Where Else Would You Rather Be?
Given by James Covington on January 6th, 2008
Years ago I experienced the greatest adventure of my life. I was a member of the crew on a 32 foot sailboat that participated in a race from Marion, Massachusetts to Bermuda. It took us a week to reach our destination. At the end of the race, I believe we crossed the finish line next to last. But who cared! Along the venture, far different from the paradisiacal vision I had created in my mind, we experienced sea-sickness, windless days, and the perfect storm, leaving us to believe that we would be lost eternally at sea. But, of course, we didn’t lose our way and eventually arrived safely on the sands of Bermuda. I still have a photo in my office taken of me in my rain gear climbing up out of the belly of the boat after being disabled for two days with sea-sickness and terror, raising my fist to the heavens, shouting “I’m back!” My fellow crewmen named the moment “Jim’s resurrection.” The name of the boat was “Ark Angel.” The last name of the captain and owner of the boat was Gabriele. As we eyed the island of Bermuda from a far distance, he said to me, “Jim, it’s been a bit rough but where else would you rather be?” “Where else would I rather be?” I exclaimed! “I don’t think you want to know!”
But of course, later on, with my feet soundly planted on the island, I waxed poetically about the venture in my journal (as we humans often do after experiencing near calamity) and referred to the venture as a stream of heightened reality, a reminder of my utter helplessness against the powers of nature. It was a place in time I would always treasure.
But Dominick Gabrielle’s question has remained with me through the years. Where else would you rather be? It’s a good, but rhetorical, question. I won’t embarrass you by actually asking you to answer it. I simply assume there is no place else in the world you would rather be than here; no other time in your life that you would rather be living in than now. And I might be right. And I might be wrong.
The first Sunday of the New Year is a good time for reflecting on that question - where else would we rather be? Why? Because regret over what our lives might have been - IF we had made another decision, IF the fickle finger of Fate had pointed in another direction, IF the roll of the cosmic dice had turned out some other way, IF things had gone differently - this has the power to undermine our spiritual zest for life.
I admit life’s great “what ifs?” are high in my consciousness now as I begin reflecting on my ministerial career- over 50 years, 18 years of it spent right here. What if I had focused my energies differently? What if I had said something wiser to that person in trouble? Been more present to my friend who was so depressed? What if I had preached in a different mode? I left the ministry for a period of time. What if I had never returned? What if I had done this or that? There are so many regrets, so many things that in retrospect I would have done differently - but I’m not going to go there. It would take too long. As we read in the responsive reading: “Is there another way? Oh, places that I have passed!” And we responded: But the journey’s done. The way leads on.
When we are bogged down with what I call The Great Regrets we have immobilized ourselves for the living of this day. And this day is where we are fated to live. This life is the one and only experience we have. We get no repeats. There are no encores. As comic Mel Brooks put it: “Hope for the best. Expect the worst. Life is a play. We’re unrehearsed.”
The danger of living so regretfully in the past is illustrated in a familiar reading, attributed to a Friar at the Graymoor Monastery, Garrison, N.Y. “If I had my life to live over, I’d try to make more mistakes next time. I would relax. I would limber up. I would be sillier than I have been on this trip. I know of a very few things I would take seriously. I would be crazier. I would be less hygienic. I would take more chances. I would take more trips. I would climb more mountains, swim more rivers and watch more sunsets…I would eat more ice-cream and less lima beans. I would have actual troubles and fewer imaginary ones. You see, I am one of those people who lives prophylactically and sensibly and sanely, hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I have had my moments, and, if I had it to do over again; I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead each day. I have been one of those people who never go anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a gargle, a raincoat and a parachute. If I had it to do over again, I would go places and do things and travel lighter than I have. If I had my life to live over; I would start barefooted earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would play hooky more. I wouldn’t make such good grades except by accident. I would ride on more merry-go-rounds. I’d pick more daisies.”
But the mantra “If I had my life to live over” can be a terribly dangerous idea. It can fill us with a burden of regret from which there is no escape - because we know we don’t have our lives to live over. We can torture ourselves with life’s great “what ifs” and make ourselves totally miserable. All of us have made bad decisions we regret and always will. All of us have been victims of fate - suffered from events over which we had no control. We differ only in the degree of severity of these experiences. As we read in the Hebrew Book of Ecclesiastes, “It is an unhappy business that God has given human beings experiences to be busy with.” None of us can really do anything about them.
Or can we? How could I not ask that question? Clearly, we can’t change history - world or personal. There is no spiritual time machine that enables us to redo our decisions or change unforgiving fate. We are left with only one possibility - the attitude with which we gaze upon those experiences in retrospect. Over our attitudes we have considerable - though hardly complete - control. Some of our past experiences are so engraved in our memories they can never be erased, and our attitudes are so frozen in place, there seems little likelihood of a thaw. Like Zorba the Greek, we cry out against Fate which has dealt us an undeserved blow, but it is to no avail, unless we find some therapeutic release in doing so.
The composer Gian-Carlo Menotti once wisely said that “Hell begins on the day when God grants us a clear vision of all that we might have achieved, of all the gifts which we have wasted, of all that we might have done which we did not do.” This Hell is of our own creation.
I once participated in a New Year’s Ritual called the Burning of the Chaff. A group of us sat before a magnificent fireplace at a country farmhouse. We were asked by the group leader to pause for a moment, balanced on the edge of a new year, and to write on a card - for our eyes only - a few words about a painful experience to which we would like to say goodbye. When they were collected we burned the cards - and symbolically purged those unpleasant experiences in the fire.
The leader said something like “Burning our regrets in the fire will symbolize a new beginning. Burn, unpleasant memories, burn. Burn, failure, burn. Burn, regret, burn. Burn, guilt, burn. Burn, meaninglessness, burn. Burn, despair, burn. We burn these cards to remind us this is a time of beginning, to show us we must move forward, not back, to purify our minds and hearts of all we have regretted of the year just past. May this flame burn brightly to show us what we have learned. May this flame burn warmly to hasten our self-forgiveness. May this flame burn strongly to remind us of the warmth of community. Burn, chaff, burn.”
And then, to sound a more positive note, the leader issued a call to new beginnings. He invited us to take a few moments to think of an experience that we anticipated in the year ahead, an experience that would be full of the grace and joy of life and write it on a card. “Let your imagination fly; let your fondest dreams come true; let your hopes be realized; let your commitments be honored. Write a few words about what you look forward to in the coming year - that which gives you hope and promise. Keep the card as your own new year’s gift; take it with you as you leave, hold it close to your heart.”
If only it were that easy. Looking back later, I realized that the ritual was based on some false premises. It assumed that the chaff of life - those experiences we regret, those we wished we hadn’t had, those which we would like to forget - were worthless. I’m not so sure this is true.
Everything we have experienced has prepared us for today, whether we planned it that way or not. What we have been through - for good or ill - has helped to create the kind of people we are today. The hard knocks we have suffered, the missed opportunities, the failures, the regrets - all have helped to shape what we are today. These experiences in themselves, I conclude, teach us nothing, but the reflection on them can teach us a great deal.
The cartoon character Ziggy had finally reached the mountain summit to meet the guru who said, “Are you sure you want to know the meaning of life? There’s nothing you can do about it anyway.” And, as one wise soul wrote, “Years ago I discovered the meaning of life, but forgot to write it down.” If we could only remember to write it down.
I have tried to write it down. One of my fundamental conclusions about life is this: the good life is messy. That is the preliminary title of one of the books I have in my head which I will never write. Life has layers and layers of messiness. Learning to live with the ambiguity of existence is the great challenge of the human spirit. And a lifetime is simply too short a time to figure it all out. So life - our life - is always unfinished business. As Russian author Anton Chekhov put it: “Any idiot can face a crisis - it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.”
Because I have concluded that the good life is messy, I have a rather jaundiced view of all those who would make it simple - and simply divine. My feeling is well expressed by poet Kathleen Norris in her editor’s introduction to The Best Spiritual Writing, 1999: “A friend told me that she recently heard an address by a popular self-help author who defined meditation as focusing on your plans for the day and thanking God for making them happen. This is not the sort of ’spirituality’ the reader will find in this volume. It does strike me as a contemporary version of the optimistic pragmatism that once was served by Norman Vincent Peale and Dale Carnegie and now finds expression in books that speak with radiant ease about controlling the world around you while channeling your goddess, your warrior, your inner child, your personal angel, your shaman, the Indian chief you were in a former life - in short, your wondrously enlightened, so very special self.”
Of course, all of us are special - exhibiting the inherent worth and dignity of every human person. But that does not mean that there is some esoteric technique that will make it all better, that there are some simple answers out there which you can learn by listening to some self-appointed guru, that the good life is right around the corner for those who have finally figured it all out.
I liken the odds that any of us will ever figure it all out to the odds of solving the famous Rubik’s Cube problem. You no doubt have seen the familiar six-color cube. I understand that there are a few talented souls who can solve the problem and line up the colors in a few minutes. Most of us, however, have yet to “figure it out” because I understand that there are 43 quintillion incorrect combinations in the Rubik’s Cube riddle - and I suspect virtually all of us here are still twisting that cube trying to figure it out. The hard truth is that when we are born, we all have the potential to live a thousand or a million kinds of lives - but we end up having lived only one.
The awareness of ambiguity in life, the ability to live with that ambiguity; the realization that the best of lives are rarely tidy, but full of failed dreams, missed opportunities, mistakes, and just plain bad luck; the acceptance of the reality that life is a difficult journey and not a guided tour - these are the marks of spiritual maturity and a religious readiness to live a fully human life. The good life is inherently messy.
Try a mind experiment on this cusp of the New Year. Who, among the living, would you rather be? You cannot be yourself. You must be someone else. The catch is, no matter whom you choose, you take on not only the beauty and brains, the talent and the treasure of the other, but also the down side, the pain and the problems, the harm and the heartaches that may come to them. I am told that in one household the game was forbidden. As people played the game they became increasingly frustrated because they wound up saying they couldn’t think of anyone else they would rather be than themselves.
As one participant said: “Look, friend, you’ve had the choice of 6 billion people and you end up with yourself. Don’t ever whine or kvetch around me again. Enjoy being you.” The greatest courage is the courage to be - yourself.
The New Year is a good time for looking at our lives as if we were a spy looking at the depth of our own soul through a telescope. It is a good time for that Janus-like look at our past and our future. I look at my varied career as social worker, therapist, minister and where I grew up and where I live now and I am filled with pride and disappointment and disbelief. Disbelief not only about where I am but about some of the stupid, irresponsible things I have done. So much accomplished, so many mistakes and so much left undone. So many good things have happened, but too many bad things as well. What if I had done it some other way?
If I had my life to live over - I wouldn’t. Not that I might not be able to do a better job next time. Not that I have not learned a few things that would stand me in good stead another time around the track. Not that I couldn’t reduce my mistakes and increase my skill. Oh, no, I could do a much better job a second time around. But quite apart from knowing there are no encores in this life, I’m not sure I would want to give up what hard-earned wisdom I have; I’m not sure I would want to lose all those tough experiences that have made me what I am; I’m not sure I’d like to forego the mistakes and what I think I have learned from them.
I am confirmed in this learning to live with ambiguity - with the beautiful and the bad - by a story from the Sufi tradition about Mulla Nasrudin who decided to start a flower garden. He prepared the soil and planted the seeds of many beautiful flowers. But when they came up, his garden was filled not just with his chosen flowers but also overrun by dandelions. He sought out advice from gardeners all over and tried every method known to get rid of them, but to no avail. Finally he walked all the way to the capital to speak to the royal gardener at the sheik’s palace. The wise old man had counseled many gardeners before, and suggested a variety of remedies to expel the dandelions, but Mulla had tried them all. They sat together in silence for some time, and finally the gardener looked at Nasrudin and said, “Well, then I suggest you learn to love them.”
If I had my life to live over - I wouldn’t. In this new year, when the temptation is to peer backward to the year that was - the in-many-ways-awful, tumultuous, violent year that was - I try to remember that while we are constantly trying to figure out our lives backwards, life is always and forever lived in forward gear. As one of my colleagues so poetically put it: “Tomorrow’s my address and you may find me there. What happened yesterday won’t hold me long and by the time you get here I’ll have gone.”
And so I leave you with this thought from Jack Kornfield’s Postcards from the Edge: “Having a great time. Wish I were here!” Well, I am here. And so are you. And there’s no place I would rather be. I hope the same goes for you. “The way leads on. . . . . .” Happy New Year!