Shawshank Wisdom

It can all start to feel like death by a thousand paper cuts.

Aging.

It happens to the best of us.

With every new trip around the sun, passing day, and next breath, we’re older than the ones before. The process does seem to accelerate though. Injuries that used to heal quickly now take longer to mend. Joints that didn’t hurt yesterday make themselves known today. Checking things out to see what this or that might mean, or not mean, becomes a more common occurrence. One can tire of having to think about, tend to, and tolerate a body that isn’t what it was not so long ago. At least this one does.

However.

Given that getting older is here to stay, there’s a choice to be made about what to do with what we’ve got.

Open our arms wide in acceptance, or shrug our shoulders in resignation.

One is active. The other passive.

To accept is to welcome, receive, and participate in. To resign is to give in, quit, and withdraw from.

Acceptance is about taking life on. Resignation is about letting it go.

Or in the words of Andy Dufresne, “get busy living or get busy dying”.

Word Of The Day: ALIVE

When I came up with the list of words on which to hang my 2020 hat and turned it into a word cloud, I noticed that three of the words appeared larger than any of the others.

ALIVE

ENERGIZED

TRUSTING

As it turns out, it’s because those were the only three words that appeared on my list twice. Apparently they are meant to be especially useful this year as I continue to put my daily efforts into crafting a meaningful life. Which, for the record, is why I suspect we are all here in the first place.

Over the next few weeks I’ll focus on a word of the day drawn from that list, taking a deeper dive into what it means, and how it can inform, influence, and inspire me in meaningful and purposeful ways.

ALIVE

Not only did alive show up twice, it was also the first word that appeared on my list. That can’t be an accident. Finding myself in my mid-sixties it is clear that I’ve crested the hill that is my life. Death is closer than my arrival on the planet, and I find myself making friends with that truth. Not in a fearful, wringing-my-hands-sort of way, or a morbid, oh-well sort of way, but in a living, breathing, get-off-your-ass-and-show-up-sort of way.

To be alive is a daily practice, a discipline, a choice. Or as Andy and Redd succinctly remind us in The Shawshank Redemption - …get busy living or get busy dying…

Alive means knowing what and who bring me to life, and spending my time and energy doing those things and in relationship with those people.

Alive means choosing that which sustains, nourishes, and energizes me, rather than settling for what doesn’t.

Alive means finding that when all is said and done, I will drag myself over my finish line having spent every ounce of myself in the service of crafting a meaningful life, loving, helping, and healing the world that is within my reach, and reflecting as best I can, the image of the creative power that is behind it all.

Simply put, I want to be fully alive until I’m totally not.

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