A few weeks ago I read a column in The New York Times by David Brooks entitled “The Moral Bucket List.” I watched as friends of mine, across the country, started posting it online. And it set off a chain reaction of thoughts and emotions and desires I remembered from a long, long time ago.
The point of Brooks piece roughly is, that while it is great to have a list of places you want to go and adventures you want to have before you “kick the bucket,” those can start to feel/appear rather narcissistic if you’ve missed trying to fill another bucket. He writes:
“It occurred to me there were two sets of virtues, the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues. The resume virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?”
Sometimes our lives hand us reasons to examine our paths mid-stroll. It happened to me in my forties. Both kids were in college. I switched careers. I had been married and divorced. Twice. I was ending a long-term relationship or it was ending for me. I had been spending time, twice a year, on the Navajo Reservation, working with the elders. I had cobbled together a once-a-week adventure/class for at-risk kids (which are all middle school-age kids are, by the way) to learn creative writing. My own children had not yet married and had not yet produced grandchildren. I got sick. So sick, my prognosis was talked about in years… left. I have a friend who happens to be a therapist and we went out for a long dinner.
She listened to my tale of woe and then gave me an exercise to do right there at the table. She told me to shut my eyes and imagine a lovely country lane. To walk down the lane and notice the budding trees and then hear the birds. Then to see the quaint little church and enter. Inside the pews are filled with all the people you know and a few you can’t place. You try to say hello but you realize you are invisible so you continue to the front of the church where you see a casket. And you look inside and see your own face. So you sit in a pew and listen.
“Who, my friend said to me softly, who stands up for you to speak? And what is it they have to say?”
It was the kind of epiphany you only have once. And I sat there with tears streaming down my face and no clear answers.
All my years of reading Steven Covey and Caroline Myss and dozens and dozens of other self-help and interior-life books, nothing flattened and energized me like that exercise. It was a clarion call for some drastic changes.
Brooks adds in his column:
“Commencement speakers are always telling young people to follow their passions. Be true to yourself. This is a vision of life that begins with self and ends with self. But people on the road to inner light do not find their vocations by asking, what do I want from life? They ask what is life asking of me?”
We are entering now that season between seasons in Park City. We wash windows and put our lawn furniture out and take long hikes and rides and float down rivers. And while many of these, in our community especially, are exterior pursuits, it also is a time to examine the interior life. To find quiet. To ask questions of ourselves as Brooks poses, “What is life asking of me?”
I think a lot about the difference of being a character and having character. Of lives writ large for the sake of looking large. And of acts taken that are small and quiet and affirming. Much of my life is spent dervishing, as my Irish grandmother would say. And the road less traveled becomes a siren call, for a few days, at least, this time of year. It involves, most often, red dirt and red cliffs and an absence of nonsense. I stumble upon pockets of sanity and clarity.
I identify with wanting to be “the stumbler” Brooks defines at the end of his piece:
“The stumbler doesn’t build her life by being better than others, but by being better that she used to be. Unexpectedly, there are transcendent moments of deep tranquility. For most of their lives their inner and outer ambitions are strong and in balance. But eventually, at moments of rare joy, career ambitions pause, the ego rests, the stumbler looks out at a picnic or dinner or a valley and is overwhelmed by a feeling of limitless gratitude, and an acceptance of the fact that life has treated her much better than she deserves.
Those are the people we want to be.”
This Sunday I will head out of the Park to red dusty roads where I can start remembering and forgetting and remembering all over again…
Teri Orr is a former editor of The Park Record. She is the director of the organization that provides programming for the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Center for the Performing Arts.