I was born - as were we all, yes? And in my early years, everything I
needed was provided for and taken care of by
my parents.
Looking back, those were
wonderful years.
There was literally nothing I had to do except be taken care of. More
than that, back then I didn't know there was any other way
it was possible to live anyway. Nothing else was required of me. My
job was to be a good boy, and enjoy it all. Then gradually (and in
retrospect inevitably), and especially with the arrival of my
sister and my brother, I was no longer the center of
my parents'
attention
- which required that I started learning to live in a whole new way.
Every one of us can relate to that, not necessarily to the arrival of
siblings, but to life suddenly changing the boat on us mid-stream, and
requiring us to learn to live in a whole new way. And it's not
personal.
It's just
simply
the
inexorable
requirement of the passing of time, and of growing up.
Then just when I had
begun
to learn to live as the oldest child in
our family,
my kindergarten school days started, and I had to learn to live in a
whole new way again: as the youngest child in kindergarten. And pretty
soon as life inevitably had me do, I had to learn to live as the
oldest child in kindergarten, then as the youngest boy in
junior school, then as the oldest boy in junior school, then as the
youngest boy in high school, then as the oldest boy in high school,
then as the youngest student at university etc etc. What I'm
illustrating here is this: just as soon as I had life figured out and
had learned to live according to what the rules of the stage I was in
were, that stage was over, and I had to learn to live again according
to the new rules of whatever
the next stage
was, which life thrust me into (about which I had no say ... or so it
would seem - which is the subject for another conversation on another
occasion).
Some time around now (it may have been closer to the last weekend of
August in 1978, but nonetheless some time around
now) it occurred to me that the impact /
implication of what I was surmising, had nothing at all to do with
learning to live in accordance with whatever stage I was in at the time
(ie its chronology had nothing to do with it). It's what
that was all
leading to,
had to do with learning to live transformed or not - no
matter what stage I was in.
I learned to live (that is to say life taught me) "Now I'm the
youngest, now I'm the oldest, now I'm the youngest again etc etc" quite
well. And there was a lot of peer pressure making sure I remembered
what there was to learn in that regard. And yet none of that, not the
age-stages nor the peer pressure had anything to do with the
inevitability of the onset of transformation, nor where I could look to
flesh it out, nor what learning to live in that way would call on me to
take on of my own volition, rather than be pushed in that direction by
peer pressure (as innocent as that was). Learning to live
my life
from and with transformation, is a new / different class of
conversation altogether, calling for our life choices to be made
coming from being instead of being about doing.
The entire thesis of learning to live transformed is not so much a
study of new themes and
new ideas
which
interest
and challenge us intellectually, as it is an adventure in giving up
the
inauthenticity
we've become wont to live. For example, can we live without blame? Can
we give up blaming? Can we adhere to
integrity?
Can we have
integrity
be the foundation of learning to live a life that works, and not
simply
be a cool and
good idea
to
believe?
Can we bring completion to all our
relationships,
and not err
again and again
by regarding
relationship
as a place to get complete? I assert that is
worth learning to live.