I Will Inhabit My Days
Dawna Markova begins her powerful poem with these words,
‘I will not die an unlived life’.
Following on from Part 1, Dare I Disturb The Universe?, I now give some thought to what a ‘lived life’ might mean. How do I end life well, not just the start and middle? How do we end our days engaged and investing in the important issues in our families, communities and world, to stop the slide towards those immortal words in the film Thelma and Louise, that sum up the unlived-life – ‘we got what we settled for’.
How do I not just settle? How do I ‘leave it all on the field’?
I have spent much of the past fifteen months wrestling with these questions. What has been emerging for me is a kind of personal manifesto. I offer it here, in the hope that it may be of some use to others.
Eye-balling fear is where I think it starts. Fear has many disguises that justify its existence and its impact often makes us smaller; it makes us shrink back; it makes us look away from life rather than lean into it. Fear of death, of the aging process, of loss, of endings, of not being valued or needed, of losing our mental faculties, our virility, or disability. Fear of risk, fear of failure. Fear of abandonment, or fear of dependence. In the second half of life these existential fears come into sharper focus and we come under their power either by surrender, or denial. Or we eyeball them. In Eliot’s poem, Prufrock spoke with true vulnerability in that moment when he said, ‘in short, I was afraid’.
Eyeballing fear allows us to have the feeling, without the feeling being allowed to have us. Carl Jung said,
“Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal, which robs the second half of life of its purpose”.
I am constantly reminded that a good life doesn’t happen by accident.
Growing a faith, is the second part of my emerging manifesto. Faith is a vital life force in the second half of life. Not a religion, but a faith. Faith is an attitude to life that embraces the fact that there is more to life than me, the universe is so much larger than my personal orbit. There is more. There is always more. Much more. When death becomes life’s end point, then we will live and invest within that narrow frame. Faith sets us free to live beyond our own life. We invest now into an unknown legacy that will outlive us. A legacy whose ultimate shape we cannot control, but whose influence we can ensure.
"I wake up every morning thinking...this is my last day. And I jam everything into it. There's no time for mediocrity. This is no f-ing dress rehearsal. You’ve got one life, so just lead it and try and be remarkable",
said Anita Roddick.
We become as big as the thing we worship, the thing we centre our self-worth around. Faith consistently calls us to focus on things bigger than ourselves, things always slightly beyond our reach, things that will outlive us.
Becoming, not doing is my third insight, which for me has been revolutionary; my new mantra for the second half of life. In the first half of life we are doing, doing, doing. Mission, purpose, strategy, achievement, success, all become about the anxious, sweaty process of ‘doing’, in answering our ego’s call to be someone. But our legacy will always be much less about what we did and much more about who we became. As the pace of ‘doing’, slows down in this second season of our lives, because our bodies are slowing down, the danger is that we equate ‘do less’ (give yourself a well-earned break), with ‘be less’ (don’t increasingly invest in who you are becoming). Plotted on the graph, the doing line goes down, but the being line should be going up. At the crossroads called Trivial, these two lines get snagged up, and often gravity wins. The greatest gift we can leave the world is a meaningful lived-life, not in burn-out activity, but in being a living example of someone who kept on becoming and kept on exploring the meaning of their life in the world.
Recovering Vocation in place of ambition, is a vital voice in this manifesto. Ambition is the drive for what I want, to build up my own self-worth. Vocation is a calling. A call from deep within and without. From within, we all have a seed, a DNA code, a Daemon, that is uniquely ours, in service of the world. From without, life is calling to us every day, if we are awake to it. Through the people we meet, the news we hear, the things that make us angry, the issues that we hear ourselves saying, ‘that is not ok!”, life calls. This was the heart of Auschwitz, holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s[1] core message to the world: Life is calling you, even in suffering, even in aging.
Jung said we don’t even begin our real-life work until the second half of life. The first half was just training wheels. At the time of life when we should be winding up to who we are becoming, many of us start winding down, at the very point when we should be heeding the call of vocation. Mandela was 72 when he left prison to start his job as President. Mary Robinson was in her fifties when she began to play a vital role in global human rights and was 74 when she became the Chair of the Global Elders. At 87 Jane Goodall has spent the past year fighting for the abolition of caged farm animals and planting a million trees.
Our ultimate vocation in life is that we should become what we were born for, to be elders to the upcoming generation. I remember talking to Professor Peter Hawkins, who told me about the time he was flying back from South Africa, where he was doing a lot of work with the new post-apartheid leaders. On the flight he was seated next to a retiring member of Mandela’s government. Hawkins was congratulating him for all his hard work in the liberation and post liberation years and said, “It’s wonderful that you now get the chance to stop working and have some well-earned rest and get to play with the grandchildren”. To which, the man looked at Peter and said, “You don’t understand my culture. When we retire from work, we become elders”. It was these elders that had shaped Mandela from his birth to his death.
All traditional societies have a recognition of elders. Most modern societies did once recognise elders, but they have been dismissed in favour of ‘progress’. It is the role of the aging generation to not step down and simply sneak away for coffee at the local garden centre, or golf club, (not that there is any problem with either of these as side activities), but to become who they were destined to become. An elder. An elder is someone who has made it further down the road of life than those who follow. They are a person whose treasure trove of experience, perspective and accumulated wisdom is crying out to be invested into the lives of others, rather than be hoarded and, as is often the case, left to decompose six feet underground. I work as a mentor with young social entrepreneurs across the globe and they are screaming out for people like you. Your simplest wisdom, is for them, like a treasured pearl. Am I hoarding or investing? Speaking of the potential that is locked up within each of us, Pulitzer prize writer Annie Dillard said, ‘spend it all’. The world desperately needs people who have carried on taking their journey of becoming seriously. People who have continued to do the hard work on themselves to keep growing.
Irvin and Marilyn Yaalom, both world famous authors in their own right, wrote a book together to help couples chart the end of a long relationship through the death of one partner[2]. They have made that journey and they share their wisdom so that we can make our own journey’s. The question they wrestled with, right up to Marilyn’s death was, “How can we fight against despair? How do we live meaningfully till the very end?”
Why am I so passionate about this need for elders? To end our life well, we need to start our life well. So, inspiring youth to make eldership an ‘end in mind’ for their lives, then supporting them to help make every circumstance of their lives into a classroom for learning how to lead, love, and leave a legacy, is a high call for us all. Become an elder, inspire youth to become elders, who will in turn be elders to those who follow them. It is the circle of wisdom for a lived-life. Markova’s final words capture the truth of it.
….to live, so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.
Which leads me to the final part of my manifesto.
It matters who you travel with. It’s painful to say it, but the people we do life with, make us bigger, or make us smaller people. Every conversation expands or shrinks us. Poet David Whyte sums it up perfectly,
‘Do not be drawn into conversations that make you small’.
The most important relationship question to ask ourselves is, can I, am I, growing and flourishing here? Listen to the conversation within your own head and the conversation between you and others, to see in an instant whether we are growing or shrinking.
As T S Eliot puts it in another of his poems, “We shall not cease from exploration[3]’. Of course, that is exactly what happens. One person stops exploring and then the other person is caught, not in the conversations that they arehaving, but the conversations they are not having,
‘You see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen,
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about[4]’
Life is a liberation journey. A liberation of our human potential, in service of the world we find ourselves in. We can linger at the crossroads, or take courage and press on towards the lived-life.
I will leave the last words to one of our iconic elders, Nelson Mandela. When he was in his seventies, he captured both the pause at the crossroads, but then the pressing on.
“I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not ended.[5]”