Harvest

 

Sometimes I wonder, “what has my life amounted to?” and fear that I come up short with all that I have left undone, abandoned, unable to accomplish.   I think of the 35 years of working that didn’t turn out the way I had hoped with so much more change, uncertainty, struggle, and failure.  I had such high hopes after graduate school. I thought the advanced degree would lead to a life of purpose and ease, financial security, respect, achievement.  I tried hard to move things forward in the direction of my vision, but the progress was so slow and often thwarted.  What, I wonder, has it all amounted to?

 

Perhaps you also think about these kinds of things if not about work, then family, friends, travel, athletic pursuits or even spirituality.  What have I accomplished in this life?  What have I don’t that I can feel good about? One sets out with high hopes only to encounter the difficulties we could not have understood unless we set out on the journey.  We might not have taken the first step if we saw ahead all the obstacles in the path.

 

If I didn’t have to make a living, I might have quit working altogether but could not.  I did think of changing careers but there was nothing else that I was pulled to do so strongly which has been research to support the work and understanding of economic and social equity.  The things that did come to fruition often took much longer than I had expected.  Some goals required a persistence that I didn’t have in me to give. 

 

Recently, though, something has shifted in the way I have been thinking about my life and what my years of work have amounted to.  It is too narrow a lens to measure one’s life in terms of achievement, money, fame, popularity. At a deeper level, the larger purpose in life is not about the material things we accumulate.  It is rather to become more tender and open-hearted through the work we do so that we might be a light of compassion and kindness in the world. That our efforts fail in the narrow sense of not meeting our expectations or hopes is in the end not so important.  What is important is to cultivate through our actions in the world more humility, kindness, generosity for ourselves and others, not less. 

 

When I think back about has been truly meaningful to me in my work I see that it has not been the achievement of the longed-for goal so much as the faith and courage to put in a good effort and to persist in some way even when I was afraid of failing.  And when I have failed, it is the courage to have the failure to deepen me and my experience of life. Rather an any particular individual accomplishment, what I value more and more now the ability to work well with others towards a common and good effort. Something that is not easy given how hard it is to come together in our differences, our fear, our short-comings, with patience, with clarity, and sometimes under stressful circumstances like lack of sufficient funds, competing goals, organizational change. Before I thought that my individual accomplishments would save me from fear, shame, sadness.  What I see now is that contentment doesn’t come so much from the accomplishment itself but how I gave of myself along the way