A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough (22 page)

This is a portal through which all of us have passed more than once in our lives. Why must my life change? What will my new life look like? What are my dreams for the future; who do I hope to become; how will I find and create the life I want to have?

When we reach this point in our exploration, I am inclined to ask: How are your days? Please. Teach me about your days, what they are like, how you feel as you move in and through them. Then I ask: What kind of days would you like to have? If you could paint a picture, tell me a story of what, for you, would be a beautiful, nourishing day—a day filled with whatever kindness, company, love, play, accomplishment, or adventure
that would bring you happiness and delight—what would it look like? What would you be doing or feeling as you move through the hours of this day?

Every life is made of days. We cannot shape a whole life. The arc of destiny drawn by the accumulations of a human lifetime is more than we could ever understand or grasp. Mark Nepo in his newsletter offers his invitation for us to make peace with the limited, human scale of our abilities:

Just as someone starving can’t eat a whole loaf of bread at once, but must break off pieces and eat slowly, so must the conscious heart live off small pieces of infinity in order to digest what will nourish.

We cannot ever chart any reliable course that will not, over the span of a life, have to be recalibrated again and again. We cannot draw the shape our lives will take, predict its future, or control its outcome. But we can, when we awake in the morning, live this one, sacred, miraculous day. Some of us do this driven primarily by habit and inertia, a life made easier by surrendering to the way things have already been decided. Or we prefer to submit to the constraints of living each day in response to the cascading flow of external demands, requirements, and responsibilities, just trying to make it through the day. Or we can listen carefully in the moment for what feels, in the crucible of our inner intuitive knowing, like the next right thing to do today.

If we can awaken to the blessings of a single day, it will not eliminate our problems or cure our sorrows. But it will help us remember how strong and abundant is our wealth of beauty
and grace that we have already been given, even in the midst of whatever difficult trials or challenges we face.

Life is not a problem to be solved; it is a gift to be opened. The color of the sky, the song of a bird, a word of kindness, a strain of music, the sun on our face, the companionship of friends, the shape of clouds in summer, the red of maples in fall—these and a thousand tiny miracles punctuate a single day in a precious human life. If we are so preoccupied with plotting our future success or failures, we unintentionally impoverish ourselves by ignoring the astonishing harvest of these small gifts, piled one upon the other, that accumulate without our awareness or acknowledgment.

Whatever we choose, however we decide to use our days, the shape of our days becomes the shape of our lives. For this and countless other reasons, many spiritual traditions focus their practice on the way we most honorably and authentically place our heart’s best attention on one single day. As the psalmist reminds us,
This the day the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad in it
.

To Love Even This

On a particularly hot summer day my father, Norman, ninety-three years old, got off the ferry on the little island where he has spent much of his life. The ferry from the mainland is the essential lifeline for everything and everyone; at “boat time,” people gather to see each other, catch up on the day’s activities, and make plans. Norman is a favorite on the island; he is always friendly and respectful, and he takes time to talk with everyone. His very limited eyesight and his lack of hearing have caused him to modify his interactions. Instead of his hearty “Glad to see you,” he often will ask, “Tell me who you are,” so he has an idea to whom he is speaking
.

On this particular day, as I was waiting for Norman to get off the ferry, I noticed he was making his way through the crowd, uncharacteristically trying to avoid contact with anyone, clearly searching for me. When I called to him, he reached for me and grabbed my arm. He propelled me up the ramp to the golf cart
.

There he told me the story of his day. He had taken the ferry to town earlier in the day because he was having trouble with his dentures. The dentist kept his dentures to repair them and sent Norman off without them. So besides being legally blind and deaf, today he had no teeth. In this condition, he had
already spent the day in town, wrestling with public transportation, navigating large grocery stores, and hailing cabs, forced to interact with many people
.

This was a man who had, as a lawyer for an international airline, negotiated with the Russians, arranged contracts with the Chinese, and established agreements with African nations. Today he was an old man who couldn’t see or hear and had no teeth. He was ready to go home
.

Before I could figure out what I could possibly offer in the form of consolation or comfort, he turned to me, looked directly at me, and said, simply: “You know, I’m learning to love what is.”

Anne Fullerton

Loving What Is

C
an we possibly learn to fully and honestly love everything our life is becoming, right now, including all the people, circumstances, and events, just as they are?

To love what is does not mean we stop growing, changing, or working to improve whatever is difficult, harmful, or unjust. But what if we soften our eyes, quiet the judging mind, and sincerely imagine we could deeply love and appreciate the whole constellation of our life—what a good friend calls “the whole catastrophe”—precisely as it is in this moment, warts and all?

The overwhelming majority of people who seek my company as a minister and therapist are unhappy with their lives. They come seeking relief from some unbearable sadness, the ache of disappointment in the way their lives are going. They come grieving bad choices, lost opportunities, and shattered dreams. I have learned to expect, even assume, that these people invariably carry, in their minds, a long list of how things should have gone, what life should look like, and who they should be by now.

After a while, it was not difficult to see that it is this list—far more than the specific pain or disappointment—that causes them the most suffering. Nothing they had chosen or
accomplished, no relationship, no job, nothing about themselves was ever as good as it was supposed to be. Nothing, including themselves, was ever good enough.

In thirty-five years of clinical and pastoral practice, while also working with local people and communities for social change, I have observed a very precious, absolutely tenderly true thing: We all share a common, compelling ache to be seen and known, just as we are, with love, appreciation, and mercy. Whether gang members or clergy, single mothers in housing projects or college professors, physicians or prisoners, no matter race, color, religion, age, gender, all these souls are thirsting for this same living water: to be seen, known, and loved, just as we are.

The instant this happens—and I have seen it in gatherings, circles and meetings in homes, hospitals, prisons, congresses, churches, and street clinics—those who feel seen and known, with loving acceptance, begin to shine. They blossom. They grow taller before our eyes. They rise to their full stature; they find their strength, courage, and wisdom. They remember who they are—the light of the world, a magnificent child of creation.

This happens every time. Every time. Most of my work of late has been with circles of people in racially, politically, socially torn communities. No matter what the agenda, the history, the blood in the soil, the stories of violence and betrayal, when people feel they can reveal with courage and honesty the person they are and the story they carry—and feel they have been seen, heard, truly known, with love and mercy—the likelihood of miraculous, impossible change in themselves and
everyone else in the circle erupts as a tidal wave of infinite possibility that cannot, will not, be stopped.

Sadly, we rarely focus these eyes on ourselves, our actions, our lives. We do not see our choices, our work, our growth, with love and mercy. With eyes grown cold with habit, we dissect the flaws and failures of our life with a vengeance. Groaning under the weight of this unbearable shame, failure, and defeat, people come to me craving to have their lives fixed, made the way they want, their circumstances improved, so they can finally relax, let down their armor, and find refuge, inner peace, and contentment.

But we must love those whom we would heal. When I worked with delinquents, gang members, prisoners, drug addicts, I had to fall a little bit in love with them so I could see more clearly the beauty, perfection, and light that shone within them, regardless of their choices or circumstances. Only then could they, through my eyes, even begin to imagine themselves as beautiful.

So it is with our whole life—the whole catastrophe. What would we need to change in our eyes, what shift could we make so we might see in ourselves, our relationships, our work, taking the good with the bad, the failures and successes, and then, as God assessed the whole of creation, look at the raw unwashed truth of all we see and say, “It is good”? Yes, it may change; we will grow, heal, it will become easier, closer to our heart’s desire. But for now, if you stop for an instant, what happens if you simply say to yourself, “It is good.” What do you notice?

Those who feel most loved are most free to grow, heal, and
change. If we can gently hold the way our lives are unfolding this instant, with love, and mercy, listening only for the smallest, most easily true next right thing, the speed with which we find strength, wisdom, courage, luminosity—and an astonishing contentment that feels remarkably like a state of being, having, and doing enough—might just take our breath away.

A Sufficient Presence Within Ourselves

I
f we ask anyone, child or sage, to point to himself or herself, to the seat of his or her self, each one will, without fail, point neither to head nor hands but right here, at the center, the core, the heart. The finger points invariably to our heart. Here is me, here is where
I
live. If you are looking for me, you must search here first, in the chambers of my faithful, beating heart.

Whenever we feel we must speak honestly of the most precious things, we inevitably invoke the heart: She has a lot of heart. My heart goes out to you. Let us together get to the heart of the matter. His heart is broken. Listen to your heart, and you will know the truth. I love you with all my heart.

Clearly we are not only naming this elegant, relentlessly beating organ, providing life, oxygen, energy, the expansion and contraction of muscle and blood. We are also invoking that place within ourselves where we are most passionately alive, where we sense what is beautiful and necessary, where we feel the truth of how things are. Only within the quiet intuition and fierce clarity of our heart can we find sanctuary for our life, our calling, our soul.

When we imagine being invited to rest in some deep sufficiency, we begin with a simple pause and take nourishing refuge in our heart’s restful rhythm. If we take just this
moment to be present with ourselves in this way, how might we live and move in the world, emerging from this easy stillness of heart?

Jesus said,
Make your home in me as I make mine in you
. When we allow this world of ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows to fully and honestly find room in our heart, there is a holy alchemy that erupts within us. Grace and healing grow and flourish right beside our sorrows, and our faithful heart gently cradles them all. The spacious sufficiency of our heart can teach us the next true thing and plant the seed that grows after the fire.

Being present with ourselves, making choices from our own quiet wisdom, finding sanctuary deep within us, gives birth to a beginner’s life, toward an unknowable destiny, on a path created by our every moment walking it. All we do is set the course of our heart’s desire by the star of our own choosing, certain we will change course a thousand times before ever reaching our distant shore, the dream of our soul.

A life of enough is born in every moment—in the way we listen, the way we respond to the world, the way we see what is and tell the truth of who we are. Every single choice, every single moment, every change of course can bring us closer to a life of peace, contentment, authenticity, and easy sufficiency, a life of being, having, and doing enough.

Acknowledgments

I have rarely in my life done anything particularly well without the close company, support, and considerable, patient love of my friends.

This book is no exception. For the past three years, anyone close to me has been subjected to an endless stream of wonderings, uncertainties, rantings, inspirations, passionate struggles, and epiphanies around this subject. I am immeasurably grateful for the blessing of so many wise, kind, good-hearted people who have carried me through countless slings and arrows, joys and miracles, of our lives together. To name each person would be impossible and would require a dozen more pages. I simply say to all who know who you are, I love you, I thank you, I bow to all I receive from you.

Still, the unfailing care and commitment of a few specific friends made it possible for me to write this book.

Anne Fullerton comes first. She would deny it, which is one of many reasons she comes first. When I was at my most frustrated, stuck, lost in all this material, it was Anne who helped me make the quarter-turn that set me free to begin writing in earnest. For months, Anne came over and helped me write, edit, imagine, and listen and actually added her own voice to the original manuscript. This book would not be in your hands
this moment were it not for Anne Fullerton’s magnificent partnership and collaboration.