his or her existence. Why don’t most of us know this? So many of the people I have worked with for the past fifty years didn’t. Whether it was as a psychotherapist helping groups of people heal sexual abuse and couples repair the ruptures between them, or as an advisor to CEOs and senior leadership teams, one person after another told me that deep down in the canyons of their bones, they felt as if their lives didn’t really matter. Why isn’t this lack obvious to us? Why don’t we know how to instill a sense of personal significance in our children and grandchildren so they can love being alive?
I believe there are three implicit forces that contribute to this:
1.The current dismissal and dishonoring of elders and their importance to the rest of us has resulted in this awareness being eclipsed. In many traditions, elders were the ones who pointed out a basic fact of human life to the youngest members of a community: that the fingerprints at the end of our reach prove that each of us is a one-of-a-kind marvel that has never existed before and never will again.
2.Our educational and cultural systems are deficit focused—in other words, attention is solely focused on what doesn’t work and what is wrong rather than on what does work and has worked (i.e., “You got four wrong on your spelling test” rather than, “You got twenty-six right.”) Consequently, it is rare to find someone who is as articulate about the talents they have to contribute as about the flaws they need to hide or improve.
3.A major thinking strategy embedded in Western culture is domination rather than collaboration. What has been honored and respected, therefore, is power over rather than power with others. What makes this possible is culturally inculcating the belief that some people’s thinking (and existence) is more important than others. If you can dismiss the contribution of a person frequently enough, he or she will shrug and believe that because they can’t have an effect on an outcome, they don’t matter. Conversely, if you create collaborative conditions whereby the stories of each person’s life experiences and the resources embedded in them can be evoked and respected, both the individual and collective intellectual capital is increased, as is a deeper understanding of how each of us matters to the rest of us. It is this that makes it possible to love the life you are living.
I am a midwife as my grandmother was, but of possibilities within and between people. I’ve lived many incarnations in the past seven decades: as a teacher, psychotherapist, researcher, and organizational fairy godmother. When I have to fill out a form that asks for my occupation, I write “professional thinking partner.” The Latin root of the word “professional” is profere, meaning to profess faith. I profess my faith by being present with others in such a way that what was broken can be made whole again. When I think in partnership with someone, I listen deeply enough to hear the question his or her life is asking. I am constantly wondering how to make connections within and between the best of a person and the challenges he or she is facing. Stories then rise in my mind, stories that synthesize, connect, and widen the horizon each is facing. It feels like a great melting, as if Life is saying, “Yes!” to and through me.
I also write books as a way of fumbling through this endless path of confusion we call a human life. Most of the ones I have written are rooted in a lifelong curiosity about thinking. In graduate school, I did research in cognitive psychology and intellectual diversity. None of that rational training helped much, though, with the personal relational and physical challenges of abuse, divorce, and cancer. My mind broke apart with questions that no one could answer: “How can I love this life while living with a ‘terminal’ disease? What will balance all the random acts of violence that are happening to and around me? What’s unfinished for me to give? What difference have I made—and what difference can I make—in a world that seems to be growing crazier and more chaotic by the hour?” Since I couldn’t answer them, these questions opened my mind to a state of wonder. And it was wonder and the stories that emerged from it which led me to discover the Promise of my life.
Grandma taught me that there is both perspective and wisdom hidden in our greatest difficulties. They can help us realize how we matter as well as what really matters to us. I learned from her that certain unanswerable questions can encourage one’s mind to open and to wander like a kite in a wind, noticing what emerges rather than struggling helplessly to find a single answer on which to land in certainty. When I have done this, what often bubbles up is a story about something I’ve experienced. I have woven these stories with those of others into several books: Random Acts of Kindness, Spot of Grace, and I Will Not Die an Unlived Life.
I didn’t know where the ideas for any of those books really came from. I had no idea anyone would want to read them. Winter in Vermont can be extremely stormy. When I first moved there, I frequently had to tie a rope to the back of the old farmhouse where I lived so my six-year-old son David and I could find our way to the barn in the blinding snow, feed the horse, and then find our way home again. The books I wrote were also a kind of rope to which I clung through the twin storms of losing my father and my diagnosis of terminal cancer.
In 1999, I withdrew to a tiny cabin on a snowy mountaintop to explore how to love the life that remained. Once more I turned my grief to ink in order to find my way through this storm of unanswerable questions. I had no intention of anyone else reading the words I scribbled. I was just writing myself home. In three months, I realized that I had written a book to help me explore the most essential questions I couldn’t answer: How do I live a life I can love? How do I love the life I am living? I was habituated to questions I could answer. But these questions couldn’t be answered, and something very different emerged in my mind. They lifted me and carried me beyond the image of myself that I had been holding onto so tightly. They floated me to a place beyond right or wrong, into an ocean of inner resources, stories, and wisdom that I hadn’t even imagined existed. I came to understand that when faced with a grand challenge, as I was then and as we all are now, there is also a call to live from everything that is within you.
Six months after I withdrew to the cabin, the questions and stories that had emerged were published as a book, I Will Not Die an Unlived Life: Discovering Passion and Purpose, with a poem I had written after my father died printed on the back cover.
I began to get letters and emails from people who told me how much the poem had helped them. That wasn’t my intent. I just wanted to learn how to love the life I was living and what changes I had to make so I could create a life I could love. Twenty years later, it is rare that a day goes by without one of those letters arriving either as an email or in my mailbox. A woman in New Mexico wrote an opera based on the poem, and a Canadian artist created a huge oil painting which now hangs in a Toronto museum. A woman in South Africa, Nomathembe Luhabe, took the poem all over her country and read it to crowds of people as she helped grow Nelson Mandela’s movement to liberate their country. In 2004, she called me from Cape Town and said there was someone on the phone who wanted to ask me a question. In a deep resonant voice, Mandela asked, “What do you think the connection is between grief and the passion it takes to live a loved life?”
A year later, the Dalai Lama invited me to come to Dharamsala to meet him. He told me how the poem and the book had touched him deeply and asked me to sign his well-worn copy. My tears had indeed turned to ink. Inspired by an illiterate man born to an illiterate mother, the poem, carrying the transformative question, “How can I love the life I am living?” has circled the globe, appearing in places as far-flung as South America, China, Mexico, and Minnesota. Seeming strangers tell me a copy of it has been hanging over their desks for years, carrying them forward. The seed my father planted in my mother has indeed gone on to blossom and, through me, to fruit.
In these dark and fragmented Humpty Dumpty times, at a moment in history when possibility seems eclipsed and all the King’s horses and all the King’s men have convinced so many people that they can’t and don’t make a difference, I feel a great sorrow that so much innate talent and valuable life experience is undiscovered, untapped, and unloved. I long to inspire you who are reading these words to search for the reservoir of wisdom and capacity within you waiting to be discovered and shared with the rest
