What Did You Come Here For?

"Now that it's all over, what did you really do yesterday that was worth mentioning?" Coleman Cox

What did I do yesterday? I can't hardly remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, certainly not the day before. The older I get the more I experience "Mental Pause". I go into a room to get something and by the time I'm there I've forgotten what I came for. What did I come here do in the first place? Why did I occupy this particular body at this particular southern location?

Oh year! I remember now! I came here to learn how to love and be loved, how to forgive and be forgiven, how to be patient and extend patience, to help and be helped, to ask questions and become answers for those few who need me to be even if for just a moment.

Question: What did you come here to do this lifetime?

Third String

"It's the hardest thing in the world to accept a little success and leave it that way." Marlon Brando

I'm pretty sure that it was "a little success" that could not be embraced or left alone that drove my heart to attack itself as much or perhaps more than it was my genetic propensity. I've said in other places that I always wanted more and success was right up there on the top of that unattainable list.

I was never satisfied with what little I'd achieved. The truth is, I was a for a short while, a second string writer, therapist and teacher and after a few years was finally moved down to third string. The push for first string is the problem, the striving to move from third or second, the unrelenting drive to climb the ladder of success gets so all consuming that is until the ladder falls down on you and need a cardiac surgeon to lift it off.

Today I am content for the first time to be where I am, be who I am, contribute what I can, look back on what I've done and say, "you know it was and is enough" and third string is not bad. At least I'm still in the game and who knows the First String and Second String my give out at any time and then the Coach of coaches may put me back in, but if HE/SHE makes that call I will not wear my heart out in the last quarter of the game.

Question: Are you able to accept where you are or are you still pushing, struggling, driving yourself a little crazy?

Hide and Seek

"All my adult life, I've hidden in my work. Not behind it, but deep inside it..." Rheta Grimsley Johnson

Like most men I learned to work for a living instead of learning how to live while working. I learned to work as we say here in the South, "from kin to can't". Well I can't anymore. Well that's not entirely true--I could--but at this point in my life choose not too. Don't get me wrong. I will always work. I believe retirement was invented to give the factory worker time off their feet and their brain a rest from the repetitiveness that assembly lines demanded.

But the kind of work I will do has got to be more like the way it started. For example-- I ran a counseling group because I enjoyed it. But by the time I stopped I was running four or five a week and dreading all those after the first two.

Like the author in the quote above I see now that I was playing hide and seek. I hid from large parts of myself and sought parts that others had kept hidden from themselves because that was my job. Now my number one job is to heal, love, be loved, and come out, come out, wherever I am and work on myself while working for love.

Question: Are you working the life right out of yourself or loving your work?

Passionate

"Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions." Benjamin Disraeli

A million years ago when I began my career I did so from a place of passion. Money, prestige, fame, or even pats on the back were not motivators. Joy, seeing people be moved to tears or laughter, a feeling of satisfaction that only comes from doing what you love was what got my juices flowing. I was energized by putting work clothes on my youthful dreams of teaching and writing.

Somewhere along the line passion declined, profit proliferated, energy waned, joy subsided, and in the end, not only were the juices not flowing, but obviously neither was the life blood to my heart. I had clogged arteries, clogged priorities, and a partly cloudy brain with constant thunderstorms that would rain down on my soul and drown out the still small voice that said, "Stop, rest, retreat, re-group and reconnect with your heart's desires to help people again and forget about how much or how little they can pay.

Today is the only day I have for sure (and not even the rest of the day is a given) so I will re-vision and renew my commitment to doing what I truly love.

Question: What were you once passionate about that is still calling you in your dreams?

Less Really Is More

"Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations." Edward De Bono

Before my heart attack I thought I really should do more, be more, say more, think more, feel more--more, more, more. It was like whatever I did was never quite enough. Doing less didn't seem to be an option at the time.

Now I do less and less and enjoy what little I actually do more and more.When people would say, "less is more," it never really made sense but it finally does now, not just intellectually, but emotionally and even spiritually.

The "still,small inner voice" is becoming more important than ever and by doing less it is even getting louder, more audible, and clearer. To grow spiritually which is more important than ever, I have come to realize that by doing less work, less talking, less traveling I get to focus on just being loving to my wife, friends, family, my God and most of all myself.

Question:Are you allowing yourself enough quiet and stillness?

Priorities-Again

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts. Neither are your ways my ways..." Isaiah

I never in a million years would have thought that what I needed was a heart attack to motivate me to get my priorities straight. Indeed to a large degree I thought I had them straight. Well if not straight at least not that crooked. But "the crooked shall be made straight," I think Jesus said that and if he didn't I'm going to guess he thought it. Anyway that is what it took--lying flat on my back.

You see four months later as I sit here writing I know in my heart that had I died this time last year many would have said, "he worked hard," "he wrote a lot of books," and maybe they would say "he even helped a few." Now I realize that if people don't say after that Fat Lady has sung her last song, "In the end, he worked hardest at love," then I will have missed the mark again.

Question: What will they say about you?

Purrrrrfect Prescription

"Creation is a drug I can't do without." Cecil B.DeMille

I never thought I would be on such good speaking terms with a pharmacist. Since my heart attack I am taking things with names I can't even pronounce. But the real prescription that I am following religiously is really keeping my ticker ticking:

1. Every day tell wife how much I love her.
2. Let my two Giant Malamutes take me for a walk every day.
3. Pet white cat once a day and listen to her purrrrrrrr.
4. Every third day try to make friends with Black Cat who growls like a dog at me.
5. Try to not watch much bad television especially news programs.
6. Live by my "inner clock" and worry less about deadlines--pun intended.
7.Remember to thank God for every day that I am on this side of the green summer grass.

Question: Do you need your "Life Prescription" refilled?

Time Off

"Happiness may well consist primarily of an attitude toward time." Robert Grudin

I took some time off last week from writing this blog. I had to reassess my usage of "time." For several weeks after my heart attack and surgery I thought I was running out of time so I began running through lots of things. I ran through my memory searching for people I needed to reconnect with. I ran through my dreams making sure every morning I was remembering as many as possible looking for clues and messages that would add meaning to my life and help me understand where I was, who I am and what I wanted to do next in life. I ran through books like a marathon man getting through each page as fast as possible.

I was in such a hurry, just like pre-heart attack days, but only this time I was more internally than externally directed as if somehow this made my rapid pace justified. I decided to slow down, take some deep breaths and hope and trust that what needed doing would get done, who needed to be connected with would be. A new attitude towards time.

Question: Do you know what time it is for your deepest self?

An Interior Kind of Wandering

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” —Marcel Proust

The grass isn’t greener on the other side of the valley. It’s just different, full of mystery. Here is where I stand and there is much uncharted territory right under my feet. I could go elsewhere if I like, but I'm certain to find the same unfinished business.

Still, sometimes I have to jump the fence that surrounds me. When I need to break free from an old perspective, roaming awhile like I did yesterday can do a lot of good.

The older I get the more I see that the most fruitful journey isn’t an exterior kind of wandering. It’s exploring my interior landscape. A silent walk, a weekend retreat, a timeout from relationship and responsibility allows me to discover new ground inside myself.

On this journey I know I need time to see things anew, to contemplate the challenges before me. I may need to grieve deeply to renew my search or sing, laugh or forgive. This is not a blind quest, but a kind of roaming that clears the eye, empowering me to see the truth right here, right now.

Question: Is it time to wander inside?

Taking A New Road

"Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car." ~E.B. White

Today, like many days when I have nothing really pressing to do I drive down quiet, unfamiliar country roads just to see where they go. I am never disappointed because I don't drive with any expectations. I just go to see what I can see and where I'll end up. Sometimes I drive for thirty minutes to an hour and get totally lost only to eventually come upon something that tells me where I really am.

Now that I have survived a heart attack I don't really know where I am because I'm heading down another kind of road--one that I have never been down before. I don't know where I'm going but I have a clearer idea of who will be my traveling companions than I ever did in my youth. Back then it seemed I was always picking up temporary relationship hitch-hikers that very often wanted out sooner than I or I would rue the day I picked them up.

Brenda, the friend I spoke to today after not talking for 30 years ago is still riding along with me. My beautiful wife is by my side co-piloting and switching off occasionally as pilot when I become road weary. My aging, but relatively healthy mom, dad, mother-in-law, father-in-law and my sweet friends Bill Stott and Robert Bly, about a dozen long time friends not to mention my brother, sister are all sitting comfortably in my mortality motor vehicle.

This road winds, curves, and delights and I can't even see around the next bend. I can't hardly wait to see where it takes me.

Question: Are you taking roads never before traveled or just taking the same old ones?

Hindsight 20/20

“The pond is fed from within.” —William Lyon Phelps

A pond evaporates in a time of drought, and it takes a long time and a lot of rain to fill it up again. For a few years before my heart attack I too often felt like a dried-up pond, a soul that resembled the Sahara desert, an empty well. In my parched condition I would often look back and try to see what I was really giving others? I try to see when serving switched into struggling?

The work I want to do now should water my soul and keep it strong, as good food nourishes the body.

With 20/20 hindsight I see that some of the jobs I did, even the creative work I produced,became too big and too important, obscuring everything else in my life. I, like many who so desperately hope our soul will be healed through accomplishments and achievements lost sight of what is really valuable, real, and eternal. As the great Albert Schwietzer said,"The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who sought and found how to serve."

Question: Is the work you are doing make you feel moist or parched?

Questions or Answers

“Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.” —Clarissa Pinkola Estés

As a boy I was taught that men, real men were supposed to have the answers to life’s questions and solutions to all life’s problems. In my twenties I would reassure myself whatever I didn't yet know, I would surely understand in my thirties. Of course, the thirties came and went and I hoped that the remaining mysteries (there were so many) would all be solved by midlife.

As I prepare to say goodbye to my fifties I finally have begun to realize that the most important questions are still unanswered and may go unanswered. At this point in my life I am beginning to wonder whether “answers” that are static, never-changing even exist. Such a moment represents a golden opportunity.

I'm beginning to get the sense that it’s time to stop pretending I can ever get THE ANSWERS and that now is the time to really start asking more questions. Perhaps it is in the process of being ready to simply ask "and ye shall receive" is where I was meant to be all along. Simply engaging in the mysterious unknown, being the perpetual student is what brings me closer to my own center and gives me a better chance of finding a little more serenity.

Question: What questions do you still find unanswered no matter what age you are?

What is Happening?

“The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet.” —James Oppenheim

Some days before my heart attack I would wake up hell-bent on happiness. If I pause now I usually notice that I’ve found it, and wonder how I got here. More often than not my happiness comes from what happens, and what I do with it. For me these days happiness exists in what’s happening now, not in my daydreams of what’s going to happen some other day.

Wise souls in all ages have been saying this same thing for thousands of years. While I can't put any claim on wisdom yet I do know if I don’t practice the art of finding my “happiness” right where I am, then nothing that changes outside me will make me happy.

Question: Is what is happening now in your own life resulting in happiness?

Patience

“Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.” —Hal Borland

I learned how to "wait" a long time ago. I waited on my high school sweetheart to get ready for a date sometimes for hours, but not patiently. I waited to leave home, I waited to grow up and get rich-- (still waiting). Patience remains a way of being that eluded me right up to my heart attack and even during. You should have seen me as a "patient" who had to "wait" in the emergency room and then later in the "waiting" room to see my doctor for a follow up.

What I needed in my teens, twenties,thirties, forties and now fifties is patience-- with my own healing process, patience with my wife's. After all she survived a heart attack, surgery and my impatience.

I need to cultivate and exercise patience with people in general: the slow driver ahead of me, the person with too many items in the “express” checkout, the guy I saw yesterday flossing his teeth and talking on the cell phone while driving. To live in this foreign land of patience, I need a greater sense of humor. And most of all, I need to have patience with myself while I'm trying to learn patience.

Patience is more than a virtue. It’s a necessity, if I'm ever going to experience serenity that lasts longer than a few minutes.

Question: With whom or what do you need more patience with?

Legacy

"No legacy is so rich as honesty." Shakespeare

This sultry summer morning as I was walking my Alaskan Malamutes for mine I saw a concrete slab that held up the park's ice machines. On it was etched the words, "Mary Koop 2005". Mary like the rest of us wants to be remembered, wants people to know she was there that day.

Since the summer of of 1984 I have written over 20 books. Mary and I want the same thing. Some of you reading this have this in common with Mary and I. You have your children, creative endeavors, projects, patents and portraits. We all want to be remembered for something, for being here, for having given something to the world that gave so much of itself to us.

Since my heart attack I've discovered that my real legacy lies in the hearts and memories of those who love me and theirs' reside in me. How people "feel" about me is rapidly becoming the true measure and meaning of my time here on the planet. While I wouldn't take anything for the books that got published I won't spend the rest of what time I have left putting publications over people at least not on good days.

Question: Who besides your immediate family will carry your legacy in their heart?

Pondering and Ruminating

“The present moment is a powerful goddess.” —Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Some call it nostalgia, some call it introspection, ruminating and pondering are nice Southern names for the same things but the truth is I still spend a lot of time in the past —thinking about what I should have done or said, doubting,and second-guessing. Sometimes I savor a memory. Before my heart attack I too often swam in the deep water of regret.

Also before my chest was cracked open I would jump like frog legs in a frying pan into the future, planning my next career move, conquest or failure. In the meantime, life was often passing by unnoticed. (By the way fried frog legs taste just like chicken.)

As my healing progresses and deepens, I spend less and less time pondering the things I'm powerless to change. With hindsight I can even honor and be grateful for the addictions and addictive thinking as the powerful teachers they are. When I put judgment aside, I'm available to feel and see what’s happening right now, really see myself, and loved ones as they are. In this simple perspective lies freedom.

Question: What do you find yourself ruminating about these days?

Uplifted

"Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek, But in our mind?"
—Percy Shelley

Sometimes I just can’t figure things out. Especially during the early stages of my recovery from surgery I felt so out of control, perplexed, out of sorts. Then I'd hear a song on the radio, or see something beautiful that reminded me of what I love, or hear the call of a certain bird that flies me right back into the good parts of my childhood. Just taking a walk at these times reminded me there is no such thing as distance, no such state as “all alone.”

Today before leaving for work, during a break in the day’s schedule, or just before going to sleep I’m going to remember those moments of connectedness—seeing a fine picture, reading a great poem, appreciating a model airplane, an old TV show, a good song. Absorbing these small pleasures takes me back to the source of all beauty, energy, and bliss. As I remember what lifts me up, I’ll let myself feel uplifted; I’ll rest in that fullness and walk in that knowledge.

Question: What lifts you up when pressed down by the illusion "you're all alone"?

Finding the Balance Again

“Teach us to care and not to care and to be still.” —T.S. Eliot

In my youth I did all kinds of things in the name of survival or to be thought of as a "nice guy": taking care of everybody else, knocking myself out to prove I was “worthy” of love. I lost a lot of myself in the process.

Or I’d try the opposite side for a while and I’d pretend I didn’t need anybody, the lone wolf who would only look out for old Number One, when secretly I feared that no one else cared about me. Both tactics failed.

In the end I’ve had to begin learning the difference between “care-taking”—giving up my own needs in favor of others’ needs—and caring for people—loving them while respecting their right to live in their own way.

Especially since my heart attack I’ve learned, too, that sometimes “no” is the most loving word that I can say. I've said no quite a bit lately--"no" to exhaustion, "no" to too much traveling and "no" to trying to do this thing called "life" by myself. More yeses are coming--"yes" to more conversations with friends, "yes" to family, "yes" to quietly reading good books and long walks in the park.

Questions: What do you need to say "no" to and what do you need to say "yes" to?

Silence

“Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.”
—Thomas Carlyle

When I get scared and I've been scared a lot lately and I'm full of anxiety, I sometimes feel compelled to fill the air with talk. I may be saying nothing of substance, but still, the noise is somehow comforting to me. It affirms that I’m here, that I’m active and alive.

The sound of the spoken word can be a wonderful tool for healing, yet I must learn to feel the value of silence. I can do this by surrounding myself with quiet, instead of the sound of my voice.

The older I get the more silence seems necessary if I am to listen carefully to the messages my soul is trying to send to my over active brain.

Cliches' become cliches because they are true--Silence is golden.

Question: When do you talk when silence is what is really be called for?

Not-Doing

“It is not healthy to be thinking all the time. Thinking is intended for acquiring knowledge or applying it. It is not essential living.” —Ernest Wood

As young a young man I loved to “push the river,”trying out my mental and physical muscles, swimming against the current. As an "older" man pushing is not my passion. Early on I learned that my life was up to me, that I should strive hard, persevere, even punish my body to keep my head above water. It took me a long time to remember that I could be held up by that water, made alive by its grace, supported by its buoyant energy.

Few of us learned one of the secrets of freedom: that “not-doing” carries us further than we could ever have gone under our own efforts. Even better, when I stop pushing my life along, the ego stays in check, because it can’t take credit for what I accomplish by simply letting go.

Nature teaches “not-doing” to all with eyes to see. The chick does not construct the egg it’s born from. The grass is planted by the wind, the lake is filled by the rain, and no one has to wake up the sun in the morning! Life has its perfect plan. When I surrender to its current, I free to give a much needed rest to my mental machinery.

Question: Are you still "pushing" or are you "letting go" as the decades roll along?