It was a long time ago, right before the era when you could look up anything on your iPhone.
I was having my 7,000th conversation over a difficult breakup at a bar with a good friend.
I’m not sure if he did it to be authentically helpful––or if he was just trying to distract me––but he stopped my rant, touched my shoulder like he wanted my vote for his congressional election, and looked me deeply in the eye, all to focus me on his sage advice.
I waited, eager for any remotely helpful insight.
Here’s what he said:
“Please…
Don’t look at this experience
from a teleological perspective.”
I paused to take this in.
I tried to look thoughtful.
Unfortunately, however, I had absolutely no idea what the word “teleological” meant.
I asked him to define it and expand.
After a long-winded digression that somehow involved Aristotle (normal pub talk), I got his point:
Don’t define the experience solely by its outcome.
I.E., The meaning of something is not necessarily determined by its ending.
A large part of it––maybe the largest part––is how you got there.
In several of the workshops and live courses I’m leading now, as well as in this new Meditation of the Month HERE, the December theme is “Letting Go.”
This makes great sense given the intensity of all that 2020 has brought.
And in my own life, I’m processing a few acute losses that I’m struggling NOT to interpret solely by their unpleasant endings.
I want to stop myself, in other words, from living in an M. Night Shyamalan film where some final plot twist forces you to go back and reinterpret everything that came before.
(Spoiler alert: no ghosts or aliens are involved in my saga.)
And yet, it’s so in our nature––and in our technology––to do exactly that, to reframe everything by the last scene, so that we forget all that came before.
Over ten years ago, I was very active for a brief time in a spiritual, very “New Age” chatroom.
One of the quirky things about it was that the avatar that appeared alongside anything you posted was HUGE.
For example, if you’re scrolling through Facebook in 2020, your avatar takes up about 2 lines of text (smaller than a dime).
In this discussion forum, your avatar took up a paragraph of 12 lines or more (larger than a matchbook).
Your image rang out loud and clear, right alongside your words.
Anyway, what I found curious is that whenever I changed my avatar, all the previous posts I’d made or commented on, now had the new avatar alongside them.
That didn’t feel accurate, though.
“Edward 2008” made that post, I wanted to tell the moderators, “Not Edward 2009. After all, Edward 2009 is a completely different person from Edward 2008.”
That felt so obvious to me.
I wasn’t the same person a year ago as I am today…
(Are you?)
And yet…
A few years ago I went to the funeral of someone rather wonderful who died an untimely death, still very much in the prime of his adult life.
Given his vitality and contribution, it was a particularly emotional event.
The peak moment was the slide show video, the most extraordinary one I’ve ever seen.
Why?
Because it showed his life in reverse.
It started with him in his 50s, then went backward chronologically, through adulthood and school, ending with him as a toddler, and finally a newborn.
We started at the ending and ended at the beginning.
I’m not sure why, but somehow that made a lot of sense.
Most striking of all––something everyone remarked on––was how his mischievous smile (essentially a knowing smirk) was on his face quite literally from day one.
At every point in the narrative, he was who he was.
As perhaps, are we all.
Whenever I teach a yoga class, I like to offer a pose at the beginning that I repeat at the end.
I’m curious about what’s shifted, what’s opened, and if we’re able to go deeper.
In the same way, as 2020 winds down, I often think of T.S. Eliot’s lines from The Four Quartets:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
As I process the losses and disappointments of 2020, I’m trying to remember all this.
The wisdom of the slideshow life seen in reverse.
The current avatar attached to the old thoughts.
And the smirk that was always there.
Here’s to the joy of celebrating the past and to the power of letting go….
Namaste for Now,
P.S. New Meditation of the Month is HERE.
Plus, some new FREE gifts and new offerings next week.
After all, ‘Tis the Season (for Letting Go.)
P.P.S. Only 1 Spot for Jan 2021 Creative Coaching Left HERE.
