MAKING THE MOMENT MEANINGFUL
Creating a Path to Purpose and Fulfillment
By Dana LaMon
Copyright 2011 by Dana LaMon
Smashwords Edition
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Copyright 2011 by Dana LaMon
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission, except in a specialized format as permitted by law.
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* * * * *
For Sharon
and
for all who feel the yearning for meaningfulness.
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MAKING THE MOMENT MEANINGFUL
Creating a Path to Purpose and Fulfillment
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER
PART I:
WHAT LIFE IS ABOUT
1. YEARNING TO BE SIGNIFICANT
2. MEASURING THE MOMENT
3. LEAVING YESTERDAY BEHIND
4. MAKING THE MOST OF TODAY
5. APPROACHING TOMORROW
6. CHOOSING TO LIVE MEANINGFULLY
7. IMAGINING A MEANINGFUL LIFE
PART II:
PROMOTING GROWTH
8. MEANINGFULNESS: GROWTH
9. CHANGING INTO YOU
10. LEARNING FOR A LIFETIME
11. USING WHAT YOU KNOW
PART III:
ESTABLISHING AND NURTURING CONNECTION
12. MEANINGFULNESS: CONNECTION
13. DEVELOPING RELATIONSHIPS
14. MAKING FRIENDS
15. NURTURING BENEFICIAL RELATIONSHIPS
16. LETTING LOVE FLOW
PART IV:
DISCOVERING PURPOSE
17. MEANINGFULNESS: PURPOSE
18. CELEBRATING GIVING
19. DISCOVERING YOUR PURPOSE
PART V:
DEFINING YOURSELF
20. MEANINGFULNESS: SELF-DEFINITION
21. SETTING YOUR PERSPECTIVE
22. DEFINING MOMENTS
23. BELIEVING IS SEEING
PART VI:
WHAT GETS IN THE WAY
24. BEING DISTRACTED
25. MAKING A LIVING
26. LIVING THROUGH AVOIDANCE
27. LIVING THROUGH PASSIVITY
28. OVERCOMING ADVERSITY
PART VII:
THE COMMITMENT TO MEANINGFULNESS
29. LIVING THROUGH ENCOUNTER
30. BEING A HUMAN DOING
31. KNOWING WHAT YOU WANT
32. KNOWING WHY YOU WANT IT
33. GETTING WHAT YOU WANT
34. CREATING THE MEMORIES
35. CREATING A PATH TO FULFILLMENT
PART VIII:
THE SATISFIED LIFE
36. MAKING A DIFFERENCE
37. HAVING IMPACT
38. SATISFYING THE YEARNING
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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PART I:
WHAT LIFE IS ABOUT
* * * * *
CHAPTER 1
YEARNING TO BE SIGNIFICANT
This life is your one opportunity to shape the world in which you live.
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Early in 2006, I received a letter from a friend's husband who was ruminating over what to do with the second half of his life. He wrote that what he would do was not clear, but he was certain it had to be significant—something larger than himself.
Two years later, I had a telephone conversation with my friend herself. The topic? She struggled with the question of what to do with her life. She was working but wasn't sure if her job was where she should be spending her time. She worried about retirement—that is, not having enough resources set aside in order to live in her retirement years.
My friend and her husband are not alone. Over the years, I have had several conversations with people who desired to “do something meaningful” or “make a difference” or “leave a legacy.” Books have been written with the intent of answering the question, “What should I do with my life?”
One morning not too long ago, I turned on the radio to listen to my regular public radio station, and they were doing a story about a woman in Minnesota who was selling everything she owned, keeping only her important papers, and driving west to find a simpler life. She acknowledged that the things she owned didn't make her happy. She believed that a life uncomplicated with things would allow her to find the happiness she sought.
The yearning to feel significant is experienced by people who have done little with their lives up to now and by those who can tout a long list of achievements. Success in the form of wealth, position, status, or fame has not satisfied this longing to matter.
Why is it that we wait until we have lived a half century or so before we decide to do something that we can label as significant? Does the yearning only begin then? Is it that we begin to think that our time is running out? Is it that we lose our amusement with the capitalistic carousel? Is this mid-life angst just a reflection of our voracious appetite for bigger and better?
Do you feel the yearning?
You were born to be significant. This life is your one opportunity to shape the world in which you live. You can choose to be a volunteer and shape your world to your specifications, or you can be a victim and let circumstances dictate your design. You can choose to ensure your significance in this world for your whole life or only for a part of it. That is to say, you don't have to wait until much of your life is past before thinking about the legacy that you leave. The earlier you begin to live meaningfully, the greater the impact you make on your world.
You can never know how long, when measured by time, your life could be. You did not enter this world with a guarantee of time. You may be around for another fifty years, and there are those whose lives lasted less than fifty seconds. Fortunately, the significance of life isn't judged by its length. Significance is determined by the meaningfulness of the time you spend. Your activities and actions and the motivation for them are relevant to meaningfulness regardless of how much time you feel you have left in life.
Life is short when measured by the things you can do with it. There are so many things you can do and certainly not enough time to do them all. The challenge, then, is to choose your actions and activities meaningfully. You must develop the decision-making skill to enable you to say yes to the things that matter and no to those that are of little importance. Every moment you give to insignificance diminishes your life's value. If you devote forty to fifty years of life to things that don't matter, you will have missed so much of life that could be lived fulfilling the yearning for significance.
You were born to be significant, and this innate instinct can be ignored only for a short time. If you live long enough to get past the social norms of getting an education, landing a job, starting a family, and/or acquiring possessions, the yearning to be significant will emerge in the question, Now what? You may respond to the question by repeating the cycle, believing that doing more satisfies the yearning. So you get another degree. Maybe you find a job that pays more money or carries more prestige. Perhaps you have another child to add to the family. You may buy more and/or bigger things. Despite doing and having more, the yearning is still there.
Unable to satisfy the yearning with more, you may seek fulfillment by having something different. You move. You change professions. You get divorced and, perhaps, remarry. Still there is a sense of dissatisfaction.
Now time has passed, you are older, and you begin to feel your mortality. The feeling of mortality serves to intensify the yearning to be significant.
Eventually this yearning to be significant will push its way to the point of priority and urgency. It may happen after your children have all grown up and left home. The yearning is then expressed as the “empty nest syndrome.” It may happen when you retire and a day-to-day job is no longer in the way. You may then begin to question your worth because your work was where you placed your importance. It may happen during a financial hardship when you've lost your job and/or lost the things that have occupied your mind and time. You begin to learn that things don't matter.
The instinct for significance is always present. When rearing children, working a job, tending to things, and other business no longer suppress it, you will hear its cry and feel its yearning. You need not wait—and should not wait—until much of your life is behind you before you begin your quest to discover what will satisfy the yearning. The way to maximize the significance of your life is to make each moment meaningful from the beginning. Choose a course of education that highlights your talents and abilities, not the one that just heightens your earning potential. Make parenting a meaningful experience for you, your partner, and your children. Seek employment with more than just making money in mind. Don't rest your identity and your value in your possessions. Establish a view of your life that allows you to see clearly what is meaningful and augments your living. Then you can avoid the things that consume and waste the precious little time that you have to shape your world.
CHAPTER 2
MEASURING THE MOMENT
The value of life must be measured, not by the minutes, but by the moments.
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I was twenty-seven years old before I attended a funeral. A friend living in Connecticut asked that I be with her for her mother's memorial service. With one day's notice, I flew from California to be with Penny at her time of grief.
More than thirty years have gone by and I have attended over forty services to honor the life of members of my family, friends, and cohorts. I have spoken at nearly half of them. My first opportunity to speak at a funeral was in 1980. It was for Norman, who was killed in the cross fire of two rival gangs while spending an afternoon in the park. I presented a message, not to Norman, but to the hundreds of young teens who mourn the death of a sixteen-year young man, about the need to put guns down.
Quite the contrast was the memorial service for Shortie. I came to know her through our membership in Toastmasters International, an organization with a focus on improving speaking skills. Shortie’s memorial was not a time of mourning; it was a celebration of a life. My heart wells up with emotion and my eyes often with tears when I recall the gesture initiated by the minister. Recognizing that ninety percent of the people present were members of Toastmasters, she asked that we give Shortie her final standing ovation.
At Annie Mae's memorial service, her children talked about the love they received from their mother. The recurrent theme was that none of the eight children remembered their mother saying “I love you,” but never did they have a doubt that she did. Her family believed that their mother lived love. Annie Mae being one of my cousins, I learned something about myself and my family and how we express love.
Dennis' family did not speak at his funeral service. We instead heard from Dennis' cell mates. All shared stories of a man “who would give you the shirt off his back.” I delivered the eulogy for this forty-something man and incorporated stories from his siblings to talk about the value of the life that Dennis shared. After the service, a man whom I did not know asked for my business card so I could be called to deliver his eulogy. He said, “Man, when I die, I want you to talk at my funeral 'cause you made Dennis look good.”
Many of the obituaries of the people whose services I attended contained a line that described the span of the person's life. The line might read: “Candy lived thirty-seven years, three months, two weeks, and five days.”
How will your life be measured?
Life...your life...is that segment of eternity during which your soul, mind, and body join to interact with the universe. It is commonly understood as the time that you are born to the instant of your death. Your mother, the doctor, and all the people around you began measuring your life by seconds, minutes, and hours; days, weeks, and months; then years. In the minds of most people, life becomes time.
Life...your life...has no defined length until it is over. It could have been as short as one second; it can be longer than one hundred years. Because it has no defined length, there is no way for you to know if you have done something to make it longer. You cannot say that you have added days to your life unless you know when it was supposed to end. You can believe—and should believe—that if you promote the health of your body and protect yourself from injury, you will prolong life. The value of your life, however, is not in the length of it.
You had nothing to do with the segment of eternity in which your span of life has encompassed. You are here now, but you could have come in prehistoric times, medieval times, or lunar times (the time when man will inhabit the moon). The value of your life is not judged by the period in which you live.
If you think of life as time—as the seconds, minutes, or hours that pass—the significance of life is diminished. The clock becomes the force that dictates what you do. You are manipulated, managed, and motivated by the hour. You become satisfied with terms such as “rush hour” and “happy hour” to define your activities. You willingly and wantonly “bide time,” “waste time,” and “kill time” as though you have plenty of it to spare.
When you measure the significance of your life by the calendar, you are likely to dread Mondays, applaud “hump day,” and celebrate Fridays. You may adopt as your theme song “Living for the Weekend.” You can't wait for the long weekends or your two-week vacation. You set aside a special day on the calendar to show love, to give thanks, or to appreciate your mother and father.
If you become complacent about life and think of it only in terms of time, it may take an alarming event to wake you up. You might awaken to the brevity of life if you have a close connection with someone who dies at a young age. You might awaken to the importance of making the moment meaningful if you experience a life-threatening illness. All along you know that you are mortal, at least subconsciously if not consciously, but you always expect there to be tomorrow. There is nothing wrong with having such hope of the future days of your life. However, you should never squander this present moment on the expectation that you will have another one.
The clock and the calendar are meaningless gauges of life. Life must be measured, not by the minutes or the months, but by the moments. A moment is the span of your life given to a specific experience. Just as life has no pre-defined length, a moment is indefinite. The duration of a moment can be a second or a lifetime. It coincides with the duration of an experience that you have.
Because it encompasses an experience, a moment has three dimensions—physical, mental, and spiritual. The physical dimension of a moment is length, which is measured by time. The mental dimension of a moment is breadth, which is measured by knowledge the experience gives you. The spiritual dimension of the moment is depth, which is measured by the impact you have on others. If you are living a life that simply marks off time and is governed by the calendar, you are living a one-dimensional life. You can never experience the fullness of life in one dimension. The meaningfulness of your life must be measured by the breadth and depth of your moments.
The moment of utmost importance is Now. Now is the point at which your past connects with your future. This connection provides the continuity of your experiences that is your life. If this continuity is broken—that is, if Now no longer exists, then life ends. Hence, Now is the moment you live and make life meaningful.
Now is the intersection of multiple moments. It may be the end of some experience. It is the continuation of other experiences. It must be the beginning of new experiences if tomorrow is to have meaning for you.
You can exercise control over the three reference points of life—past, present, and future. However, the tools by which you exercise control are different. You control the past with memory. You control the present with action. You control the future with planning.
CHAPTER 3
LEAVING YESTERDAY BEHIND
You must leave yesterday behind but extract from it two things—memories and lessons.
* * * * *
In my brief career practicing law in California, I handled marriage dissolutions. I encountered no two marital relationships that were the same. John and Jamie, fundamentalist Christians who married each other in their fifties, could not get along after two years of being wedded. Mary, who was seventy-nine years old, hired me to terminate her five-year marriage to her husband of the same age. Melanie and Larry, a young couple that had not yet been together for five years, battled over custody of their two-year-old son as they decided to go their separate ways. Veronica had to quit her job and leave the state to hide from Mark, who threatened to shoot her and her coworkers because he didn't want to divorce. Brenda destroyed Walter’s car, house, and clothes as she took custody of their three children and exited the marriage. I quickly wearied of handling conflicts between couples who could no longer get along.
Though the particulars of each marriage break-up were different, I observed in each relationship disappointment and/or frustration that marriage was not what the individuals expected.
I was a single man when I practiced law, so I had no practical marriage experience, only a vision of what a successful marriage should be. Included in my ideal was how I would approach a marital relationship that was no longer viable. Maybe because of the personal conflicts I witnessed, I resolved that she, whoever she might be, could have the property and custody of the children. I'd want my after-marriage relationship to be as free from my ex-wife as possible.
I did not try to impose my ideal on my clients. I carried out my client's wishes as his or her legal representative. Even when Brenda sought one hundred percent of the property and sole custody of the children, a position contrary to California law, I argued it before the judge. Because of the evidence we presented on trial, she, at least temporarily, got almost all that she sought. But then she got all the headaches that come with continual contact with a non-cooperative ex-husband.
What about yesterday can you change?
Your life of yesterday is carved in stone. You cannot change it. You cannot relive yesterday. You cannot pretend that the past did not happen. Well, yes you can, but pretending that it did not happen does not change what yesterday is. Mourning over the past or ruminating about what-ifs will only cause you to miss the opportunity to make the most of today.
Yesterday will remain forever in the past. The only part of the past that you can bring to the present moment is the memories and lessons of your past experiences. If you have memories of past experiences that brought you joy, be grateful for them. Cherish them. Share them readily. These are the moments that make life meaningful. Be careful, however, that your celebration of yesterday's joyful memories do not supplant the actions to be taken to make the moment now meaningful. Memories will lose their meaningfulness if they thwart forward motion.
If yesterday is full of experiences that gave you pain, use the moment now to soothe the pain and heal. Dwelling on the past will keep the pain in the forefront of your mind and delay the healing process. Observe what you lost and begin your efforts to replace or compensate for it. Make a note of what you might have done to bring about the painful experience, and learn from your error so that you don't repeat it. Identify who or what contributed to the negative experience and separate yourself from her, him, or it now so that today isn't a repeat of yesterday.
To know pain, you must experience pain. Yesterday's experiences may have caused you pain, but you should use the experience of pain as a lesson learned about what to avoid today and tomorrow.
To leave yesterday behind does not mean forgetting it. Recall the situations that produced those pains, analyze the situation, and learn from the lessons they teach so you can avoid similar pains in the future.
Leaving yesterday behind does depend on your ability to forgive. You cannot make the best of the moment now if you are carrying around guilt from yesterday’s actions. After you acknowledge your responsibility for yesterday's experiences, release yourself. Yesterday is gone, and your part is complete. To release yourself, you must forgive, apologize, and restore. Forgive yourself for mistakes of omission or commission and focus on the role you must play now. You must then apologize for harm you may have caused someone else. You cannot claim meaningfulness in a life that has caused pain to others and/or has been detrimental to another person's effort to live a meaningful life. Along with apologizing, you must offer restitution. To the extent that you can, compensate the individual for the losses you caused. Once you have apologized and provided restitution, consider yourself released and move on. If the person you harmed forgives you, you have no reason to continue carrying a burden of guilt. If they are not willing to forgive you after you have offered your sincere apology, the burden shifts to them. They have chosen to carry it, so you should let it go.
By the same token, you must be willing to forgive the person who may have been responsible for the painful experience you lived yesterday. When you are not willing to forgive, you choose to carry the weight of the matter into the present moment. While someone else may be responsible for what you experienced yesterday, you are the one responsible for reliving the pain today.
If there is something about yesterday that merits reliving, live it now, but do so only if there is not something greater to be attained. Otherwise, let now be the period of your life to go and grow beyond yesterday's achievements.
If any part of yesterday was wasted on things that have no meaning for you, don't worry about it. It's now gone. Spending life now regretting time wasted in the past, wastes the present and the future, making the moment meaningless.
CHAPTER 4
MAKING THE MOST OF TODAY
You get the most out of life today when you feel the urgency of now with equal intensity as the expectation of tomorrow.
* * * * *
Bob Koken is eighty-nine years old. He retired thirty years ago after working thirty years for General Electric as a mechanical engineer. While he has retired from going to a job, Bob has not retired from living.
Every day of his very active life, Bob has breakfast with a friend—not the same person each day, but different friends. Just about every day he talks to his sisters on the phone. One is a year younger and the other six years older. Everyday he reads the newspaper and the book of his choosing. Once a week Bob volunteers at a preschool for children who have been abused. Two or three times a month he visits people in a home for senior citizens and sings and recites poetry. Bob helps persons with mobility limitations by providing free loans of wheelchairs and scooters. He currently has more than twenty of them out on loan. He bought magnification equipment for a friend in Arkansas who was losing her sight and software for a blind man to enable him to read printed material with his computer.
Bob is happy with what he is doing. Whenever I ask how he is doing, he responds, “Doing so well I almost feel guilty.” This is his response notwithstanding the fact that he has impaired hearing and wears hearing aids, that he can't drive at night because of limited vision, and he has a problem with balance owing to a brain injury he sustained over forty years ago.
I first met Bob in January 2005. We sat together on the commuter bus. It was my usual ride from downtown Los Angeles back to Lancaster, but it was not usual for him. He usually took the Antelope Valley line of Metrolink from Union Station. The train was not running that afternoon because of a fatal collision with a train and an SUV. Bob was able to take the train in the morning to make his every-Wednesday visit with his now deceased brother, who was in a Long Beach convalescent home, but he had to take the bus as alternate transportation back home.
One might think that Bob, at his age, wouldn't have many more years to live. He told me in a recent telephone conversation that he feels good and expects to be around at least another ten years. That day he met a friend for breakfast, read a bit, made arrangements to buy another wheelchair, and talked with some of his children on the phone. Every day he is doing what gives him a sense of fulfillment.
What are you doing today that makes you happy?
The most important time of your life is now. It doesn't matter how many years are behind you or how many years you believe are ahead. You may be twenty-nine or eighty-nine years old. The time to make life meaningful is right now.
If you are a young person, you should resist the temptation of putting off meaningfulness for later in your life. Making a living should not take priority over making the moment meaningful. It is never too early for you to discover your purpose and then to seek the job that allows you to work purposefully. When you delay purposeful living, you are more likely to be distracted by things that don’t matter. You also delay the meaningful impact your life can have.
If you are a person of mature years, you must not think that too much of your life has already passed to make life meaningful. You have today, and today offers you one more chance to fulfill the purpose uniquely assigned to you. Never discount the significance of now no matter how much lies in your past.
Of all the moments of your life—those of the past and those that will be—the only one over which you can be sure of exercising full control is the moment now. Over yesterday and tomorrow you can only control your attitude. You cannot take action in the past, nor in the future. Only today can you act, react, and make the choices that are governed by your attitude. To maximize meaning in your life, you must learn from yesterday, act today, and plan for tomorrow.
You make the past a significant element of a meaningful present by using it as a resource for knowledge. From your experiences—your actions, reactions, and interactions—you grow. You discover purpose. You nurture beneficial relationships. You define your beliefs and guiding principles. Learning from the past, today you can avoid actions of insignificance and meaninglessness. You cannot make the most of now if you continually repeat the acts of yesterday.
Now is the time to act. For what are you waiting? Are you waiting to finish school? Are you waiting to get a job? Are you waiting for money to come your way? Are you waiting to marry and to rear a family? Are you waiting to retire? Today you live. Life doesn't begin tomorrow. Going to school, working, and having a family are all part of life now. What you do to make a difference in this world should not be separate from your day-to-day activities. It is what you do now in school, what you do now in church, what you do now at home, and what you do now at the job that make the difference. The more you do now, the greater the difference you make.
Though tomorrow is not promised you, you should take time today to plan and prepare for it. Planning is a meaningful activity through which you create your opportunities for the future. Preparation readies you for the unexpected opportunities that may come a-knocking. If today you don't plan and prepare for the things that will matter to you tomorrow, you will likely spend your life on the things that don't matter.
The challenge is striking the appropriate balance between living today and planning tomorrow. With too much planning and not enough living, you will lose your chance to make the most of now. On the other hand, with too much living and not enough planning, you miss the opportunity to make the most of the future. You get the most out of life today when you feel the urgency of now with equal intensity as the expectation of tomorrow.
CHAPTER 5
APPROACHING TOMORROW
You can alter the quality and meaningfulness of your tomorrow by what you imagine and the reason you have to hope.
* * * * *
In January 2008, the management of the division in which I worked sent an e-mail to all employees announcing drastic changes that would be made in how we conduct business as a cost-cutting measure. We in the Los Angeles office were stunned by what we read. The proposed changes included closing the Los Angeles office, having judges to conduct hearings by videoconference in home offices that would be set up for each, and transferring all clerical positions to Sacramento. These changes were to take effect before the end of the year.
The proposal raised many questions that remained unanswered six months later. The proposal introduced into the lives of several an uncertainty about their future. While the changes wouldn't be immediate, employees' distant tomorrows were disturbed. The reactions to the disturbance were varied.
Collectively, the employees went into a resistive mode. They tried to reason with management by trying to show that the proposal didn't really save any money. They argued that the proposal violated the laws that protected the rights of the people we served. Finally, they went to outside sources to oppose management through the union and the legislature.
Individually, the reactions were of pain or resignation or both. One clerk cried for hours about needing her job to provide for her children. Another said that whatever happens she would deal with it when it occurred. All of the clerks began applying for other jobs. Only one actually left.
Judges in the office began serious discussions about retirement. One, who had already planned to retire in 2009, expressed his expectation that the change would not occur until after he was gone. A couple of others announced a date for retirement. Apparently unable to handle the stress of it all, three judges took medical leave.
I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. I wanted to fully support my colleagues. I did not want the clerks with whom I worked to lose their jobs. But I welcomed the idea of working from home at all times. I saw in the situation the possibility of doing more of what I do as an inspirational and a motivational speaker.
When it became evident that the proposal announced in January would likely not be implemented before the end of the year, the office settled back into an operational routine. There was still discussion from time to time about what would happen in the future, but there was little evidence of change of behavior.
How do you approach tomorrow?
Tomorrow is a concept of time yet to come that is the convergence of imagination and hope. Your body can never experience tomorrow. When it reaches that point that was tomorrow, it is today. You experience tomorrow through your thoughts and your emotions. You can alter the quality and meaningfulness of your tomorrow by what you imagine it can and will be and the reason you have to hope.
Tomorrow holds a treasure trove of possibilities. The wealth of what is possible tomorrow lies in the circumstances of tomorrow—the time, the place, the things, and the people. The depth and breadth of what you will find depends on the tools you use when you approach tomorrow. Here are some tools that may be used to mine the possibilities that lie in tomorrow.
Routine—that is, seeking tomorrow's possibilities in the repetition of the same set of circumstances as yesterday and/or today. You can approach tomorrow by setting your alarm to awaken you at the same time as you awoke today. You go through your usual morning rituals in getting dressed, eating, and preparing for the day's activities. You take the same route to the job to work with the same people and face the same issues you faced before. The calendar becomes the map that guides you to your possibilities. You may follow one routine Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and then follow another routine on the weekend.
Using routine as a tool to approach tomorrow, you will likely find the same possibilities tomorrow as you found today. The only chance that you will realize new possibilities is the occurrence of some unexpected event to push you out of the rut of your routine.
Memory—that is, seeking tomorrow's possibilities by resetting the circumstances to get the results you remember from the past. You can approach tomorrow's possibilities with the mindful certainty of what you have already experienced. You remember the good time you had last week, so you look forward to doing it again—whatever it was. You remember how she made you feel and you liked it, so you plan to see her again. As you plan for the re-encounter, you know that you may not be able to recreate the set of circumstances for the immediate tomorrow, but tomorrow's tomorrow or the one after that will suit you just fine. The benefit you got—financial, social, emotional, spiritual, or other—is worth the wait.
You can use memory as a tool for approaching tomorrow's possibilities to avoid what you don't want. Avoiding the times, places, things, and persons that annoyed, bothered, or hurt you becomes your way of mining new possibilities. You don't seek new possibilities; you just avoid some old ones. By chance, you may encounter something new.
Using memory as a tool to approach tomorrow affirmatively, you rely on certainty, the familiar, what you already know. The realm of possibilities in tomorrow is constrained by the limits of your memory and accuracy of your recall. If you can accurately recall and recreate the same set of circumstances, you will achieve what you set out to achieve—the same thing you got before.
Realism—that is, seeking to experience of tomorrow's possibilities only what you believe that you can handle. You can approach tomorrow's possibilities in the confines of your known resources and abilities. Do only what you have the money for because you don't know from where you might obtain other funds. Apply only for the job that specifies your qualifications instead of arguing that your qualifications would be comparable to what the employer is seeking. Look only for jobs in your area because you just bought the house you're living in. Meet only people who are like you—your age, your race, your political affiliation, and so on—because those are the people you are likely to get along with.
Using realism as a tool to approach tomorrow, you establish artificial limits on the possibilities. What is possible for you is only that which is logical...which makes sense...which is achievable. By setting these boundaries of realism, you seclude yourself from the vastness of innovation. Everything that exists today was once illogical, unreasonable, and/or unattainable in the minds of the general population. We know of it today because one day someone approached his or her tomorrow with a tool that allowed him or her to reach beyond realism for new possibilities.
Adventure—that is, seeking from tomorrow's possibilities something that you do not yet know or have not experienced. You can approach tomorrow's possibilities with a zeal for something new. You don't just wait for the unusual to happen, you plan for it to happen. You help create the set of circumstances that will result in a new experience. You are willing to meet new people, go to new places, and try new things.
Using adventure as a tool to approach tomorrow, you will likely find something different from what you encountered today. Your desire for these new encounters, however, is not just for the sake of the thrill, though adventure can lead you to be a slave to pleasure. As a tool for seeking tomorrow's treasure trove of possibilities, adventure is the way to expand your knowledge, uncover your hidden talents, develop your skills, establish new relationships, and discover ways to fulfill your purpose.
Attitude—that is, gauging the importance of your search for tomorrow's possibilities. You can approach tomorrow with the belief that whatever is going to happen will happen no matter what you do, or you can approach tomorrow with the belief that you have influence in determining the outcomes of the day. The belief that you have regarding your role in tomorrow's possibilities determines what tools you'll use to search out the possibilities. If you believe that you are just a pawn in a game that someone else is playing, you just wait for the circumstances to move you in one direction or another. If, on the other hand, you're the one playing the game, you devise the strategies and develop the tools that will ensure that you get what you are looking for.
Using attitude as a tool for approaching the possibilities of tomorrow is not optional. You will have an attitude about what lies in the future. You can choose whether to approach tomorrow as a routine or as an adventure. You have the option of using memory or realism as a tool to mine the treasures of tomorrow. On the other hand, your choice about attitude is not whether to use it or not to use it, but rather, what your attitude will be. You will approach tomorrow with an attitude and it will be yours, not the attitude of someone else.
Insight—that is, the ability to see the possibilities in whatever circumstances come with tomorrow. You can approach tomorrow with the confidence that whatever happens, you'll find something beneficial in the situation. Insight comes from an attitude that you have influence over what is possible for you. Living with such belief, you develop the habit of looking for your point of influence. The set of circumstances you confront are not intrinsically negative or positive. They are not good or bad. Positive, negative, good, bad, adverse, and beneficial are value judgments made about the situation. The value that you see or don't see in the circumstances is determined by your insight.
Using insight as a tool for approaching tomorrow ensures that you will realize the possibilities that are available for you tomorrow. You'll be certain that you can look at each day as one that enhances life.
Creativity—that is, making possibilities out of tomorrow's circumstances. You can approach tomorrow with an open mind ready to reshape the circumstances—i.e., people, places, and things—to fit your purpose. This means, of course, that you have to know your purpose or purposes. Your mind must be open so that there can be a free flowing of thoughts and ideas. Your sense of adventure, influential attitude, and insight guided by purpose gives you a perfect setting for not just searching for the possibilities, but creating them.
Using creativity as a tool for approaching tomorrow, you control the circumstances to open up possibilities. You set the time to do what you must do to achieve your purpose. You choose the people with whom to interact. You determine what things are important for tomorrow to be meaningful, and you decide where it will happen.
CHAPTER 6
CHOOSING TO LIVE MEANINGFULLY
There are too many things to do to fit into one lifetime. Choose to do what makes life meaningful.
* * * * *
During the summer after my first year of law school, I obtained a job in the office of the Los Angeles City Attorney. I was assigned to handle incoming calls from the public to direct the caller to the appropriate unit of the office or to refer him or her to another government entity. Usually the City Attorney assigned this task to newly hired attorneys. Because the job was so onerous, a person was assigned to the “public desk” on a two-week rotation. I did it for two months. My success in performing the job prompted the City Attorney to offer me a full-time position. I was tempted to accept it. At the time I was receiving $313 a month in Aid to the Blind, so the $1,049 monthly salary that the City Attorney offered was enticing.
Before making my decision, I talked with Harvey, the friend who recommended that I attend law school. His advice was that I return to school instead of taking the full-time job. He warned that interrupting my educational pursuit might result in my never completing law school. I followed Harvey's advice and turned down the job offer.
However, my finishing law school at the University of Southern California was almost interrupted by my desire to be with Andrea. I was in love, or at least I thought I was in love with the young lady whom I met while attending Yale. She herself was not a Yale student but lived in New Haven where Yale is located. At the time that I was in law school, she was attending college in Boston. As much as my limited income would allow me to pay the telephone bill, I talked with her as often as I could. I loved her voice. I loved the way she made me feel when we talked. The pleasure of the relationship far surpassed the displeasure of law school.
I investigated transferring to Boston. I considered Boston College. The idea of transferring was stopped abruptly when Andrea offered a point of consideration. She suggested that I figure out what my problem was—whether it was external or internal. She remarked, “If your problem is inside you, you will bring it with you if you move to Boston.”
I figured that the problem was just a matter of adjusting to the new geographic and academic environment. I faced the same adjustment issue in my first year at Yale, and I expected that moving to Boston would not have made adjustment any easier. I stayed in Los Angeles and addressed the matter there.
I didn't always have the wise counsel of a friend when choosing what actions to take. Sometimes my choices were driven by the desire for pleasure or recognition or revenge. Usually, my actions so driven were regrettable rather than meaningful.
How do you know when to say yes and when to say no to opportunities that present themselves to you?
Your life is the result of the choices you have made up to now. No matter what words you use to describe life, you will be expressing your assessment of what you have gotten from your past decisions. Life for you may be happy, unfair, wonderful, difficult, great, sucky, pleasant, depressing, peaceful, hard, meaningful, complex, joyful, hectic, sweet, ruined, satisfying, meaningless, exciting, the pits, or some other term that I can’t write in this family-friendly book. You cannot change the decisions you have already made. You can, however, change your assessment of the results. You can also change the way you make your future decisions.
It is impossible for you to do everything. First, life is not long enough for that. Second, some things require knowledge, skills, and/or inclination that you may not have. Third, some things are mutually exclusive—that is, to do one thing excludes some other. Whatever options come your way, you must be able to decide if they’re ones you should seize as opportunities to make life what you want it to be.
While you can't do everything, there are many opportunities that you can seize. Too many to fit into one lifetime. From among the many, many options available to you, you must choose. Whatever choice you make is a decision that the action or activity is important enough to give up your limited time. Once the time is spent, you cannot get it back.
To determine if your time—i.e., your life—is well spent, you must identify what you are getting in exchange. Are you exchanging life for things that are lasting or for things that provide only temporary satisfaction?
* Are you getting money? Is it enough? How much more would be enough?
* Are you getting pleasure? Will the pleasure last a lifetime, or will you have to keep giving your life for a repeated thrill?
* Are you getting recognition? Is it from someone who loves you? What good is recognition from a person who doesn't care about you?
* Are you getting revenge? When you get revenge, are you really getting or are you losing?
Life choices that are based solely on money, pleasure, recognition, and/or revenge are not likely to result in a sense of fulfillment. The gratification you get from attaining them doesn’t last. You have to keep repeating the action or find new ways to generate the feeling of satisfaction that they provide.
The sense of fulfillment and meaning comes from the choices you make to positively impact your world. The impact you have can only be known after the choice is made. It would be too late to wait until the end of life to assess whether the choices you made were the best choices. Because you cannot relive your life with the knowledge and wisdom of the experiences you gained, you must develop a way of determining today whether the choices you make today are the ones that make life meaningful.
I offer four factors to consider when making your choices of what to do for lasting impact.
Growth. Ask yourself: If I do this, will it promote my growth and development? Every living thing is growing and developing. When it stops the development process, it starts dying. If what you choose to do is not leading toward your growth, it is pushing toward your demise and will not make life meaningful. (See Chapters 8 through 11.)
Connection. Ask yourself: If I do this, will it promote connection with the people around me and my environment? Will it establish or nurture mutually beneficial relationships? Your relationships with people add significance to life that your relationships with things cannot. When you interact beneficially with another individual, you enhance your life and hers (or his). If this mutual benefit does not exist, one of you is using the other. The used loses life with no gain. (See Chapters 12 through 16.)
Purpose. Ask yourself: In doing this, do I fulfill my purpose? The possessive “my” is important here. Fulfilling a purpose does not necessarily make your action meaningful. Fulfilling your specific purpose does. Every element of creation serves a purpose. You differ from inanimate objects of the universe and other living creatures in that you get to choose whether to live within or outside your purpose. You act meaningfully when you do what you were meant to do. (See Chapters 17, 18, and 19.)
Self-definition. Ask yourself: Will doing this be consistent with the principles that define me and that I have adopted as my guides? You have beliefs, standards, and principles that you have adopted. Though you may not have put them in writing and may not be able to articulate them, they are reflected in your actions. They define your attitudes and views—in short, your life. If you choose actions contrary to your defining principles, your beliefs, standards, and principles are empty and meaningless. If they are meaningless, so will be your life. (See Chapters 20 through 23.)
You can maximize the meaningfulness of your life by choosing to do that which promotes your growth, establishes and nurtures connection, fulfills your purpose, and is consistent with the beliefs that define you.
CHAPTER 7
IMAGINING A MEANINGFUL LIFE
The image that you hold in your mind of the life that you want to live is the context in which you respond to opportunities.
* * * * *
As we sat in a restaurant having lunch together during my last year of law school, Harvey, my high-school chum and college mate, engaged me in conversation about my plans for practicing law.
“What kind of law do you want to practice?” Harvey asked. “What do you see yourself doing as a lawyer?”
I responded, “I don’t know for sure. I don’t see myself arguing one side of a case or the other. I see myself sitting on the bench and making the decision.”
The picture of my being a judge that was evoked by Harvey’s questions stuck with me. Within five years, I was doing what I pictured myself doing albeit not in a courtroom.
In 1980, I was working as the executive director of the Disabled Resources Center in Long Beach, California. It was my third job following law school. A job announcement crossed my desk. It was from the Department of Social Services. This State of California department was seeking applicants for the position of Hearing Officer, the precursor classification for the current administrative law judge position. They were affirmatively seeking applicants who had a disability. As the executive director of DRC, it was my responsibility to pass the recruitment information to the counselors who could then identify clients for whom the job might be appropriate. Based on the description of the job—conducting quasi-judicial hearings concerning issues in social services programs, I decided it was a job for which I should apply.
It was easy for me to make the decision to apply for the hearing officer position. I had a picture in my mind of what kind of work I wanted to do with my law school training. With such a picture, I had no problem identifying a fitting opportunity.
What do you see as the picture for your life?
The image that you hold in your mind of the life that you want to live is the context in which you respond to opportunities. You should say yes to those opportunities that will complete the picture that you imagine of a good life and no to those that will not. At times you may find yourself saying yes when you should say no. In such situations, you are likely to regret the decision you made. You might even complain that life just is not going your way.
If you don’t hold an image for your life, then you will struggle with your decision making. You will always be perplexed with whether to say yes or to say no. Even after you make the decision, you may be nagged with questions of uncertainty about your choice.
To be sure that you are making the decisions that will make your life meaningful, you must have an image of what a meaningful life is. This is not to suggest that you cannot live meaningfully without a vivid image of a meaningful life. It is possible for you to chance upon meaningfulness. The significance of having an image is a policy against making decisions that waste your life on activities that are insignificant.
What you envision as a meaningful life may not be the same as that imagined by your spouse or close friend or me. Your picture of life is drawn from your collection of experiences, complex of emotions, and vault of knowledge. Your experiences are not the same as mine; your emotional reactions are not the same as mine; your fund of knowledge is not the same as mine. Hence, there can be no question that what we draw from our differing resources will vary. Nevertheless, I share with you what I picture as a meaningful life to stimulate your creative thinking.
For me, a meaningful life is one that has the following benefits, opportunities, and responsibilities:
Basic needs for physical survival are met. It should be obvious that an essential element of meaningful life is life. Hence, we must have the things that sustain life—food, water, clothing, shelter, exercise, rest, etc.
Access to the universe of knowledge. Knowledge is the fuel for thought, ideas, and creativity. It is essential to the vitality of the mind as food is to the body. Since knowledge is not depleted when it is shared, we all can and should have equal access to the universe of what can be known.
To be loved. Love is the connective force of meaningful relationships. It provides the sense of belonging and appreciation that are crucial to emotional well being.
To love without inhibition. The natural tendency of love is to be shared. It is strengthened when it is allowed to flow. When the flow of love is thwarted, the result will be frustration, indifference, and apathy. A meaningful life should be one that is free from the barriers to expressing one’s love.
Freedom to share what you think. One’s thoughts are one aspect of a person’s identity. You must be free to reveal who you are if your life is to be meaningful. This is not to suggest that a person with a mental illness or mental impairment cannot live a meaningful life. I make a distinction between freedom to express and ability to express. Meaningfulness is not a function of capacity but rather of opportunity without restriction by another person.
Freedom to express what you feel. One’s emotions are another aspect of a person’s identity. Like your thoughts, you must be free to reveal who you are if your life is to be meaningful. Again, I make a distinction between freedom to express and ability to express.
Freedom to decide what you do. Of the various and sundry activities to occupy your life, you decide which to do. Life cannot be meaningful for you if someone else controls what you should be deciding. You may grant another person the authority to decide for you because he or she is in a better position to make the decision. For example, the other person may have more knowledge regarding the situation and can, therefore, better assess the pros and cons of an action. So long as such delegation is willingly made, you are still in control.