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I have been away from these longer posts for a few weeks. Which doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about them – or you, the readers. There are many of you who read these posts that I have never met in person, but I feel connected to you through our shared experience of these ideas and words, and by your very generous offer of time to spend with these words.
Truth be told, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately.
A few months ago, my sister-in-law, who is two years younger than me, was diagnosed with advanced and untreatable brain cancer. She has three children in their 20s and 30s, and four grandchildren. To say that this is heart-rending is an understatement.
For the last few years, my brilliant, compassionate uncle has been battling Alzheimer’s disease. Knowing that someone with such a sharp, curious mind was slipping into a mental abyss was painful; and while his death a few days ago has relieved his suffering, my aunt, cousins, and their children have entered a new suffering of their own.
On top of that, I’m turning 60 in a few weeks. And while it’s just a number, it does feel like a number with import.
At mind-fully, we have often used the phrase, “Celebrating life lived to the fullest”.
But what does that mean?
‘Life’ is so much more than the biological definition - the ability of an organism to eat, metabolize what it eats, excrete, breathe, move, grow, and respond to stimuli.
The life we talk about is the ability and willingness to know and engage our purpose, to act and choose from our values, to cultivate and tend meaningful relationships with other people and with the natural world.
But just how do we do that ‘to the fullest’?
And should we even try?
What does it mean to live life to the fullest when we are grieving or when life is hard and painful?
Each week I meet with a group of people with lived and living experiences of being unhoused and with substance abuse. What would it be like to tell them in their struggles to ‘live life to the fullest’?
Or to tell my brother in his grief and waiting to ‘live life to the fullest’?
I cannot attempt to answer those questions for anyone but myself, it would be hubris to try, but it is important that I continue to try to answer those questions for myself, and perhaps there is something in my searching that would be a signpost along the way for you.
These questions first weaved themselves into my journey as I began to recover (through therapy and medical care) from serious mental illness, and they have continued to be questions I return to regularly. These current circumstances have amplified questions I have grappled with for a couple of decades now.
For years now, each morning when I wake up, I offer three acknowledgements and three intentions.
I acknowledge that the Divine will be present in my day, and it is up to me to live slowly enough and with enough awareness to not pass by those encounters unaware.
I acknowledge that I can never love another person or being with more love than I am able to offer myself, and it is up to me to live my life in a way that is self-compassionate and tender on the whole, not just in moments.
I acknowledge that lack of or loss of love is the greatest wound a living being can sustain, and it is up to me to practice in each small step and activity of my day patience, kindness, forgiveness, and generosity of thought to others.
It is my intention to prioritize attention to the Divine in this day.
It is my intention to prioritize self-compassion today.
It is my intention to prioritize patience, kindness, forgiveness, and generosity of thought to anyone I encounter in my day or in my thoughts.
When I think of living life to the fullest, I think of those three overlapping circles of Presence.
And that is NOT some sort of Pollyanna approach to life that refuses to acknowledge pain.
It is the declaration that I can bring each of those acknowledgements and each of those intentions into my grief or anger or frustration – as equally as into my joy or peace or contentment.
I’m not looking for those acknowledgements and intentions aside from the grief I feel right now, but right smack in my experience of grief.
I am absolutely certain that those three acknowledgements and intentions will not magically deliver me from my grief; but I am also absolutely certain that they are present in my grief the way a germinating seed is alive, active, and present in the darkness of soil.
These three acknowledgements and intentions have taught me to not look for ‘the fullness of life’ beyond my circumstances, but in my circumstances.
Rumi once said, “Let yourself be drawn by the strange pull of Love. It will not lead you astray.”
That strange pull of Love is there in your circumstances waiting for you.
And it will, I assure you, lead you to a life truly lived to its fullest!