is being heard. It means coming to understand that one thing said can actually mean something else. This is how humor works. And gentle suggestions.
For weeks in advance of my fifth birthday I was very busy communicating with everyone in my family that I would like a birthday party with my neighborhood friends, a birthday cake with candles and balloons. I didn't even mention presents. I thought the party would be enough. I had just completed a string of birthday parties for my pals and I thought that it would be the finest thing to turn five with a party of my own.
My suggestions were met with disinterest and deferral. I waged a campaign. I sought justifications. I offered strategies to make the party easier. I would concede the balloons. No. Not yet. Everyone thought maybe a party would be a good idea when I turned six.
I was clear. I would give up birthday parties for many subsequent years but, just like my friends, I wanted a party when I turned five. I was unsuccessful in all my lobbying. And I was one disappointed four-year-old.
There was one bright spot on the day of my birthday. My sister said that I could go to the library and check out three books. Three! At one time. Now that I was five I guess this was the privilege that came with maturity. It wasn't fully able to assuage my loss of the long-hoped-for party, but it came darn close.
I had selected two books when suddenly my sister became urgent about wanting to go.
“I've only got two books.”
“You can only read one at a time,” she observed. This was not precisely accurate but I could see she was inexplicably in no mood to negotiate. I wasn't leaving without three books so I threw my last deliberation to chance and grabbed a book off the shelf.
I'd seen folks launching kites and it occurred to me from the way my sister was hauling me home that maybe if I'd had a tail she might have been able to let me out on a string and fly me like a kite. This girl was in one kind of hurry.
It seemed odd to me that she insisted on taking my books as we came to the steps of our house. More negotiating. They were mine. All three. I handed them over. Distracted, I pushed through the door to a torrent of leaping children, streamers and balloons, and staccato screams of “Surprise! Surprise, surprise!”
I was surprised all right. There was a banner over the mirror above the mantle announcing “It's your birthday!!!” I didn't think I was the one who needed reminding; it was my family who had all appearances of forgetting that I was turning five.
I surveyed the room, speechless. Yes. There were balloons. A cake with unlit candles on the table. Wow! A pile of presents. What mad plan had this been? I was stunned. My entire family had lied to me for weeks. Liars, all of them? If you can't believe your family, who can you believe? I wondered. The neighbor children had stopped leaping. The calls of surprise had dwindled to bewilderment. Everyone in the room stared at me as my face crumpled and I began to cry. Steve West, my best pal, came to offer me the only solace he had: “Whataya crying for? It's your birthday.”
Again what? Was I the one who needed to be reminded? I had asked. For weeks. I had communicated clearly what I wanted. What joke was this? I ran into the room adjacent to the living room and helped myself into the linen closet where I shut the door behind me and cried.
Graciously, someone laid the arm down on an album and started in with games. Without me. A few minutes later my sister came in with tissues. She offered that nobody meant to hurt my feelings—they wanted to surprise me. I explained that the only surprise that I had was that I was surprised everyone had forgotten my birthday and then I was surprised that everyone had lied. Neither one of us can now remember how long it took her to talk me out of the linen closet. But she eventually did. Just in time for cake.
Life experiences draw certain subtleties for us. They expand our ways of listening and give us other tools for understanding what people are saying and what they are not saying; what it is they say they want and what it is they really want.
It was clear what I wanted. My family wanted something different. I learned, as I grew older, that this is not just the way of families, but of all relationships. Even when you “listen hard” you can be unclear as to what someone really wants.
Wouldn't you just imagine that it was quite some time before I could actually enjoy the process of a surprise party. Actually, I've never really enjoyed a surprise party. Perhaps some day I'll learn a new way.
There are many people whose words have influenced me. Some of those words, and some of their stories, are salted throughout this book. As I contemplated the effects of those words upon me, I turned the thinking upside down and wondered if I could discover a stranger upon whom my words had some sort of effect. I am grateful for my loyal customers who graciously take the time to let me know the place my words have in their life. But I wanted to go in search of someone who lived with intention, used my words, but didn't know me. I went to the Internet and entered some of the key words from the “Live with Intention” text. Numbers of websites responded to the search. One particular site caught my attention. There my search began and ended.
“The Best of What's Left” was a blog written by a fifty-something professional man who had recently lost his lifelong wife, partner, and friend to a battle with cancer. Rather than long succumbing to the sorrow of his loss, he started questioning his values, considering his aspirations and decided, yes, to make “the best of what's left.” He purposed to leave his chosen field and accept a position, which would travel him all over the globe. Ultimately he even set aside those structures in order to construct a life based upon his rediscovered dreams.
This man, who had featured the text of my writing on his site, did indeed seem to live out the tenets of that writing with enthusiasm. He announced to the world that he supposed the woman who wrote “Live with Intention” was probably 106 and her idea of walking to the edge might be passing on her Metamucil for a day. I told him I would not let him forget that assessment. Ever. And now, it's there in black and white. Again. I did immediately inform him that while I thought there was nothing wrong with being 106 (I hope I get to find out!) and that I'd never actually had Metamucil, I could lay claim to having written the words he'd featured on his blog. This began a delightful and challenging communication with a person who has the courage to question the assumptions of his life, ask himself the real heart of his dreams, and act on them. It turns out Michael R. Wigal inspires a lot of people to live with intention, including me. He shares this story from his life experience called, “Leaning Forward into Your Foxhole.”
In a previous life I was a young second lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne Division. (I'm a pacifist now, but life is about transition.) Field Artillery to be exact, a Forward Observer. My battalion commander was a hard-driving, up-from-the-ranks guy by the name of Bobby J. Godwin. We called him the “Godfather.” He was a man who drove his troops through a combination of fear and respect. I was afraid of him. (And people said I was one of his favorites!) But, he would always urge us to do better. One of his constant sayings was, “I want you leaning forward in the foxhole.” Those words stuck with me through the years. I have taken a “leaning forward in the foxhole” approach to life.
This is not a combat story. I never saw combat (thankfully!). It was a training thing at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina. The year must have been 1974. There was a battalion-wide contest to determine who was the best Forward Observer (F.O.). That would be one of three guys, as there were three Firing Batteries (six guns each) in the battalion. (While this information is not necessarily germane to the story, it's interesting background, especially for guys.)
Even though the F.O. operates pretty much by himself in terms of identifying targets, determining the target's location as accurately as possible, and calling that location (via radio) back to the guns, in those days it took a fairly complex system
