What do you invest your life in?

My dearest friend for 27 years died this week after a very short illness.  I'm very glad that her illness was so short, for her sake, but have struggled with the huge hole in my heart.  Such a loss, such an angel she has been.  The outpouring of support and affection for her, and for her husband and two daughters, has belied the fear that some of my clients have: why should I spend my life being a good person?  No one will care or remember me.  If you pour good wine into a golden goblet, it will taste ambrosial.  If you pour good wine into a peeling vessel, or one with holes, you'll end up with nothing. It's not being good, kind and generous that is sometimes wasted; it's continuing to pour your good wine into rubbishy glasses that is the potential problem.  So stop wasting time with biological relations who aren't good, kind and generous, even if they are your descendants.  Spend your time exclusively with good people.

The Dhammapada tells us that what we surround ourselves is what we ourselves become, so surround yourself with the good and virtuous.

I loved Cindi Johnson because she was so lovable: kind, generous, funny, smart, tenacious, dedicated to her remedial college math students (how many lives did she save by helping low-income kids get their AA and start a career-track?) and always ready to open her heart.  But I really loved her because of who I became, year by year, because of her.  At my wedding, where she was matron of honor, I told my assembled friends that I was the person I was because they had honed me and shaped me, year by year, like you create a sparkling gem from an unprepossessing stone.  To the extent that I am good and virtuous, it is because I surrounded myself with the good and virtuous, and walked away from the mean and selfish.

I will miss Cindi at one level or another until the day I die.  And her legacy is much, much more than just three grandchildren.  Her legacy is also the array of sparkling gems that her life honed and polished, all the lives that deviated from their course and moved closer to goodness and virtue.

Every faith and wisdom tradition on earth, now and in the past, extols the value of one precious gem vs. a pile of junk-stuff, and the value of one good person to change the world.  They were right.  I was blessed by this good woman's life for 27 years.  There is no greater epitaph for a life.

It's a good year. No, it's a bad year. No, it's.....

We so blithely talk about having a “good” or “bad” year.  What we mean is a time in which we got what we wanted out of life - we had health, a good marriage, a nice income, low stress – or we had a time that presented many challenges, sometimes intense challenge on one front – exceptional health challenges or frustrating unemployment .  My “bad” years frequently feature being nibbled to death by ducks – dozens of mild to moderate problems, but constant and relentless  - that lead your psyche to believe that the Lords of Creation have it in for you (as a Christian client referred to it) or that life is just a constant struggle with one stumbling block after another.

2015 was a difficult year for me.  2016 is shaping up to have lots of challenges as well.  I lost 5 weeks of my life to a serious bronchitis attack and now my beloved sister is riddled with cancer and breathing through her last weeks, the latter hitting with almost no warning.   Why did my goddess, angel and animal spirit cards, not to mention my Akashic consults, all tell me that this was going to be a “good” year?  Are they wrong – or nuts?

Maybe the latter is closest to the truth.

I think the disconnect can be explained by a story from one of the Buddhist scriptures, which I will paraphrase and shorten.  A farmer had a young son who was an excellent helper.  That’s good, his neighbors told him.  Then the boy broke his leg and it set poorly; he would always have a limp.  That’s bad, his neighbors said.  Years pass and the nation is at war.  All the young men are conscripted for military service.  All the fathers lose their young male labor and have to work hard in the fields.  Except our farmer.  Because the boy limps, he is excused from military service.  That’s good, the neighbors say. The young man does not die in the war and remains to help work on the farm, albeit at a reduced capacity.

This constant mental categorizing event outcome as “good” or “bad” is the major cause of our life’s dissatisfaction.  If things aren’t good or bad, but just are, we can move on to maximizing the value of what we have, like the farmer.  His emotions weren’t up and down, fluctuating with the “story” that his mind created about reality, like his neighbors were doing.  Some people read the story and think that the moral is that you have to wait to decide if something is good or bad, because of course the story ends up “good” – the young man does not die.  But the real meaning is much more profound.

So what about me?  Maybe I can be very sad, weep and journal and be hugged, but my sister’s untimely death isn’t “bad,” per se, just very, very sad.  Maybe it just is.  Maybe the bronchitis just is.  [Compare this with “the bronchitis is actually good because it got me to cut back on the number of overseas trips I was planning for 2016, which were exhausting to think about, much less do” which is the psych cognitive-behavioral approach, and a very good one it is, too, in getting us to see another possibe interpretation of the available facts.  But with all its virtues, it is only turning bad into good, not walking away from bad and good as categories, period.]

So I don’t think all those cards and Akashic messages were wrong.  It was my interpretation of them that was off-base.  They didn’t say I would have a “good” year.  They said that many blessings were coming to me.  It was I who mistranslated that into “nothing sad is going to happen.”   When I take a more balanced look at the year, the blessings – so many more than in 2015 – stand out in stark relief.   My gosh, what a shower of blessings, in business, in health and in new friendships and spiritual relationships.   Not nothing but blessings of course.  But blessings there are.  And all of it – without being labeled good, bad or both/neither – just is.

If you ask me how the year is going, I may make you comfortable by saying, “Many blessings,” because small-talk doesn’t require philosophy or truth.  But know that I know what kind of year I’m having.  I’m having a year in which I am alive, and all of it just is.

The Nurturing of Life