Personal Growth
Creating a Rich Life Story
My only regret in life is that I’m not someone else.
—Woody Allen
Fear less, hope more, eat less, chew more, whine less, breathe more, talk less, say more, hate less, love more, and good things will be yours.
—Swedish proverb
There is nothing noble about being superior to some other man. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.
—Hindu proverb
No one can make you feel inferior without your permission.
—Eleanor Roosevelt
One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.
—Helen Keller
Whether deliberately or by default, we each create a personal identity and life story. If we’re lucky, we figure out what we’re good at, what we believe in, and what we want to accomplish, joyfully, while we’re here. However, in this world of media and mirage, there are significant obstacles to “knowing thyself,” as the Greek sages counseled, because there are so many stories out there! (It’s like a room filled with hundreds of telephones—which one is ringing?) From the moment we understand even a few words, we begin to absorb TV stories complete with laugh tracks, parental parables, religious scriptures, mythological epics, and cultural directives—and we try to figure out which story is most like the life we want to create.
Judging from the many gentle, passionate characters I’ve had the
pleasure of knowing, sometimes our aspirations and instincts do guide us in the right direction! These remarkable people create an ethic to guide them; a vehicle of self-identity to carry them securely through life. They meet many of their needs just by knowing who they are. If the script is strong enough, material possessions and monetary wealth often become lower priorities than do other forms of wealth. This is not to say that people with creative, original scripts prefer to be poor, just that money isn’t their primary goal—it comes as a by-product of other passionate pursuits.
A friend of mine, writer and artist Patricia Lynn Reilly, is definitely a self-scripted individual! She has also become a coach and mentor for other life-minded people who also want to create authentic, rich life stories. Patricia’s earliest years were spent as a “lost and tossed” child with alcoholic and drug-addicted parents. Her father would be home for a few days, then take off again. “I made up stories, as any four- or five-year-old would, to make sense of his comings and goings,” she says. “He comes when I’m good. He leaves when I’m bad … One day he left for good.”
Within a few years, Patricia’s mother also disappeared. “I was taken to an orphanage in a station wagon driven by strangers,” she recalls vividly in the book Words Made Flesh. An ordinary girl might have let the fire inside go out, but Patricia dug deep and found her core values. During her five years at the Sisters of St. Joseph orphanage, she also found mentors among Catholic nuns who had taken vows of poverty. “Their basic needs were met to support the work which gave great purpose and meaning to their lives,” she says. “Their love, focus, and dedication had a strong influence on me; I learned that a purposeful life can be creative and abundant.”
I ask if she felt a lack of “stuff” in her life at the orphanage, and she shakes her head emphatically. “Material possessions were not even a blip on the screen for me,” she says, “and they still aren’t.” Clearly, she celebrates her immunity to stuff and the stress that usually goes with it. “I’ve noticed that some of my friends who grew up in more comfortable surroundings didn’t have to reach inward as I did,” she tells me, “and they are less likely to question the script they are living and create their own story. But I had to move away from the violence and danger I’d seen. I had to rely on myself.” Because she felt drawn to dancing, she sought out a nun who was a dancer to teach her the basics. After weeks of looking in the window of a dance studio near the orphanage, she was invited to take more dance lessons, free; and by hanging around a horse stable and looking cute she also got free horse-riding lessons. “I knew what I wanted, and I went out and got it,” she says.
She recently went back to the orphanage for a reunion, and saw the well-preserved videotape of a play in which she starred. “My classmates at
the orphanage said they remembered me as “focused, creative, and thriving,” she says, with pride. “A few of the nuns commented on how ‘resilient’ I was.” That inner resilience served her well when she began to question the religious script she’d been taught. “In my graduate studies at Princeton Theological Seminary, I began to see that I was studying scriptures that were written solely by men, and that portrayed women as subservient. I was preparing myself for a profession that still didn’t accept women as equals. I decided to write a book on that subject. I titled it A God Who Looks Like Me, and I traced the problem back to its roots—all the way back to the story’s passages about Eve being created from Adam’s rib.” Adapting her personal script-in-progress, she became a Child of Life rather than a Child of God because she feels a greater sense of abundance and immediacy in the way “life calls out to life.”
Patricia went “under the story” of another dominant script when she turned her back on the “fear-based, accumulative story about the American Dream that’s told on television.” In her twenties, when she was living with her partner and his children, she observed, “The creative impulses of the kids were neutralized by television and it was a very sorrowful thing for me. I insisted, ‘The TV has to go!’ Then I set up an art center in the apartment and watched the kids come back to life.” Like so many clear-headed people I know who have permanently turned off the tube, she continued to create a script free of commercials.
She’s also arranged a simple life to have more creative freedom, challenging the idea that a successful person must own a house and spend twelve hours a week at the mall. “The lifestyle I’ve designed is not dependent on whether a company’s stock is high or low; not dependent on whether the company is hiring or laying off workers.” Patricia finds creative ways to make her freelance career work financially. As one of America’s forty-seven million citizens without health insurance, she nevertheless sees the very best specialists—the ones the doctors themselves go to—and persuades them to let her make installment payments for their medical care.
“I measure the wealth in my life by the creativity that flows through me; by the depth of connection I have with interesting people; by the time I spend laughing, exploring, and learning,” she summarizes. Where would the world be without people like Patricia, who have the courage of their convictions and who are able to question the weaknesses of prevailing scripts?
We don’t have to wonder if Abraham Lincoln challenged the existing paradigm, giving slaves their freedom and doggedly sticking with a life script that he wrote long before he penned the Gettysburg Address. Honest Abe was persistent! He failed in business in 1831 and again in 1833, and also lost a race for state legislator. He then suffered a nervous breakdown after his loved one died, yet remained rock-certain he could be a contributor in American politics. He ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Congress in 1843, 1848, and 1855; remained unsuccessful as a vice presidential candidate in 1856 and a senatorial candidate in 1858; and then ran, in 1860, for president.
Unless Lincoln had won his place in history, people like environmentalist Lester Brown, who I interviewed for chapter 17, might not have created their own scripts. Says Brown, “As a young boy I read the biographies of Lincoln, Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Daniel Boone, and I realized that these men were addressing the great issues of their time. So I asked myself, ‘What are the great issues of our time?’ And the environment was one of them.” Without Lester Brown’s dedication and focus, people like me may not have edited our own script. Some people have even told me my work has affected their life, and no doubt theirs will affect others, too …
I’ve always been a writer. In second grade, when I was recovering at home from a long hospital stay, I dictated a little story to my mother about how skunks got their stripes (a whipped cream accident, of course). She took the story to my classmates and I’ve been writing ever since.
A formative moment came in my college years on a walk through the Indiana countryside a few miles out of town. My love life wasn’t going anywhere, my grades were lousy, and I was up before sunrise to do some back-roads soul searching. With a faithful little campus dog by my side, I passed a lush, green pasture where dozens of dairy cattle grazed, just as the sun was coming up. With the Indiana sky’s pink, gold, and purple-gray hues as a backdrop, I saw in a storybook-flash-of-insight that life was like an interwoven quilt! The cows ate the grass and made milk, fertilizing more grass with their wastes. The skies contributed rain; farmers were nourished by the milk and had the good health to properly take care of the cattle. I realized that billions of similar relationships were woven productively together, all over the planet. “I see it!” I shouted to my furry friend Pooh, who of course had always seen it.
It wasn’t that I knew much about ecology back then—that would come later. Really, my epiphany was more profound than science—I didn’t just know about the interconnections of life; but in that instant of insight, I was right in the middle of them. I suddenly realized that life on Earth had a strategy and a purpose, and that our throwaway style of living was naively oblivious to it. In the years after college, my emerging draft script focused more and more on the evolution of a strong environmental ethic, and it became clear to me that I should combine my two passions. My work at EPA years later did that, but there was something missing. The job paid good money, I had great health and retirement benefits, and I was doing work that the world considered respectable. I knew that if I just kept my head down and went with the bureaucratic flow, my basic needs would be met. But something in me craved sunlight, freedom, and fresh air. I wanted more than a standard career.
In my last days at EPA, I would sometimes sneak out an hour early, shutting my computer off and making a casual-looking (but inwardly desperate) beeline for the fire-escape stairs in the center of the building, as if I was just heading off for still another meeting. I’d leave my daypack in my cubicle as cover, and dance down four flights of stairs into the wide world outside, where the afternoon sun was still shining. I needed to find a different path—one that I chose myself. The bottom line is, I didn’t retire from that job, I just got tired. (And if it hadn’t been that job, it would have been another.) I remember feeling at first like I was playing hooky from the real world, and that I would get punished for it (bankruptcy? terminal illness?). I’d ride my bike to the grocery store by way of the park, or plant a row of lettuce in the garden, and feel as if everyone else was following the script but I’d forgotten my lines.
Then I began to trust my instincts, relying less on what the world wanted and more on what I needed. I learned that being less conscious of what other people think could save me lots of money, because it required less than the average person spends on new cars, electronic gadgets, and clothes. Gradually, what I was moving away from became less important than what I was moving toward. I was far less dazed and confused than before, and since confusion often results in consumption, I rarely showed my face at the mall. I liked the work I was doing and I didn’t feel a huge need to get away for more than a good vacation a year—I was already “away,” after all. At an extended family reunion in the beautiful Napa wine country, my mother and I debated the meaning of success and whether I still had a shot at it. I wrote this note afterward, but am only now “sending” it in excerpted form. I think of it as “Successfully What?”
Dear Mom,
The radically honest conversation (okay, shouting match) you and I had in our cottage during the family reunion prompted me to write. You truly care about my well-being, and I really appreciate that! You want me to be successful, the same way I hope your life and my own kids’ lives are successful.
The question is, successfully what? When I confided that last year was a financial challenge, you were worried. “A person needs to have enough to live a good life, and to provide for later years,” you said. You also seemed to be saying, “Work harder. Make more money. Go back and get a real job again—quick.”
When I told you that despite the meager income I had one of the best years of my life, you seemed skeptical. I guess you didn’t realize how much meaning the work has for me, and how inspired I was by the insights of the people I interviewed for the film I was working on. In combination with good friends, family, and continuing play in building the community garden, it was enough. I didn’t need much money.
When I recently served two very large bowls of organically grown salad from the garden to a group of forty appreciative friends, that also felt like success—good work that we could taste and crunch, and feel proud of. When I went into a music store the other day that stages jam sessions and somebody remembered a song I’d sung six years earlier, I considered that a success, even though it had nothing to do with money.
Last week I got an e-mail thanking me for a talk I gave, telling me that one woman had tears in her eyes because I was speaking from my heart. Wasn’t that success, in a real sense? And when I went in for a physical the other day and the doctor told me I had the heart of someone half my age, that felt like success, too, because of all the exercising and healthy food I’ve chosen to eat.
At breakfast that morning in California, you told me I shouldn’t be so demonstrative about my convictions, because I’ll turn people off, and I won’t be successful. But the way I look at it, unless I express my hopes and suggestions for a more livable future, I can’t be successful in the full sense of the word. There’s too much evidence now that our young, boisterous economy has designed and mined itself into a very dangerous corner.
That’s why I’m writing, Mom. I feel an urgent need to communicate my concern that our country has lost its way, whether or not that brings in money. I want to help find and present better trails. I’m OK,
Mom. I think you already know that I need to “do my own thing.” And you also know how much I love and appreciate you, right?
Love,
Dave
That particular year, I’d made less money than some households spend on facelifts for their suburban backyards: state-of-the-art barbecue “stations,” tractor-style lawn mowers, and upscale professional stonework for the perennial beds. (I’d also made less money than society spends annually on the average prisoner—about $35,000; but, in contrast, I was out of jail.) For the most part, I was happy, partly because the decisions were mine. Money wasn’t the game I was playing. My sister Susan confided recently that she, too, had debated with my mother about whether or not I was successful. She’d used rhetoric like this: “Why do people need money? They need it to bring up their kids, and Dave’s kids are doing fine—both are college graduates and both are happy. People need shelter, and he owns a great house in a neighborhood he helped design. They need health—he has that; they need something stimulating to do, and his work seems to turn him on. They need occasional breaks from everyday life, and in recent years, he’s been to New Zealand, Vietnam, Costa Rica, the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Alaska, Guatemala … People need someone to love and his girlfriend, Susan, is wonderful.” She concluded that however much money I was making, it was apparently enough. After thinking about it in those terms, our mom had agreed—what a relief!
My partner, Susan, made strategic scripting decisions, too, and doesn’t regret them for a minute. In her children’s formative years, she took twelve years off from a stimulating career as a computer software expert because the kids were her priority. Toward the end of a career distinguished by many awards and achievements, she did the math and opted for an early retirement even though senior managers offered her a small fortune to move up the ladder and direct a whole department.
I’m not suggesting that to create a good script a person has to leave her or his 9-to-5 job! What I am suggesting is that it’s a relief to know our own minds, and know what we stand for, and what we are willing to stick our neck out for. I read a great newspaper story last week about a guy, Jim Reddick, who works in a supermarket in the state of Washington. He’s become a local hero for going the extra mile with customers. When he does deliveries to seniors, he brings not only groceries but books they might want to read, medicine from the drugstore, or much-needed sweatpants he’s found for them, on sale. He checks the mail for them, takes out the garbage, even gives them a lift to town. At the supermarket, old-timers wait in line to have
Jim check out their groceries, even when other checkers are available. You might say that Reddick’s script has a wealth of character development.1
What will our life stories look like in our last years? Here’s hoping that all the people involved with this book—readers, editors, writer, reviewers, binders, printers, and all those I’ve quoted or interviewed—are happy in our final years because we’ve all made good decisions and had good experiences! (And if not, maybe we’ll get another shot as zebras, orchids, or at least slime molds). I was curious what stories people tell at the end of their lives, and asked my friend Jonathan to tell me what he hears as a hospice chaplain.
For a man who’s just thirty years old, Jonathan Daniel has acquired a lot of wisdom. Some of it comes from rigorous meditation and Buddhist practice; some from his challenging work as a chaplain, where he’s gotten to know more than a thousand people before they died; and some from the fact that his father, an attorney, was murdered when Jonathan was twelve. Death has always been part of his adult life, and he seems to live more mindfully and intensely as a result.
His daily work begins when he goes into the homes of people who’ve been told they have less than six months to live. His mission is to help them die with strength, comfort, and dignity. If they’re Christians, Jonathan recites scriptures; and if they are Muslims, he finds wisdom in the Koran. “I want to use the truths they’ve been studying throughout their lives to have a conversation about what’s meaningful to them,” he says. Every workday, he deals with two very profound questions: How should we live in the time we have left, and how should we regard death? As we sit in a booth at a busy restaurant, I ask him, “What do people tell you in their last days? What do they value in their lives above all else? What are they most proud of?”2
“Many of them tell me they’ve always thought they’d take a trip around the world before they die, or buy impressive trophies, like a stylish new car,” he answers. “Instead, what they value in their last days are things like feeling the sun on their face, hearing the intricate beauty of a classical symphony, or smelling the fragrance of a lilac in bloom, out in the backyard. These are the ordinary, everyday surprises that really matter to them, in the end.”
He takes a sip of beer and continues, “People who live with purpose and dignity seem to die that way. A woman I worked with recently was a successful writer whose husband was also successful at starting a small
company. Every week, about fifteen close friends would come to visit her, and it made her feel great to know that she was loved. That’s what people are proudest of—that other people love and respect them. When I came to her house I asked her how she was doing. She shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘Well, you know, I’m dying …’ I asked what she thought was going to happen when she died. She smiled, saying, ‘Wow, that’s unusual for you to ask that! All my friends who come to see me—I can tell they’re uncomfortable about death. They sit down stiffly and to reassure me, they tell me exactly what’s going to happen when I die; what I need to believe; who I should pray to; and what it will be like, after I die. You’re the first person who’s asked me what I think.’
I interrupt Jonathan’s story to comment that the friends had as much anxiety as the woman who was dying.
“We learn to be afraid,” he says, nodding. “So, then I asked her what she would want to have happen, if she could have her way, and she said with a smile, ‘I’d want to come back as a racehorse! I know it sounds kind of crazy—I can’t tell that to my friends—but as I sit here dying I keep thinking how grand it would be to be a racehorse, because they’re so beautiful and majestic, so powerful …’
“‘I’m wondering if what you’re seeing in the racehorse is what you want right now, as you go through your transition,’”I asked, and she answered, ‘Yeah, actually that’s true—when I see all the grace, all the lack of hesitation, that is what I want as I die …’ Even though she was a Christian, all our conversations became centered on the attributes of racehorses. And it seemed like she did have that sense of strength as she died.”
I ask Jonathan, “Are most of the people you see afraid of dying?”
“There’s usually some discomfort, because death represents the unknown, the loss of control, unpredictability—and these are the central issues that people fear. They’re used to things that feel safe and predictable—things they can control. When we’re dying, we lose control of our life. The project is over; there’s no longer anything to maintain. Everything we’ve identified with—our careers, our friends, our ways of thinking, the way we look—is suddenly stripped bare and we’re left with the true face of who we really are. We come face to face with ourselves, and that can be uncomfortable.”
As Jonathan talks, I’m reminded that the acquisition of material things is often about trying to control life rather than just live it. We surround ourselves with possessions to fortify our lives against uncertainties that lie ahead. It seems apparent that to reduce consumption, we’ll need to be less obsessed with controlling life. After all, we each have a solid seat in the universe, and we’re not likely to fall out, so why waste our lives worrying about
death and possessions? Why not focus on what we have rather than what we don’t have? Billions of living creatures die every day—there must be a pattern behind it.
Jonathan continues, “When people have displayed a tremendous amount of generosity in their lives, and been very giving and thoughtful of others, that seems to diminish their suffering. When I ask them what they want to pray for, they don’t say themselves. They want to pray for their families, for other people in the care center, for the people on the news they recently saw … I find it very poignant, the number of people who are concerned about the survival of the human race. I tell them, ‘Here you are with terminal cancer, talking about your death, and yet you’re concerned about how this world is going to continue after you’re gone …’ Sometimes it’s expressed in a big way, as the entire world of humans as a species, and sometimes at a smaller scale, like how America is going to fare. So there’s this real sense of interconnectedness that hits them. Sometimes they don’t even realize how strong it is until everything else is stripped away.”
I ask Jonathan what people say about their material goals and possessions at the end of their lives. “They often say that financial wealth gets in the way of family relationships, especially at the end. A few days ago, a man I talked with wanted to have deep, meaningful conversations with the family, but couldn’t because they were so focused on the money, asking for advances on the inheritance, and pressuring him to sell the house. The poor guy wanted to talk about more important things, but they kept coming back to, ‘Mom always said I could have this.’ He told me, ‘I wish they could wait until I die to have these squabbles.’
“So I think you’re saying that the best way to prepare for death—and also live a quality life—is to become more comfortable with the unknown and the unpredictable?”
“To live happily and die comfortably, I think we have to give up trying to be in control,” he says. “But at the same time, we can be mindful, and prepared. A man I’m working with right now has taught me a lot about this. I worked with his wife as she died, too; all this stuff came up, all this baggage, all the shadows she’d repressed. But eventually she was able to work through it and die peacefully. The family asked me to perform the funeral service; then, two years later, I get this phone call from their daughter who says, ‘My father wants to be ready for death. He wants the same level of care my mother got, but he wants it now—while he’s healthy and able to do the work. When his death comes, he wants to die consciously and aware.’
It struck me that the pursuit of real wealth such as mindfulness is a sure way of being ready when death comes.
Jonathan explains, “So I meet with him once a week and we talk about
what he wants to do with his remaining time. He wants to learn how to meditate, to calm his mind and release some of the trivialities he’s been caught up with. The more he lets go of his worries and doubts, the more he tells me, ‘You’ll never believe what happened to me today!’ He’s making friends and having real conversations with them, and feels a great sense of delight. The smallest words of kindness from his daughters completely make his day. Every day is a blessing. He smiles and laughs a lot more than he did just a few weeks ago. Sometimes we’ll sit together in complete silence for ten or fifteen minutes, just looking into each other’s eyes and smiling. ‘When I die,’ he tells me, ‘I don’t want to be overwhelmed by the pain of all my past habits. I want to be present for my death. And I want to learn how to do that now, by becoming present for my life.’”3
“It is not enough to add years to one’s life; one must also add life to those years,” said John F. Kennedy. One of the most fruitful ways of adding life is to get in the habit of following a script you believe in—based on values that resonate for you. By keeping promises to yourself, you stand a pretty good chance of treating other people—and yourself—well. You become something much bigger than an ego or an appendage of commercial logos. You find activities and passions that match your abilities with the tasks at hand and make the world safer and more sensible. Sometimes, though, the world seems to trap you in your own script. For example, Olympic skier Bode Miller has always skied primarily for the love of it, trusting that the money would follow. And did it ever. With thirteen corporate sponsors, Miller has become a multimillionaire, and isn’t sure what to make of it. “As soon as you have millions of dollars, you literally don’t have money as a motivating force anymore, unless you just simply try to continue to acquire more and more of it,” says Miller. “That process is about as unhealthy as anything else I can think of—so the acquisition of money alone is a terrible, terrible goal.”4