Making those tough decisions…

Ever wonder why sometimes it can be so difficult to make a decision? From small stuff like what to have for dinner and what to wear today, to the bigger decisions like changing career paths and whether to buy a house or continue to rent. We all know the familiar feeling called analysis paralysis. Underlying analysis paralysis is, of course, what? Yes, of course. It is fear. Okay, so maybe fear isn’t underlying indecision on dinner… I’ll concede that point.

We are so afraid of making wrong decisions and ending up with regret or consequences we can’t or don’t want to live with that instead of deciding, often we decide not to decide. We can do everything we are supposed to do; make lists of the pros and the cons of the choices we have in front of us, give thoughtful consideration to each choice, and still so often after a great deal of time, reflection, and angst we are paralyzed into inaction.

Living in a modern society as we do, we are blessed with the wide range of opportunities and choices that present themselves to us on our journey toward fulfillment and happiness. I suppose though in some ways choice can also seem like a burden when we find ourselves paralyzed by the fear of making a wrong choice and ending up miserable. Which brings me to my point. Is it really possible ultimately to make a wrong decision or choice about anything that cannot be repaired or really just thought of in a different way? What sets people up for regrets really is not the choice made, but rather the perception of losing the opportunity that was passed up as being better than the one selected. The grass is always greener dilemma.

We have to make a great number of decisions and choices as we navigate through the many years of our lives. Some of those choices will cause us pain and will have consequences. But does that make them wrong choices? Is it really possible to mess up so badly that you feel you will never recover from a choice or decision that you made using the best information you had at the time? Is it not better to choose an option that has the potential for moving forward and growing rather than stagnating and standing still? It still seems to me the biggest obstacle is fear. It is the fear that creates the paralysis, the stagnation, the standing still. So how many years will pass of standing still … sacrificed to fear, and deciding not to decide? Isn’t that a setup for regret in and of itself?

It is our perception that needs the work, not our decision making capability. I know people who can make decisions in a split second and never look back. Even if the decision doesn’t turn out exactly the way they hoped or planned, they are still happy with the decision. These are the individuals who make lemonade out of lemons. And you know, they are quite often the movers of the mountains, the people who live the experience of life to its fullest and never look back to the past with a single regret about anything. It is their perception that matters, not any single decision that they ever make or any opportunity they pass up. The perception is that every decision is a right decision as long as it is a decision that means moving forward. They are the ones who dream the big dreams and have the conviction to make those dreams come true because they know that no matter what happens, it is the journey that matters … it is the experiences that bring the joy, excitement and fulfillment in being alive …

…on that note, I need a dinner plan. Suggestions?

Always choose love….and be strengthened by the choice

The ability to share a loving moment with another person is truly beautiful and miraculously healing for both the giver and the receiver. Our lives are so often filled with ugliness and hurt that it is sometimes easy to forget that it is our natural tendency to express love for one another, even in the smallest ways. When we show interest in a stranger and how his/her day is going, when we smile at the person we pass in the elevator, when we send an e-mail of encouragement to someone we care about, we are expressing love, and that expression both strengthens the giver and the receiver at the same time. The more love we express for one another, the more we all have to give. The love we express is what unites us in our humanity, what brings us together as one unified spirit, and is what heals us when we are hurt or weakened.

The exchange of true love, the love that is given freely without conditions and without selfish expectation, has the power to transform lives. This love transcends the needs of the selfish ego, and is the ultimate expression of service to another person; loving another truly as we love ourselves. What a magnificent source of strength, healing, and divinity inside each and every one of us. When we are feeling a lack in our own life, we can rely on those who are stronger to provide that love to us, and receive it freely. When we are feeling strong in our love, we can be the sharer who provides that love to those who need it most. In so doing, we are all strengthened, and more importantly……love is strengthened. The stronger love gets, the less it is threatened by fear, and it’s transformative power to change lives is unimaginable.

Our expressions of love for one another may have far reaching effects we may never know anything about. Displaying a sign of love to someone may create a shift in their own perception toward something in their life that day that could lead to a miracle of change for them. Love releases us from feelings of isolation, bitterness, despair, and discouragement and replaces them with feelings of unity, encouragement, and….hope. It is a faulty perception on our part that love can’t conquer all…..it can (and does) when we don’t allow ourselves to live in the nightmare of our own creation where we are separated from it. …………….I choose love.

Ars Bene Moriendi

Ever wonder about the unique ability we have to look to the future and ponder our own mortality? We all know at some point we will die. It is not merely an instinct to stay alive as we see in the animal world, but rather cruelly sets us up for the inevitability of feeling pressed for time. In the grand scheme of the universe, our lives count for merely a fraction of a second; actually not even that long, and so our search for meaning in our lifetime is punctuated by an urgency about how little time we have and what the purpose of our existence really is all about.

Unlike most people I know, I have been exposed to death many times in my life. Beginning with my first funeral at the age of 4, there have been a steady stream of deaths ever since, continuing to the present day and including the death of several friends I went to school with, most significantly the friend I have written about previously at the age of 9. So I never really had the protection from death that most people I know have had. The veil was ripped away very early for me, and I suppose this must be the source for the fascination I have always had with death and dying. Not a morbid fascination, more like a curiosity to fully understand it, to fully understand something that simply cannot be fully understood by any of us who have not yet experienced it. It is a transition we will all go through and yet an experience none of us knows anything about because we simply cannot interview those who have completed the process.

What does it mean to die well? In the second half of the fifteenth century, our predecessors decided to try to define what it meant to die well. Human beings “learned” how to die. It was thought that if Ars Bene Moriendi, or the “art of dying right”, was learned at a young age, there would be no reason to fear death because everyone would know exactly what steps would occur and what would happen at the hour of his/her death. A manual of sorts for dying right. Given that the Black Death had been taking lives in huge numbers, there simply were not sufficient numbers of priests left alive to attend to the dying. So, Ars Moriendi was an attempt by the church to put together a manual on how to die well on your own. A do-it-yourself guide to dying well. There was a long version and a short version, complete with illustrations made on woodcuts. The long version consisted of six chapters. Basically, the idea was that a dying man would be subject to five temptations that may jeopardize his eternal reward, and so instructions were provided regarding these five temptations and how to avoid them. Instructions were also provided on the seven questions to ask the dying person, and the consolation available to him through Christ’s love. Further, instructions were given regarding how family members in attendance of another’s death should act at the death bed during the dying period, and prayers that should be recited.

The original text of Ars Bene Moriendi may be a bit out of time and relevance to us today, but the wider concept of dying well, or at least figuring out how to deal with death at all, seems to be a concept worth at least some attention. Given the fact we are all going to go through it one day; it can’t hurt to give some thought to it beforehand, and we certainly don’t generally do dying very well in our modern society. We spend our time and money worshipping youth and going to great lengths to avoid aging as much as possible, we pour huge amounts of money into industries such as medicine and pharmaceuticals in order to delay dying and death as long as possible, we do everything we can to ignore the presence of the elderly and largely relegate them to nursing homes where they are out of sight and out of mind, forgetting of course that we are all going to be there ourselves at some point. But we don’t like to see them and be reminded of how much closer to death they are than we are. We would rather live in our happy denial about the inevitability of our own mortality and hope that by totally ignoring it maybe we will escape it, or at least we won’t have to think about it until the day actually arrives.

What then IS dying well? And who defines what dying well means? And how exactly is living well related to the idea of dying well? What a sorowful thing it must be to lie on a death bed with bitter regrets and longing for things not accomplished, love not expressed, wisdom not shared, experiences not enjoyed, decisions not made. What a shame that instead of joyous release from a life lived in fulfillment, a person is simply tired of living.

Maybe the key to dying well really is just as simple as living well, making each day count, living each one as if it truly is the last, loving each other in unity, and being grateful that we live in a time when our life expectancy is more than double what it was such a short time ago, so that we have more time to figure out the living well part. I’m not really sure. I just know from my experience volunteering in a critical care unit in a hospital and watching many different death scenarios play themselves out that I am sure it could have been done better. Too many people die alone, being cradled only by machines in sterile rooms with fluorescent lighting, lulled to final sleep by the sound of a monitor and IVs dripping into their bodies as they just drift off into eternity. Surely we can do dying better.

Maybe an Ars Bene Moriendi for our modern day is exactly what we need.

Go for your dreams and take the risk.

As human beings we each have an astonishing ability to adapt to the most extreme of circumstances. At the same time we are such creatures of habit and find so much comfort and security in sameness that we often do not (or will not) recognize when we are stuck in the quagmire of constancy that is killing our dreams, whether it be something physical, mental, relational, or behavioral.

Think about how capable human beings really are at adapting to extreme life situations. Whether it be soldiers fighting wars in extreme situations, or astronauts spending extended periods of time in space, or even explorers who wish to study and work in Antarctica, there are examples everywhere of the capacity of adaptability to extremes.

So given that we have this amazing capability to adapt, why then are we so consistently resistant to change, even when those changes will make our lives better, happier, and more fulfilling? We get so stuck in thie fear of making a wrong decision that we are paralyzed by the analysis, or we even find comfort in the predictability of the constancy. The fact is that all of us will make decisions that please us in their outcome, and all of us will make decisions we will later regret. But instead of facing our fears and challenging our discomfort, we stand still and decide not to decide. Our dreams go unfulfilled and one day we wake up and realize that the holy gift of time has passed us by and we have squandered opportunities presented to us because we chose fear over our dreams.

So what dreams or decisions or changes are you putting on hold? What excuses are you using to avoid adapting to something new? What fears are you allowing to paralyze you? Do you really want to keep doing more of the same, and let the sand of time run through the hour glass until life is so empty and devoid of joy because you let your dreams slip through your fingers? Do you really want to get to a point where you stop dreaming big dreams…….and realizing them?

……..Dream it….Believe it…..Achieve it.

Strength in Compassion

As human beings we have a unique ability to place ourselves into the situation of someone else and imagine what it feels like to be in another person’s experience. We are able to experience emotions for that person as if the event was happening to us instead of to them. We draw from similar experiences in our own lives to feel a sense of understanding and community with an individual who is going through some event in his/her own life. In this holy moment, we are united with another person; we share in their experience and the greatest gift we can give to them is to let them know they are not alone in either their pain or in their victory. For it is not merely pain we share, but also joy and happiness.

So it begs the question…what happens to individuals who display no capacity for sympathy, empathy, compassion, understanding, or shared holy moments with others? History is rich with examples of people who seemingly have not only completely lost this capability but who actually take great pleasure in the pain of others.

Have some people become so desensitized to suffering they see around them that they have become numb to it and incapable of feelings of sympathy and empathy and compassion? Is there just too much pain and suffering in our world that it feels self preserving to turn a blind eye to the pain we see around us? We have watched human beings repeatedly become complacent about human pain as atrocities are committed by those whose evil carries human suffering to a degree of insanity and creates gaping wounds for our global humanity that never completely heal.

Are we teaching the next generation how to be fully compassionate, tolerant, respectful, and sympathetic? When we see children playing with other children and bullying others, are we doing enough to teach the lessons of kindness, sharing and understanding? Are children seeing compassion and acceptance modeled by their parents in their homes every day?

As painful as it is and as helpless as we can feel to make a difference, it is necessary work for us to bring suffering into our consciousness, feel it for ourselves, stand up in love to soothe it and heal it, and be authors in the global script being written for our world now and for the world we leave for future generations to come.