Welcome
to today! It's the newest day in all of our lives,
and we're all very fortunate to have reached this day and
received the ability to experience it for all that it's worth.
Just what are you going to do with your new today?
Every day I live I
am more convinced that the waste of life lies in the love we have
not given, the powers we have not used, the selfish prudence that
will risk nothing and which, shirking pain, misses happiness as
well.
Mary
Cholmondeley
The most noble charity is
to prevent our neighbor from having the need to accept charity, and the
best gift is to teach and assist our neighbors in giving freely.
Sina M. Reid
The
purpose of life is not to be happy. The purpose of life is to
matter, to be productive, to have it make some difference that you live at
all.
We are a nation of communicators, but communication is not
always connection. I remember a scene in a Woody
Allen movie where a group of lonely New York men sit
around a table with beers, frantically talking to each
other to ease their loneliness. Everyone talks at
once. Gradually they raise their voices and
interrupt each other trying to be heard. Finally
they become so desperate that they are actually spitting
on each other in their efforts to connect to each other,
but they never do. This scene usually gets a
laugh. I think more and more that life has become
like this.
These days, disconnection is a habit, a way of life.
I had not really felt how isolated I was until I spent a
week in Fiji. Arriving at night and unpacking, I
idly picked up the reading material left in my room by the
hotel management. Under "Cultural
Differences" I was surprised to find that it is
considered good manners in Fiji to acknowledge total
strangers on the street. The brochure was quite
specific, telling me not to be alarmed if I found myself
greeted by strangers, and indeed, people would think it
rude if I did not respond in kind. The proper form
was to make eye contact and acknowledge each other either
by nodding and smiling or by saying,
"Bu-la." In the place where I was raised,
New York City, such a thing would be extremely
unwise. Amused, I decided to try it.
What this
means in practice is this: You walk down the street
to the post office to buy a stamp for a postcard. On
the way you might pass three or four people, greeting each
one of them with a nod or a "Bu-la" and
receiving their greeting. You buy your stamp, a
transaction which takes only a moment. Walking back,
you pass the very same people and it is expected
that you greet them again even though you passed by
only moments ago. Annoying at first, but by the end
of the week it had become second nature.
Then I returned to the States. Rushing out to fill
an empty refrigerator, I found myself on a busy street in
California. All alone. No one made eye
contact. No one greeted me. No one
smiled. In some very profound way I felt both
invisible and diminished. Yet the street was totally
familiar. It was my home.
The Fijians are aware of a basic human law. We all
influence one another. We are a part of each other's
reality. There is no such thing as passing someone
and not acknowledging your moment of connection, not
letting others know their effect on you and seeing yours
on them. For Fijians, connection is natural, just
the way the world is made. Here, we pass each other
with our lights out as ships in the night.
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Several years ago I went away to Cornwell, and I
bought all the holy books that I could get my
hands on to take with me. I spent months
reading them all to try to find commonalities,
and this was the commonality of them all:
if you look only at the externals of life and
humans, you are missing what is essential.
Again, let me define: when I am talking
about a teacher, I'm not just talking about
somebody who has a diploma that says he or she
has taken so many boring courses. I'm
talking about parents, I'm talking about
custodians, I'm talking about the person who
sells ice cream on the corner. Everybody
teaches all of the time, and, therefore, it is
imperative that we all know as teachers what is
essential because only when we know collectively
what is essential, can we know what is
possible. And the wonder of it all is that
what is essential is so vast and so marvelous
and what is visible to the eye is so limited and
so small.
One of my heroes is Buckminster Fuller, and this
little old man was at our university
recently. He's just spectacular! He
wears big, heavy lenses, and he has hearing aids
behind each ear, but he is so vital that with a
piece of chalk and a blackboard, he can keep
everybody mesmerized for three solid
hours. You wonder how he can do it.
Just recently he, too, was asking the question
along with so many other great
individuals: what is essential about the
human person? Is it our body? Is it
our mind? Is it our arms? Our
legs? Our fingers? What is truly
essential. Who am I? Who is the
"I of I"?
He wrote a wonderful article that appeared in
the Saturday Review/World. It is so
typical of Buckminster Fuller, who even at
seventy-eight is still so vitally interested in
what makes the human being unique and
wondrous. He wonders why we are all so
magical, why it is that when we really begin to
know humans, we can't help but love them because
they are so unique and so different. If
you deny even one person entrance in your life,
you'll never get that person's uniqueness from
anyone else. I, for instance, want you in
my life because without you, my life will never
be complete. But only when you find the
you of you, will you have anything to give me,
just as I must find the me of me. Why do I
read? Why do I travel? Why do I
listen? Why do I care? So that I can
get more and more and more and share it with
you--that's the only purpose for having it.
In this article, Buckminster Fuller, his eyes
still dancing (seventy-eight years of dancing
eyes, what a wonder!) wrote something in his own
little whimsical way. He wrote,
I
am seventy-eight, and at my age I find that I
have now taken in more than 1,000 tons of water,
food, and air, the chemistry of which is
temporarily employed for different lengths of
time as hair, skin, flesh, bone, blood, etc.,
then progressively discarded. I weighed in
at 7 pounds, and I went on to 70, then 170, and
even 207 pounds. Then I lost seventy
pounds, and I said, "Who was that seventy
pounds?--because here I am." The
seventy pounds I got rid of was ten times the
flesh-and-bone inventory at which I had weighed
in, in 1895.
I am certain that I am not the avoirdupois [our
system of weights based on the 16-ounce pound]
of the most recent meals I have eaten, some of
which will become my hair, only to be cut off
twice a month. This lost seventy pounds of
organic chemistry obviously wasn't
"me," nor are any of the remaining
presently associated atoms "me."
We have been making a great error in identifying
"me" and "you" as these
truly transient and, ergo, sensorially
detectable chemistries. . . There have been
quite a number of weighings of people as they
died. Many cancer-doomed paupers have been
willing to have their beds places on
scales. The only difference manifest
between weight before and after death is that
caused by air exhaled from the lungs or urine
that has been passed. Whatever life is, it
doesn't weigh anything.
And then he goes on to talk about our
minds. He says our ideas are constantly
changing. The mind of a child is not the
mind of an adult. The mind you have
tonight won't be the mind you have next week or
the week following, so obviously it isn't your
changing mind that is essential. What is
the you of you? What is this wondrous,
nebulous something that he calls eternal?. . . .
Those of us who work with children should be
bound and determined that we're not only going
to find in ourselves the "I of I" so
that we can share it with these kids, but we're
also going to help them and set them free so
they can find the "I of I" in
themselves, develop it, revel in the wonder of
it, and then share it with others.
When you have come to grips, for example, with
what is essential about yourself, only then will
you be able to decide what is essential about
your children. And the truth of it is that
so often we professionals tend to see children
as their externally manifested bits and
pieces. We tend to divide them up.
We tend to see each other, also, as our bits and
pieces, instead of our external whole.
Living
Life Fully, the e-zine
exists to try to provide for visitors of the world wide web a
place
of growth, peace, inspiration, and encouragement. Our
articles
are presented as thoughts of the authors--by no means do
we
mean to present them as ways that anyone has to live
life. Take
from them what you will, and disagree with
whatever you disagree
with--just know that they'll be here for you
each week.
It does not
always help to analyze and think about problems with your rational
mind.
Sometimes it is far more effective to turn to your inner
self, to ask the universe for
help. Simply sit quietly. Take
a few deep breaths and focus your awareness within.
Ask your wise
inner self, either silently or aloud, for guidance or help in
understanding
the message. As you get a sense of what feels right,
act on this feeling.
I am the poster boy
for overcommitment. And I'm not particularly proud of
that. We all have our weaknesses, and if I look at my life in
the last decade, running too fast has been mine. Oh, I could
justify that it's nearly all good stuff that I run toward--I'm not the
guy blowing two hours watching trash TV or playing two rounds of golf
a week while my sons wonder why Dad never shows up for their games.
I could match my
attendance at kids' games with nearly any parent and come out on
top. I could rationalize that I've never had a nervous breakdown
or resorted to any sort of illicit drug--pop isn't illegal, is it?--to
keep myself going.
Still, I have to
face the reality that I'm far busier than I should be.
The good news is,
I'm changing; the bad news is, that's like a 400-pound man saying he's
going on a diet.
At times, my weeks
have this Houdini quality about them: I bind myself in handcuffs
and crawl into a trunk. The trunk is wrapped with chains.
Then the trunk is dropped to the bottom of the East River to see if I
can break free and swim to the surface without drowning.
Thus far, I've
gotten out of the jam every time, broken the surface of the water just
before my lungs are about to burst.
But though that
might equate to success in the world's eyes, it does not in God's
eyes. Because enslaving ourselves like that asks a price, though
we're often so desperately trying to unshackle ourselves that we don't
take time to notice.
For me, that price
has been a number of things:
A subtle, but
real, loss of patience: When you're tired, anger more easily
gains a foothold on you. It may not be a four-letter-word,
dog-kicking, fist-slamming barrage of anger, but I know it's
there. And I know it sometimes gets used against the people I
love the most.
A subtle, but
real, loss of creativity: When you're tired, you're more apt to
settle for the ordinary when, somewhere deep inside, you might find
the extraordinary.
A subtle, but
real, loss of control over the more mundane aspects of life:
checking accounts that need more consistent pruning, financial matters
that need more plowing and planting, closets and dressers that need
more consistent weeding.
But the more
serious price has come in the areas that I'm called to make my
priorities: my relationship with God and my relationship with
others, in particular my wife.
I've given time to
both, but it hasn't been the quantity, or quality, they deserve.
Again, I look good on paper: I'm an elder at our church, I teach
Sunday school, I occasionally preach a sermon, I speak to men's
groups. But I know, deep down, that God doesn't want a resume from
me; He wants a relationship with me. And when you wedge
God into your daily planner as if He were just another line on the
To-Do List, that relationship suffers.
Likewise, I could
point out trips I've taken with my wife, presents I've given her,
dinners out we've shared. But I know, deep down, that she'd
trade such things for more consistent "ordinary" time with
me, time that might be nothing more than a walk around the block but
which is given with my full attention, not as some sort of
parenthetical phrase in the midst of a more significant sentence. . .
.
I've come to learn
that you can't have it all. So you have to decide what you want
and what you're willing to give up. Some people decide what they
want more than anything is to be successful in business and thus are
willing to sacrifice their family to get there. I'm not among
them. . . .
I believe we're
called to give our best to God; our work should be done with gusto and
quality. But we're also called to lives of balance, and when we
get out of balance, our work becomes a legalistic
going-through-the-motions, not something filled with heart. Our
work becomes more important than the people who it's intended
for. Our lives are guided by our heads and not our hearts.
To awaken
each morning with a smile brightening
my face; to greet the day with
reverence for the
opportunities it contains; to approach my work
with
a clean
mind; to hold ever before me, even
in the doing of little
things, the Ultimate
Purpose toward which I am working;
to meet men
and women with laughter
on my
lips and love in my heart; to be gentle, kind
and courteous through all
the hours; to approach
the night with
weariness that ever woos sleep
and the
joy that comes from work well done--this is how I desire to waste wisely my days.
Thomas Dekker (c.
1570-c. 1641)
No, "The
Extremes" are not a singing group. They are the choices we
have to make. Now, you may say you want everything in moderation
and don't like to be extreme in anything you choose. But without
extremes, there is no depth or challenge in your life.
What do you believe in? What are you here to do? You have to
make some choices when you see life and nature being destroyed.
The truth is we all have to take extreme measures at times. It is
not a question of whether you will be extreme, but a question of what
you will be extreme about.
What is important to you? Or is nothing important to you, so you
take the extreme position of never speaking up for a worthy cause or
person?
If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to
preside
over the christening of all children, I should ask that
her gift to
each child in the world be a sense of wonder so
indestructible that
it would last throughout life, as an unfailing
antidote against the
boredom and disenchantments of later years,
and the sterile
preoccupation with things that are artificial, the
alienation
from the sources of our strength.
Yes, life
can be mysterious and confusing--but there's much of life that's
actually rather dependable and reliable. Some principles apply
to life in so many different contexts that they can truly be called
universal--and learning what they are and how to approach them and use
them can teach us some of the most important lessons that we've ever
learned.
My doctorate is in Teaching and Learning. I use it a lot when I
teach at school, but I also do my best to apply what I've learned to
the life I'm living, and to observe how others live their lives.
What makes them happy or unhappy, stressed or peaceful, selfish or
generous, compassionate or arrogant? In this book, I've done my
best to pass on to you what I've learned from people in my life,
writers whose works I've read, and stories that I've heard.
Perhaps these principles can be a positive part of your life, too! Universal Principles of Living Life Fully. Awareness of
these principles can explain a lot and take much of the frustration
out of the lives we lead.
™
