The coming of midlife, when life’s pathways begin to diverge seriously from the map we’ve so carefully crafted for ourselves, brings with it the equivalent of an ‘engraved invitation’ to indulge ourselves in a virtual orgy of self-doubt. At these times of reflection, we’re tempted to look at all the personal resources that we’ve expended over the years to live up to expectations — from others (parents, teachers, spiritual and civic leaders, ‘gurus’ of various flavors, elders, mentors, friends, etc.) as well as from our own egos — and to question most seriously what it was all for. Over the years, haven’t I repeatedly just wasted my money, my blood, sweat, and tears, and, most precious of all to me, my time? Poet Robert Frost wrote about the ‘road not taken,’ but, at midlife we start to think back more frequently concerning the ‘road once taken, but abandoned.’ Was it worth it? Not so much. Is there an answer?

You betcha! By this time, as a Midlife Master, you must have realized that your perspective on life and love is not just your point of view: how you look at life, the universe, and everything actually creates the reality in which you live and move and have your being. When it all fails to make sense, it’s not the reality that needs adjusting; it’s your perspective on it.

I was in a meeting yesterday where a brilliantly insightful member shared how everything in her life served to prepare her for what came next, and, in addition, the skills and understanding she gained through careful adherence to the detailed policies and procedures she was ‘force’ to follow won her the freedom to innovate later on when she was no longer constrained (or no longer chose to be constrained) by external authorities or personal or institutional demands. I thought that her reflections on the topic were so incisive that I told her after the meeting that I was going to write about it. This aspect of midlife affects everyone who passes through it, in one way or another.

Take our experience with religion, for example. For years, in the ministry and long after, I’ve heard people complain about how mistreated they were by the religious institution they were brought up in, or how religious institutions deal unlovingly with their own members or with outsiders. I’ve listened to more than my share of tirades against the ‘institutional church.’ In each case, the indignant speaker cites personal or public anecdotes to demonstrate why s/he feels victimized by the institution and, in many cases, why those events should serve as evidence not only for the hypocrisy of religion in general, but also for the non-existence of God. This argument has spawned a plethora of folks who take great pride in proclaiming to whomever may be listening that they are ‘spiritual but not religious’ people. In their estimation,’religion’ represents a blight of ignorance on humanity rather than what its definition intends it to be: the summons to mindfulness.

Yet, ironically, it’s that very mindfulness that I find lacking in their arguments. There are many purposes for religious institutions, among which are the preservation and safeguarding of human spiritual experience (through Tradition with a capital ‘T’ as enshrined in Scriptures with a capital ‘S’) and the tutelage of each successive generation of novice believers (through institutional discipline as enshrined in its rules and regulations). Without those services to humanity, our common spiritual experience through which Higher Power communicates with humankind would be lost forever, and each generation would have to begin from square one learning the language of the divine.

At the same time, those who complain about how they were mistreated by religious institutions may not realize that, as people who insist on considering themselves victims, they have failed to grasp the very lessons that those religious institutions are in place to teach: namely, that no one can take advantage of you without your permission. Life is full of injustice; from earliest childhood to the indignities of old age, everyone at some time suffers pain of some sort at the hands of others. That is not the lesson that life teaches. That is simply a fact of life, like birth and death.

The lesson that life teaches concerns how we deal with the pain we encounter. Wallowing in blame and resentment only cements our status as victims. Yet, we are not victims unless we choose to be so! All tutelage — especially that offered by religious institutions — provides us with the platform from which we can learn how to transcend other-focused blame and resentment and gain independence and mature self-possession. Without spiritual tutelage (lessons in meditation and discipline), spiritual maturity would be impossible.

Nothing that you have experienced in life has gone to waste. Every element, every experience, every moment you’ve spent in travail has provided you with an opportunity — an invitation — to growth. Every moment you’ve lived and every person you’ve loved and every thought you’ve thought and every breath you’ve breathed has become a part of the person you are today. Some of those experiences have provided you with the raw materials you needed to grow both strong and wise. Other experiences (particularly those you’re allowing to haunt you as resentments) await the moment when you’ll assimilate them, too, into your growth process. Each one of them came to you as a gift that you need right now to become the person that you were destined to be. Whether or not you actually become that person is your choice: at any given moment, you have the choice either to resent the teacher or to be grateful for the lesson. So then, what’ll it be?

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

Today marks the end of my life. That’s right: my life as I’ve known it for over six years ends today. Tomorrow, I get dressed in a suit, tuck my brand new organizer under my arm, and head off to take the Metro to work. As of tomorrow (Monday morning), I am a Federal bureaucrat, and my time — my life — is no longer my own. What happened to all the exciting plans that I had, following my passion to provide life coaching services to people in transition, building my own business,creating inspirational online content, offering life-altering content of tremendous value? It appears on the surface that all that collapsed into the quicksand of market disinterest. At first I saw it as the end of a dream. Then, once again, I woke up. Let me explain.

The essence of life can only be discovered in a spiritual awakening. Last night, we went to the movies and saw A Single Man with Colin Firth and Julianne Moore. It is the story of a man who rediscovers meaning in his life after the death of his life partner. He finds, just when he least expects it, a “moment of clarity” that makes all the difference. It was his spiritual awakening. All of my favorite authors talk about a ‘spiritual awakening’ as the core of the midlife transition, whether or not they use those exact words. It’s the ‘moment of clarity’ that separates adulthood from maturity. Like Firth’s character in A Single Man, we don’t get to chose when that moment comes, nor what it will look like when it arrives. The only thing that I can say for certain about it is that you will not recognize it before it hits.

I had two amazing interviews last week, both with women who have had their own moments of clarity and have, as a result, experienced their own spiritual awakenings. The first was during last week’s Midlife Matters internet radio program with my guest, life coach, author, and spiritual thought leader, Anita Pathik Law. She told her story of how chronic illness drove her into a corner until she surrendered to a Power greater than herself that not only brought her physical healing, but gave her the clarity to see her life’s purpose. A couple of days later, I interviewed Amona Maa Jeevan from the U.K. for a recorded segment of next week’s edition of the same program. We talked about her encounter with the Dark Night (as defined by the 16th century Spanish writer, Saint John of the Cross and other mystics), and the spiritual clarity that she received on emerging from it. Between those two conversations, I was powerfully reminded of how “God writes straight with crooked lines.”

Awakening to spiritual clarity and emerging from the midlife transition (which are really equivalent events in a person’s life) generally involves considerable pain of one or more types: spiritual, emotional, mental, and even physical. In every case, it’s pain born of a fear of letting go. The ‘dark night’ experience leads us to the brink of a seemingly-unbridgeable chasm. It’s the moment when we realize that life as we’ve defined it for ourselves is no longer working. There’s no going back and there’s no way forward (or so it seems). Perhaps we’ve experienced the loss of everything we valued: relationships, career, possessions, health, or even our own capacity to control our own behavior. At that point, we may be left with nowhere to turn but to our faith. We may find great comfort in our belief in a Power greater than ourselves. This is what John of the Cross described as the “dark night of the senses.” It’s quite awful, and the inspiration for many a ‘prison’ conversion or ‘death-bed’ conversion. This may be enough to create a kind of spiritual awakening in anyone.

It’s not the end of the story, however. There’s a ‘dark night’ that goes even deeper. John of the Cross called it the ‘dark night of the soul.’ People often use this term too loosely, confusing it with the dark night of the senses. The dark night of the soul does not necessarily involve the loss of any of the trappings of life. One can pass through it surrounded by loving spouse and friends, successful career, a multitude of possessions, exceptional health, etc. All these things simply make the experience that much more painful, as one experiences the complete and total loss of direction, meaning, purpose, and faith in God. Not everyone experiences this kind of dark night; it seems to be reserved for those who will be called upon to become a source of hope and inspiration to others. It is the ultimate challenge of a lifetime: to go forward boldly without any possible hope for success.

What arises on the other side of a ‘dark night’ is simple to describe but seemingly impossible to live. It is the experience of grace. The term ‘grace’ comes from the Latin gratia, meaning ‘gift.’ It also forms the root of our word ‘gratitude’ — our response to the gift. The meaning and purpose of our lives, and therefore, our destiny, is pure gift, and our authentic response to it can ultimately only be gratitude, pure and simple. Spiritual awakening only happens once we come to terms with certain fundamental truths. Our plans, our choices, our decisions all have an incredible impact not only on our own evolution, but, because we (collectively) form the decision-making organ for the universe itself, they also help to determine how the universe itself evolves. Nevertheless, whatever our plans, choices, and decisions may be, they are ultimately the gift of the inscrutable will of God.

Passage through the dark nights (of the senses as well as of the soul) are not, strictly speaking, the will of God. They are, like those animals whose insides outgrow their outsides, the result of our resisting having a spiritual awakening. We enjoy sleeping and dreaming the illusion of our own self-will. We even go so far as to convince ourselves that what we see and what we want is, in fact, our purpose and destiny (leaving no room to expand beyond the limits we impose upon ourselves this way). Thus, spiritual awakenings can be very painful because they demand that we puncture right through our comfort zone and right into the heart of the Unknown. We don’t want to wake up. We don’t want to climb out of our comfortable beds into the cold reality of the life that we are meant to live. It’s a fearful life, because it necessarily goes beyond what we know or can even imagine.

If you’re at midlife, or if you’re facing seemingly-catastrophic loss, if you’re feeling lost, purposeless, directionless and completely bereft of any semblance of spirituality, rejoice! Your spiritual awakening is here! You’ve received an engraved invitation from your God to enter into the life you were meant to live, no matter how different it may seem from the one you thought you were having. Your response to this invitation — this grace that I mentioned — is, as I said, easy to understand but hard to live. Can you bring yourself to pray this simple prayer composed by the second Secretary General of the United Nations and modern mystic, Dag Hammarskjöld: “For all that has been, thanks. For all that will be, yes“? Can you pray that prayer today without reservation?

Regardless of your age, if you’re struggling, a spiritual awakening awaits you. The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous spells out the hope of a spiritual awakening that sustains every one of us in this process we call ‘life’: “Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us — sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them” [emphasis added].

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

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Must couples in trouble necessarily fail? No, not necessarily: no healthy couple is doomed to failure. In fact, the only ‘doomed’ relationships are those where one or both partners are unapologetically physically or emotionally abusive . Without a doubt, the only realistic option for someone who finds her- or himself in a fundamentally abusive or exploitative relationship is to exit immediately. Apart from that, I believe that many (if not all) relationships “on the rocks” could be healed under the right circumstances. From my perspective, the fact that this healing so often fails to take place could be an indication that one or both of the partners have stopped listening. Additionally, ceasing to listen indicates a spiritual problem. Let me explain.

It would seem that the  person who hears another’s voice, but is no longer committed to listening to what the other has to say has given up on her or his partner, as well as their relationship together. If you look more closely, however, it soon becomes clear that the person has actually given up on him- or herself. Empathetic listening and appreciative inquiry represent a three-fold choice: 1) to accept the other, 2) to trust the other, and 3) to engage with the other. Closing off the lines of communication also represents a choice: to cease accepting, trusting and engaging with one’s partner. Before I relate this to fundamental spiritual principles, let’s look briefly at each choice.

The choice to accept another human being is foundational. True acceptance represents a fundamental option to see in the other person another self, with exactly the same sorts of strengths and weaknesses that we ourselves possess. This choice to acknowledge the other person as another self  has two destructive opposites. The first perversion of acceptance we call ‘exploitation‘. Philosopher Martin Buber contrasts these approaches with the terms I-Thou (for true acceptance of the other), and I-It (for exploitation). To see your partner merely in terms of his or her usefulness (like a tool or a piece of furniture) or her or his capacity to satisfy you represents a fundamental denial of humanity on your part. The second perversion of the choice to accept your partner shows itself as conditional acceptance. In brief, “I’ll accept you if you do such-and-such or so-and-so.” Conditional acceptance of another puts you in the position of being their judge, jury and executioner. In fact, it represents nothing less than your attempt to usurp the position in your partner’s life properly held by God alone.

Next, let’s look at the choice not to trust your partner. Why don’t you trust her or him? Because you’ve been hurt before? The refusal to trust your partner goes way beyond self-preservation. Once again, it is passing a judgment of condemnation on another person — another self — who exhibits the same sorts of faults and failings that you yourself exhibit. In fact, if the truth were known, the faults and failings that you find most easy to condemn and most difficult to forgive in others are the very ones that you exhibit most strongly yourself. In fact, the two keys that are absolutely essential to unlocking both acceptance and trust are these: first, to acknowledge an identical humanity in both yourself and the other, and, second, to commit yourself to the path of unconditional forgiveness. Who cannot look at the plight of even the most desperate of people around us and not be able truthfully to say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I?” The greatest message of Christianity — and also, I’m afraid,  its most forgotten and neglected — is simply this: unconditional, unlimited forgiveness. If you cannot forgive unconditionally, you cannot trust for very long.

The final choice is the choice to engage with your partner. If you refuse to engage with her or him, you thereby give credence to the (Jungian) ego’s false belief that you are vulnerable and need protection. It’s the same force that drives people’s frantic searching for that illusive (and illusory) ‘security’ that they believe will fix everything and protect them from danger. Once again, it would be foolish to put ourselves in harm’s way by engaging with an abusive partner. We owe it to ourselves and to them to take the necessary precautions so as not to allow ourselves to become victims of deliberate abuse. However, if you imagine that refusing to engage with your well-intentioned partner will grant you some sort of immunity from harm and from hurt, you are mistaken. Do you believe that spiritually you are invulnerable and that nothing outside of yourself — not even death — can destroy the essence of you? “Greater love has no one,” we have heard, “than to lay down his life for another.” Oddly, dieing for someone can actually be a whole lot easier than living for them.

Finally, what does the choice not to listen say about that person’s spiritual condition? The testimony it gives is nothing short of damning. Personally, I would liken it to what Christians refer to as the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ or the ‘unforgivable sin.’ Here’s what I mean. Whenever I write, I use the terms ‘acceptance,’  ‘trust’ and ‘engagement’ as  synonyms for what are called the ‘theological virtues’, namely: faith, hope , and love. The ‘sin’ against faith is the decision not to accept the will of God exactly as we encounter it in our world. The ‘sin’ against hope is the choice not to trust that our only Source of genuine security is divine providence. The ‘sin’ against love is the refusal to become meaningfully engaged with those we were sent to serve: our fellow creatures who, along with us, share the “image and likeness of God.” If the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ is a refusal to believe that the love of God is powerful enough to forgive us (and so we refuse to ask for forgiveness, and therefore refuse to accept it), then turning a deaf ear to someone we once claimed to love is a ‘sin against love’, for, as we know, the opposite of love is not hate, but deliberate indifference.

What can you do if you find yourself failing to listen? Remember the futility of protecting yourself. What can you protect yourself from? Even more importantly, what are you protecting yourself for? After all, your mission here in this world is not to try (futilely) to keep yourself safe. It’s to share with your fellows (and especially those in relationship with you) the same kind of acceptance, trust, and engagement that your God has shown to you. God hears his people’s cry . . . can you do any less?

And what about you who find yourself ‘learning to love one another’ and your words keep falling on deaf ears? You, too, have the opportunity to pass on the love of God. Your acceptance of the other can be renewed continually. Your trust of the other need never fail or fade. You may stand ever at the ready to engage. However, engagement (love) requires reciprocity. God does not condemn, so how could you? God does not constrain, either (because love can never be forced), but rather waits for all eternity for the other to emerge from his or her isolation and re-engage. You can have the willingness to re-engage, whether or not the other ever seeks it. You may never re-engage as you once did: time and the world goes on while the other chooses to isolate, stagnate, or (what’s worse) repeat the same self-defeating choices and behaviors with other partners. You, on the other hand, have the opportunity to accept and trust and engage with people at every stage and every condition of your life: people who, like you, have chosen to listen not only with their ears, but with their hearts.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

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Today, I’d like to share with you the (always-tentative) response that I seem to be getting from my six decades of  reflexively auto-dialing a universal ’411′. It seems — to the best of my ability to understand the answer — that the universe and all it contains is nothing but a mega-University that’s only function is to educate Consciousness (in all its known and unknown iterations) in just two interrelated subjects: what I’m calling the Two Great Lessons of Life. I won’t keep you hanging there in anticipation. The First Great Lesson of Life comes down to this: learning how to love. The Second Great Lesson of Life is its complement: learning how to let go. That’s it. That’s all there is. Once you’ve mastered both subjects, you’re ready to graduate. If it were only that easy.

We were all born selfish. You may know that in biology there’s what they call the ‘recapitulation theory’ that suggests that every life form goes through all the stages of evolution on its journey from fertilized egg to viable organism. I have no idea whether or not that’s exactly accurate, although there does seem to be a general pattern observable across all forms of life. It seems clear to me that at least human consciousness in its earliest stages develops along the lines of how consciousness emerged on this planet. At birth, our consciousness makes a giant leap forward that takes the developing distinction between “me’ and ‘mine’ to a whole new level. Birth can be seen simply asa quantum leap in the ever-increasing viability and independence of the organism. Early life outside the womb closely parallels life inside: the infant remains totally dependent on its care-givers for all the conditions necessary for its survival. From that point on, the nascent person must assume ever-greater responsibility for his or her own independent existence. Life begins with the understanding that I must get what what I need in order to survive. I learn to value who I am and what I have been given. ‘Love’ and ‘need’ start out life as synonyms.

As I lead you through this ‘recapitulation theory’ of mine, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to reflect back on your own life’s experiences to see where the crises you’ve encountered indicated ‘sticking points’ in your own evolution. If you try, you can see how they imitate the earth’s plate tectonics: the plates in the earth’s crust push against each other and their energy imperceptibly builds until, at one random moment, they suddenly become unstuck and shift — sometimes with catastrophic seismic results. Each of the crises in your own life represents a seismic shift across every aspect of your life: physical, mental, emotional, relational, economic and spiritual.

If childhood can be defined as that epoch of life during which we learn to take care of ourselves and to become increasingly self-reliant and responsible (we gradually take on the responsibility of  providing for our own survival) then that life transition stage that we identify as ‘adolescence’ must be that period where we are forced by nature and culture to confront our own self-centered self-interest and begin very tentatively to open ourselves to others as well as to the Other. It’s the time when we learn to both value and care for others above and beyond our own selfish needs, even our own need to survive. Love and need split apart in adolescence’s tumultuous soul-quakes. The adolescent transition from childhood to adulthood takes on the features of a transformation.

Learning to love . . . learning to accept unconditionally, to trust unconditionally, to become fully engaged with another . . . committed to another. These lessons of love take a long, hard time to learn because the real lesson (that love is a choice, a decision) only begins when the ‘other’ love — the emotional surrogate of love — starts to fade away. Love is what’s left after all the needing and wanting has dissipated, been satisfied or disappointed.

My first prayer as a young man entering the chapel on my first day in the major seminary was: “Lord, teach me to love.” That was the prayer of a foolish youth who didn’t understand that the prayer to learn to love, like the prayer for patience, is one that’s always answered and always in startlingly unexpected ways. “Greater love has no one, than to lay down life itself for another.” What they don’t tell you is that it’s much more difficult to live for others than it is to die for them.

Just as some people never quite learn the ‘independence’ lesson from childhood, others never quite get what it means to love selflessly. There’s a type of grieving involved in every act of true love, because it means letting go of all of our expectations. We want to be loved back, to be unconditionally accepted and trusted, to have someone somewhere somehow commit unconditionally to us. We feel as though we need that affirmation of self: if we don’t receive it, we’ll just die.
But, we don’t fully receive it — we don’t fully give it either — and we don’t die. Instead, we learn life’s Great Lesson number one.

Then comes midlife. Just when we think we’ve gotten our Master’s degree in loving, life turns the tables on us. We positively freak out when we first turn to that page in the book of life’s instructions that our parents and our whole culture and upbringing gave us for guidance and we read, “Everything in this book may be wrong.” Here begins life’s Great Lesson number two: letting go.

Letting go begins with relaxing our death-grip on our opinions, starting, of course, with everything we were once so certain and sure of. Today, on the other side of the midlife divide, I am certain of very few things. As certain as I am that there exists a universal Truth, I am equally certain that I will never fully know or understand it. And, as far as God is concerned, the God of my understanding has been replaced with the God of my lack-of-understanding. In fact, all that I really need to know about my God is that I am not he. Everything else is open to interpretation. In life, as both Martin Buber and Karl Jung so clearly saw, there is an I (a Self) in constant dialogue with a Thou (an Other) and, as with all true dialogues, meaning is always given by the receiver, not the giver. Contrary to popular belief, what God said is relevant only in regard to what we actually heard and understood.

The crises of midlife arise from the difficulty that each individual has letting go of the certitude that we hold with regard to our beliefs and opinions. At midlife, we are brought face-to-face with the great transcendental ideals that Plato and Aristotle proposed: absolute Goodness, Truth, Beauty, and Unity, and we begin to recognize that we in this world enjoy only their analogates: relative goodness, truth, beauty, and unity. We will never know (nor can we as humans really adequately even understand) such things as Life, Love, Security, Health, Peace and Freedom. The famous midlife crisis is the struggle that we wage against having to give up our pretensions to these Divine attributes. When the crisis is over, we find that we have let go a little bit more of our pretensions to the divine. The answer to the great question, “Why me?” (as though we had some divine right to Life,  Love, Security, Health, Peace and Freedom) is always the humiliating, “Why not you?”

Our topic today of the Two Great Lessons of Life has brought us to the understanding that all of life is, in fact, one great process in two distinct stages: learning to let go of self (what we call love), then learning to let go of everything else (what we call death). It makes me think of the Jewish proverb that says: Shrouds have no pockets. All of this lifetime of learning to let go is just preparation for the Great Letting Go that silently awaits each of us. Like all lettings-go, life’s Great Lessons involve grief in (at least) five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. How you think about death and how you feel about the lessons that life is handing you right now, today can be very good indicators of where you are in the learning process. The more you learn to let go, the more grieving there is. The more grieving you do, the farther along you progress toward acceptance. So, where are you?

And, just a final word to the wise, if the Roman poet Horace was right when he wrote, “Non omnis moriar” (“I shall not wholly die”) — and I believe he was — then whatever letting go and whatever grieving you don’t get done in this life, you will carry with you into the next. That’s just something to about it.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

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Obviously, the middle ages were infused with what we would consider a ‘morbid fascination’ with death. Yet, they had good reason. Back then, there was no hiding from the end of life. Infant mortality was rampant. Life was short (the average age at death was 40 or less). Disease swept Europe in waves that killed millions. Families encountered death ‘up close and personal’ on a disturbingly regular basis. Death, back then, was certainly an unavoidable ‘fact of life.’ Indeed, the experience of death and dying was so pervasive that it was completely taken for granted, like eating and sleeping. People needed to be reminded of what it meant: “Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris” (“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” from the Ash Wednesday service). Even Thomas Moore, Lord Chancellor of England under king Henry VIII adopted a famous motto: “Memento Mori” which is a Latin pun meaning both ‘remember death’ and ‘remember Moore.’ We would not want to return to the fixation on death that characterized the medieval period. Yet, what have we replaced it with?

Rather than focus on our ultimate destiny, leaving this world behind, our culture has chosen to replace a morbid fascination with death with a morbid fascination with rigidity and changelessness. Our obsession with youth and nostalgia for an imagined halcyon age in times gone by permeates not only our decision-making processes, but also the meaning we give to the world. ‘Living in the moment’ seems to have become ‘living for the moment.’ Haven’t our lives been overtaken by an obsessive pursuit of security? How much thought, time, and resources have you devoted in the past year alone to achieving security for yourself and your family? Even the term ‘conservative’ has shifted from meaning a forward-looking, thoughtful decision-making process to meaning a kind of reflexive instinct for self-preservation. Yet no real security can ever be attained.

Sometimes the discipline of philosophy can bring sense to a worldview that appears confusing and contradictory. Medieval writers spoke of everything having a ‘final cause.’ That meant for them that things happen with an inner logic that drives them forward (whether or not we are aware of what that logic might be). If the universe had a beginning (and it did: the ‘big bang’), then it has a direction and an inner logic that drives its evolution toward some future, as yet unknown, ending. The universe is not static. It’s not rigid. It’s not eternal and changeless. The only constant in the universe is change. Although its inner logic drives it forward, the universe’s unfolding is anything but ‘secure.’ All we know for certain is that, at some point, the earth will be swallowed up by the sun, the sun will become a super-nova and die, our galaxy will collide with others and be ripped apart, and the forces of the entire universe will eventually play themselves out. Time and space as we know it will just cease.

The life that each of us enjoys can be understood as a microcosmic reflection of the universe itself. For us, as for the universe, there is no security, no stability, no guarantees. We grow and our lives play themselves out by an inner logic over which we have only limited influence. We call that inner logic our ‘destiny’ — that complex of possibilities that work together with our understanding and our decision-making powers to determine who and what we shall become. We absolutely must look backward to appreciate where we’ve come from. However, in life, there’s no room for sentimental nostalgia. We can’t — we shouldn’t want to — turn back the clock. At midlife, youth has gone; good riddance! Enlightened by the past, our decision-making power must be focused rather on achieving our destiny whatever that may be. Our choices need to be forward-looking, enlightened by our ultimate end, our ‘final cause,’ our purpose for being here. Looking forward gives meaning and direction to our lives; obsessing on the past can only leave our lives frustrated, empty and meaningless.

Now how do we put this understanding into practice? One of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits is, “Begin with the end in mind.” How will you know if you’ve made the right decisions if you have no idea where you’re going? As the Cheshire Cat told Alice, “If you don’t know where you’re going, then any path will take you there.” As you begin this new year, do you know where you’re going? Do you have a clear mission for your life? Defined values? A vision for the next 12 months? A written intention statement that defines specifically what you want to accomplish? If you knew that death awaited you a year from now, how much differently would you live today? Death overtook our aunt while the rest of us were making plans for the New Year. Every time something like that happens, it’s a wake-up call that reminds us with stark finality of our own end. Most of those who read this will end this year with a greater or lesser degree of success (however you choose to define that). Yet, some of you may not. Eventually, each of us will come to a year without a New Year’s eve. Should we not begin this one with the end in mind? Indeed, “Memento Mori.”

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

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