Impassionata

It was supposed to be a dying 3 minute speech, but you know me and time…Anyway, I offered to help facilitate for this group of Silicon Valley folks. I loved the rich conversation we had around death and life.

The ‘homework’ question that Kai and I worked on for this was to think about what you’d say if you had to give a speech imparting things, and knew at the end of the speech that you would die.

The context that I wrote up:

“The speechmaker is given no more than three minutes and is instructed to imagine that, as soon as the talk concludes, he or she dies. My friend said that the speeches were uniformly riveting, but, more notably, they were surprising. The men and women charged with the honor of giving these speeches clearly thought hard about what was most essential for them to say, and often it wasn’t at all what you might expect from a senator, a world-renowned physicist, or a CFO.” – Eugene O’Kelly

 

It is interesting to think on what expectations are of a CFO or a physicist, yet at the very core, death comes to us all and is one of the most fundamental of human experiences. At the end of the day, your various titles and the roles you’ve played may or may not be relevant. What IS relevant is your voice, your own beliefs, framed by what you’ve experienced and who you are, and we would like to hear that voice.

 

This is an invitation and an opportunity to think about what you’d say in the last three minutes of your life if you had the opportunity to relate some things before you left this world. Please bring in a sense of what you’d say. We say  “a  sense” because for some, it may be a full 3-minute articulated speech, or others may feel more comfortable with a bulleted outline of things, a passage from a favorite book, etc. We would like to invite you, if you are comfortable, to share what you would say, but to at least listen to what a few of your peers and fellow human beings would say. 

Here is mine:

“Three Minutes Before Death”

I’d want to convey that life is more than the depth and breadth of what we can touch with our hands and see with our eyes, that a fully lived life must not only include the observing of the world but the acceptance and stepping into of one’s perceiving and participatory self in a very vulnerable way – to see requires being seen, to touch requires being able to be touched, to hear requires being heard. To hear you, I know myself as a hearing being.

Reciprocity plays a role, that the choice to affect others means being open being affected in turn, whether you like it or not. Care for the environment shouldn’t need scientific proof or some external mandate, or even social pressure and the judgment of others, but an internal awareness around the impacts one makes and consequences of one’s choices in lifestyle and habit.

I wrote in a journal a long time ago that I wanted my existence to be evidence to people whose lives I crossed path with that the world isn’t such a bad place. The amazing thing is that as a consequence, I became aware that everywhere, I encounter people who affirm for me that the world is an amazing and beautiful place, and there is so much joy in that!

You can bear far more than you think you can.  I’m going to borrow someone else’s words again, in that I’m afraid “that it will be too much, that I won’t have what it takes to be with it all, the exquisite beauty and the bone-wrenching sorrow of being fully alive.” My own discovery is that as uncomfortable as growth is, we can bear more than we know if we’re only willing to find out if we can. Find the things that stretch your capacity to hold the wonders of this existence, and that keep you raw to them.

At the core of a lived existence, there is love.  To be loved and to love in return requires reciprocity, seeing, and the risk of being alone. I’ve learned that joy can fill a human being so fully that need of the basics of life can be held at abeyance. That when life is at its best, there’s love. That life at its best isn’t something complicated, but is incredibly simple, as simple as breath. That in other ways, you learn the depth and breadth too of what you’re capable of feeling and thinking, how deeply you can be capable of loving. Life at its best holds acceptance of the fullness of being human, both the best parts and the worst parts. It’s the worst times when I have to have the most compassion for my flaws, to face most fully the consequences of the things I live with and that haunt me, that make the joy more poignant because it’s shaded with richness and contrast.

Just show up. No one can expect anything more from you than who you are, nor do I want to show up as less than who I am. Sometimes it’s that simple.

Life at its hardest can open up incredible spaces for empathy and understanding, both the gift of that from others to self, and from self to others. The hard parts are a landscape on the journey, not the destination.  It becomes, if you open your eyes, your place of connection with all the suffering that has gone on before and that is and that will be. When things are hardest, that dark is the most fertile soil for what is possible in the brighter spots of life. Also, I learned not to confuse acceptance with resignation.

Travel far, if not in body, at least in spirit, and stay awake. Rumi says, “the morning breeze has things to tell you, don’t go back to sleep.”

The great griefs of the world may seem immense, but they can’t quench hope.

It’s about building a resilient life, not a flawless one. You will screw up. It’s inevitable. How do you find joy in the midst of grief, silver linings on clouds? That’s part of the constant challenge we face – to choose what we see, without being willfully blind to that we must see. Viktor Frankl wrote out of his experiences in a concentration camp that, “Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

I think heaven and hell are right here. They co-exist with this reality you see around you. You carry it with you, and there are a thousand ways to be alive and dead at the same time. Choose life. There are myriad choices and decision points. Being reactive is not being at choice. Making choices or not making a choice because you’re too afraid of the outcomes is reacting, not choosing. There is always the question, do you choose love or do you choose fear?I chose to get divorced. People asked, “what if you’ll never find someone?” I discovered two things – one that I refuse to avoid being alone because I’m afraid of being alone, and two, moving through the aloneness is an illusion, because in the void, there is an interconnectedness with all things. Aloneness and loneliness are fundamentally universal human experiences.

We live in paradox – the longing to be individual coupled with the longing to be with others, the mundane reality of messy bathrooms and sublime moments in nature, despair at the state of the world and the problems that lie before us, and what someone once termed ‘radical hope’, not the hope of the blindly idealistic but the hope of the pragmatic optimist. I want for you and for myself “the ability to simply be with the world and the need to change what we know is not right about how we are living.” (Oriah)  

The tension between poles is a dynamic, living, difficult one, but it is the only place where I feel most alive. The polarity between life and death also is a vivid one. Every moment is one moment closer to my death.

I’d like to end with lines from one of my favorite poets, Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote: 

My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying.
Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree;
I am only one of my many mouths,
and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.

I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because Death’s note wants to climb over–
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
they stay there trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful. 

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