Whether we like it or not we are bestowed with a life. It’s a journey we all have to make. Some go gladly; some go recklessly; some attempt drudgingly; some move on automatic pilot. It includes death, grief – obscene loads of it – not as an opposite but as an integral part of the way life is made. Nobody, however, gets an accurate map. Everybody just has a hunch. So this journey is the oldest trip in any manuscript – from birth to death, from self to world, from known to unknown – but each of us travels it anew, and totally alone.
We often look outside of ourselves as heroes and teachers because it has not occurred to most of us that we may already be the role model we seek. The completeness we are looking for may be trapped within ourselves by beliefs, attitudes, and self-doubt. Our belief is like a pair of sunglasses. When we wear one and look at life through it, it is difficult to convince ourselves that what we see is not what is real. With our sunglasses on, sometimes life looks to us differently. There is a Talmudic saying that goes, “we do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.” Knowing what is real requires we remember that we are wearing “glasses” and to take them off. This quest of purification rarely means that we need to add something to ourselves; it is, really, more an undoing than doing, a freeing ourselves from beliefs we have about who we are and ways we have been persuaded to “fix” ourselves to know who we genuinely are.
There is no doubt that each of us is incomplete, a work in progress. Perhaps it would be most accurate to add the word “yet” to all our assessments of ourselves and each other. “That person” has not learned compassion… yet; she has not developed courage… yet. It changes everything. If life is a process, then all judgments are provisional. We should fall fearlessly, break a bone or two and let nature heal the fractures. It is of course with an acknowledgment that the ruptures sometimes do not mend again.
Sometimes all that is needed is a sense of possibility – a true chance for the “maybe” to play out in our great business of learning how to be, to do, to do without, and to depart.