"I had the realization that what my life was about was really
meaningless, it was
empty,
and this realization that the things that I thought were so
significant
like looking good and winning, just the normal things that I guess
most people think are important, that they really had no importance,
that it was all
empty
and meaningless. When I
broke through
the
sadness,
broke through
the sense of despair of having wasted my life, I all of a sudden
realized 'My
God!
I'm
free!'."
Even if I'd confronted it earlier (no, even if I'd
realized it earlier), there's a good
chance
it wouldn't have changed me - and if it had changed me, it
would've been temporarily: within a short period of
time
(a week, a month, a year,
ten years)
I would've reverted to wasting
my life
again. In other
words,
my insight into wasting
my life,
wasn't a
bigenoughbreakthrough
to be
transformational.
Question:
is there an insight into wasting your life, that istransformational?
Answer:
try this on for size: it's not your insight into wasting your life
that's
transformationalper se (if it were, none of your New Year's resolutions
would peter out, yes?), rather it's a certain
context
for your insight into wasting your life, that's
transformational.
OK what does that
meanLaurence?
To
answer
that
question
with another
question:
what does the sentence (it's not a phrase)
"My lifetransformed"
mean?
(here,
"transformed"
is an active verb rather than a past participle deployed like an
adjective). It
means
"whoever I had been up until
that point, I no longer was".
That, by
the way,
is
vintage
Erhard
which I'm unabashedly
re-creating
here verbatim to give
form
to my own experience, simply because I can't
imagine
a
clearerway
of articulating it.
"Whoever I had been up until
that point"
had figured out what was
significant
in life. It was more than that actually. It was I took
pride in having figured out what was
significant
in life: I had to look good, and I had to win. Now I never took that
winning thing to extremes. You know, for me it was never I had to win
and the other guy had to lose (mine was never the go
for the jugular brand of winning). But I did see life as a
game
in which winning was
significant,
and that determined almost everything I did. So I'd seen the
significance
of looking good, and I'd seen the
significance
of winning. What I hadn't seen yet was it was I who added all the
significance
(that would come later).
That was nearly forty years ago. The quality of the
future
I
created
then (wide
open)
is still
present,
and from it I'm ongoingly
creating
a life I
love
ie a life worth living. Life's spontaneous changes come and go - that
is, if they come at all. But mostly they just creep on and on at the
same brain-numbingly petty pace (as
William Shakespeare
may have said).
Breakthroughs
like
Werner's work
on the other hand, you'll talk about forever: once you experience that
breakthrough
in
transformation
(either as something you applied yourself, or perhaps as something that
just
happened
of its own volition), you can't go back. You can't
un-learn riding that bicycle, yes? (at best, you may vaguely
recall what it was like before you learned to balance, but what good
does that do anyway?). Like that, you can construe the
sadness
of a wasted life to be the backedge
(if you will) of
authentic,
genuine, real, thrillingtransformation
(transformation
itself can be construed as the front,
leading
edge).
