If we can’t see the entire path we have a difficult time taking the first step.  Yet we do have the ability to respond to the urge contained in that dream.

   There is a quote from Laurence J Peter, which goes something like this:  “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll probably end up somewhere else.”  That speaks to the most important part of making dreams come true.  You have to know what it is.  You have to be able to pin down your final destination.  For instance, I want to be interviewed by Oprah Winfrey about one of my books.  Do you suppose I have any idea how to make that happen?  Not so much, but its clear the first step is writing the book and getting it published.  The next step is calling attention to it.  That could be steps three through umpty-hundred.

   The point is, each step you take reveals the next step.  You see, we are not responsible for the “how,” we are only responsible for the “what.”  When you nail down your “what” and begin taking steps in that direction you might get a great surprise.  The “what” just might morph and change into something else; something so great you never would have dared to dream it in the beginning.  As you are guided in the steps to take, you may also be guided to a higher path and that higher path is guaranteed to give you greater joy.  That always happens when you choose your “what” and trust to Spirit to guide your steps.  You’ve got the ability to respond to your dreams.  Let’s get walking!

Response-Ability Our Elders

Our Elders

Chris and I have a delightful habit on mornings when the weather is good, which it is most of the time.  We take our first cup of coffee out on the back patio and sit surrounded by flowers and birds and the amazing Arizona sky.  Most mornings it takes us an hour or more to drink that first cup (thermal mugs) because we tend to slip into a meditative state for a while.  Yesterday was one of those long mornings.  We were still sitting out back, in our jammies and coffee in hand when an elderly gentleman I will call Ron walked in our front door, through the house, and came out to the patio.  We had never seen him before.  We engaged him in conversation.  He knew his name but not much else.
We asked to see his wallet and it had some cards in it.  Two of them were employee ID cards, one from Allied Signal and one from Honeywell.  Another was a 1996 insurance card for a 1996 Cadillac.  Seems he did well in his working years. He said he was somewhere in his 90’s, probably 95, which would be my father’s age if he were still alive.  Dad also worked at Allied Signal and Honeywell at about the same time as Ron.  Bit of a chill from that one.  There was one card in his wallet with a local phone number, which I called while Chris called the police.  The phone number belonged to his sister and the police had a missing persons report on a man fitting Ron’s description.
The two officers who came within minutes were very gentle with Ron and asked his permission to take him home.  They stayed and chatted a few minutes to make sure Ron wasn’t frightened of them, then drove him home.  Turns out Ron lives on the block just behind our house and had wandered away and didn’t know how to get back.  Our front door was probably the only one unlocked in the neighborhood and I’m glad it was.
This got me thinking about our society and its potential direction for the future.  In China, Japan, some European countries and among most indigenous people the elderly are revered and cared for.  Their wisdom is sought, respected and often heeded.  Here, we stuff them away out of sight.  Now some want to take away the pittance of the social safety net called Social Security and Medicare, even though the money for that safety net came out of their own wages for years.  No wonder many societies consider us barbarians.  In the matter of care of our elders, we are.  I pray we learn and grow enough to rise above this.

Peace, Passion, Purpose

Get Started Now

   Take a moment and bring to mind something you have not yet fully accomplished that is very important to you.  It could be a relationship with a friend, spirituality, world peace, physical health, education, business success - just one big thing that’s on your to-do list.  Don’t try to define everything you care about right now, just pick one thing that has high value for you.  Just one! 

   I have a challenge for you.  Look through your checkbook and your credit card statements for the past 12 months.  How much of your money have you spent on that one thing?  If you have a calendar or a Palm or any regular way of organizing your time, look through it for the past year and see if you can estimate how much time you have spent on this one, important thing.  If you don’t have something like that, search your memory and come up with your best guess.  How much of your resources have you committed to something you feel is very important to you?

   I’m willing to bet every one of us has at least one thing we say is very important to us, but it gets little of our resources; financial or time & energy.  Why is that?  One possible answer is that it really isn’t that important.  Maybe it’s really a “should.”  Something we feel we should believe is important, some sort of obligation.  Another possible answer is that it means so much to us we hardly dare try.  What if we fail?  It seems emotionally easier to hold this wonderful thing out in the land of “someday” than it would be to give it up altogether because we just didn’t make the grade.  Or maybe we think it’s going to require more of us than we have right now.   You know, all of the "too young, too old, too poor, not enough education, too fat, too thin, too tall, too short" series of beliefs.

   If you want to live with peace, passion and purpose, schedule that one thing.  Start a savings account for it, block out time in your calendar every week, make that first call, shop for those first healthy meals, whatever it takes for your one important thing.  Just start right now.  First thing when you wake up each morning bring that one thing to mind and tell yourself something about it.  “Today I will……………"

Then do it.

Peace, Passion, Purpose

The Song In Your Soul

I have often said that for the first time in recorded history, humanity is living long enough to grow up.  It’s even better than that.  Mid life is no longer somewhere between thirty-five and fifty.  It is possible now to have a thirty year career, retire, and still have an entire adult life ahead of us before we get really old.  We can start looking at midlife as between fifty five and sixty-five, or older.  That means we have lots of time for lots of changing!  Isn’t that wonderful?  I would like to share a passage with you on midlife from the book “Create a Life that Tickles Your Soul,” by Suzanne Willis Zoglio.   “In midlife the need to accumulate material things becomes less significant than the need for time to enjoy what we have.  The need for the approval of others becomes far less compelling than the need to follow dreams of our own.  …… As we assume positions of leadership in our careers and communities, we want to exercise that same level of influence in our personal lives as well.  We become more insistent on living deliberately and according to our own rules.  As we begin to lose parents, older siblings and even peers, we become keenly aware of our own mortality.  Just as we hit our stride, time starts to really fly.  Suddenly we have an urge to do what we’ve always wanted to do, before it’s too late.  We want to taste life more fully, connect with others more honestly, and somehow have a hand in making the world a better place.  So we set out to reinvent our lives, seeking peace, passion and purpose.”

   Peace, passion and purpose.  We are seeking to regain what we were born with, then had trained out of us or forgot as we were growing up.  Let me give you a little reminder lesson on the 1960’s in middle class America.  Not the part about the hippie generation, rather the part about conventional social expectations.  Education for girls was still not necessary, but most of society had recognized by then that girls who went to college were more likely to marry the really successful guys, the doctors and lawyers and such.  If you find a college town movie from the ‘60’s, many of the girls would be wearing suits that Jacquie Kennedy or Barbara Bush would have considered socially appropriate for the upper class.

   I grew up being told that whatever my life was like, that was God’s will for me, and my job was to live that life in humble service, hoping to die free of sin so I could then spend eternity in paradise. 

   Do you know how far away eternity feels to a 10 year old in Sunday School?  And just how much weight will that teaching carry with a 16 year old, in love, or maybe it was in lust, for the first time.  Of course it didn’t help that the young man was three years older, drop dead gorgeous, and a natural born smooth talker.  Motherhood, here I come.  Funny, a hundred years earlier I would have been the success of the community, bagging a husband with a job at such a young age.  In 1960-something, it was a shameful stigma that locked the door to church that I had already slammed shut.

   I can remember hitting my first round of mid-life crises.  I was directed to a psychic – the first time I’d ever met one – and the first words she said to me were; “You’ve spent years trying so hard to fit into all the little boxes other people built for you, and you almost succeeded.  If you had, you would have killed yourself in the process.”  That was the beginning of me reinventing my life, and I began a long search for the peace, passion and purpose that had for so many years been buried under obligation, duty and, yes, resentment.

   When you give up the song in your own soul in exchange for pleasing others, or for what looks like the easy road to success, resentment becomes a growing cloud that darkens your days and separates you from joy.  The only cure is to find your own song again and start singing it.  Stay tuned.

Peace, Passion, Purpose

Changes

   If you had been raised as a Hindu boy at the same time Gandhi was, you would have been taught that there are natural stages to life that were relative to your age and learning.  The first twenty years were for your education and developing your skills for work in the world.  The second twenty years were to be spent supporting and raising your family.  The third twenty years were for the purpose of prayer and spiritual growth.  These classifications make perfectly logical sense.  Men learned first how to earn a living, then used that ability to continue the human race by raising children, then completed their lives by focusing on spiritual practice and perhaps even benefit the world in some way by the wisdom they discovered and taught.  That certainly was the pattern that Gandhi’s life followed.

   There were two basic assumptions in that culture; in fact in most cultures at the turn of the 20^th century.  One was that there was no point in educating women, because their purpose was to bear children and serve their husbands.  The second was that living to be as old as 60 was a much longer life than many people experienced, so guidelines didn’t exist for the next 20 years, or the next.  Today with advances in medicine and nutrition, experts are now talking about an average life expectancy of 110.

   So let’s extend those guidelines a bit.  The first 30 years are for getting educated, the second 30 for raising a family, the next 30 for spiritual pursuits.  That leaves 20 years at the end to figure out what’s next, or just play around.  However there is a third basic assumption in categorizing life in this way, which is clearly inaccurate; the assumption that life as it is will always continue in pretty much the same way.  That assumption is the seed of hopelessness and the antithesis of faith.  An old, simple affirmation is a guide out of the rut of hopelessness.  It goes like this.  “Life is an upward, progressive movement of Spirit.” We are on a journey and we have a purpose.   Yet we humans often step into the rut of hopelessness and get stuck there, unable to find our faith.  The way we do that is called resisting change. 

This earth was born in a blast of flaming gasses, and if it weren’t for change, consistent, progressive change, you and I would not be living here today.  What if you and I had never learned to tie our shoes or feed ourselves or crawl?  What if we had so resisted change that we still needed someone else to change our diapers?  The changes in the earth and the changes in us have been an upward, progressive movement of Spirit that has led to more and more possibilities, more and more life.  Change is the very activity of being, doing and becoming.

   One truth that comes through loud and clear from the Hindu teaching is that there are life stages and our life will change from youth to adulthood to old age.