Keel

To move through life is to experience a multitude of losses.  This is not the brightest of perspectives, nor is it a viewpoint today’s society spends much time socializing, contemplating or marketing.  We are all about winning.  To lose is somehow humiliating, shameful and should be moved through quickly lest we lose focus on our goal to win.

 

As kids we played “The Game of Life”, the Milton Bradley board game where the roll of the dice determines your fate.  The definition of winning is a big family and lots of money.  “Life” is all about landing on the right spaces so you are victorious in the end.  I remember vividly how I’d sweat through the small stretch of road offering the opportunity for a spouse and babies.  Much cheering ensued if you happened to land on a husband and a visit from the stork, condolences if you suffered the misfortune of skipping over these spaces.    I was conditioned to believe a full car and bursting coffers are my right by the time I rest in the coffin.

Life isn’t about vigilant, careful choices that bring about a prize in the end; rather it is a series of opportunities and circumstances to be managed with the goal to be as happy as possible no matter what happens.   Knowing and embracing this concept is kindred to harnessing power.  When looking back at the trials and tribulations adolescents endure becoming adults, we can’t help but use the phrase “he turned out okay”, like there is some magical point in life when we have arrived; we cease to evolve.  My mother died when I was 38.  If she thought at that point I “turned out okay”, she would have been doing both herself and me a disservice.  I often wish she could know me now.  In the last seven years of my life I have reached into my soul and pulled out the real me.  And I’m probably not done yet.

 

I believe in the chance aspect of life.  As much as we try, as much as we think we are controlling what comes our way, so little of it really is up to us.  What I don’t believe is that there is an end game.  Life is not meant to be finished; it’s simply extinguished at a point along the continuum.  We are not cheated if we haven’t had the chance to build our families and amass our fortunes, to win by society’s rules; these are blessings not entitlements.

 

 “A Grief Observed” by C.S. Lewis is the journal of a man consumed by despair after the death of his wife.   She was more than a wife by today’s standards.  Too many marriages are on paper only.  Instead of nurturing a cherished intimacy as Lewis and his partner did, the ever-present pursuit of winning distracts us into believing we should expect to lose our passion, that it is normal to settle into languid content, and that the distance brought about by business commitments and raising children is to be expected, tolerated so that we can someday retire in wealth and splendor.  But what about right now?   Are we sacrificing too much today, banking on a finite tomorrow we really don’t control?

Lewis talks about how faith is not really tested until we lose something so important to us that we really need our faith to get through.  And for a portion of the grief process, we question our faith.  I have yet to experience the death of a loved one as profoundly as Lewis documents in the book.  But I have experienced a multitude of everyday losses.

 

“Delicious drinks are wasted on a really ravenous thirst”. Lewis describes the drowning man, so consumed by his fear and panic that he flails recklessly and thwarts the very rescue he is desperate for.   His theory is that when engulfed in grief, we believe God has abandoned us, when the reality is we’ve created such chaos within ourselves we’re unable to hear Him.   The endless pursuit of winning and society’s definitions of success exert tremendous chaos within our hearts and minds.  So much in fact we sometimes can’t drink the sweet elixir of our soul, that internal life preserver demanding stillness to be caught.

Life is not a prescription to be filled.  Are you on the journey to collect dividends, check victories off a list?  What if we handled winning and losing with the very same grace?  I think we might find happiness every day.