What Constitutes ‘A Well-Lived Life’?
There is a wonderful poem by current poet laureate Ada Limón titled, “In the End, Everything Gives.” In it, Limón describes how one day we all will have to give up “the bleary algorithm of patterns” and everything else that anchors our sense of security and stability.
Limón goes on to say:
Everything gives way, the shorelines, the house decaying
and becoming shrub and moss and haunt, the body
that gives and gives until it cannot give anymore …
Those lines returned to me when my husband and I went recently for a medical check-up. The nurse practitioner who has been caring for us for years remarked how all three of us now have more years behind us that ahead. The remark prompted me to reflect less on what I want to do in the years remaining than on the kind of person I want to be.
In the end, will mine have been a life well-lived?
When I think of the many religious sisters, monks and priests I’ve known — including two abbots who were close friends — each of them lived consequential lives. They did it through the service they gave to others. Each one could have been the subject of the weekly “A Life Well-Lived” segment on NBC’s “Sunday Today” show, celebrating the lives of otherwise ordinary people who leave an extraordinary legacy.
Many of the monks, priests and religious sisters I knew have passed on. Yet when I visit their monasteries, it feels as though they still are there — in the corridor walls, the stone walks, the atmosphere of a chapel.
Of course, they live on too in my heart. As Luke tells us in Chapter 20 of his gospel, “For he is not the God of the dead, but of the living. For to him all are alive.”
I recently participated in a series of online workshops on “Eldering in Grace.” The penultimate session explored death and various views of the afterlife. I appreciated the metaphor our workshop leader Danny Martin offered: our lives as symphony where every note counts, even after it’s been played.
The priest and scholar Thomas Berry, who felt a strong connection to the natural world and the cosmos, was asked once where he thought he’d be after he died. He answered, “In the universe, where I’ve always been.”
There is a joke about an old Irishman who was asked his age. “I’m made of the stardust of the universe,” the old man said. “I’m 13 billion years old!”
Given that we are all 13 billion years old, what then is the prescription — if there is just one — for living life well?
There is an interesting scene in the novel “Zorba the Greek” in which Zorba tells his younger protégé about a 90-year-old man he encountered who planted an almond tree.
“What, grandfather, planning an almond tree?” Zorba asks in disbelief, guessing the old man will not live to see the tree grow.
“My son, I carry on as if I should never die,” the man tells Zorba.
Zorba replies, “And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute. Which of us was right?’
I lean toward Zorba’s philosophy. St. Benedict in his Rule for monastic life advices, “Day by day, remind yourself you are going to die. Hour by hour keep careful watch over all you do.” Benedict isn’t suggesting a morbid preoccupation with death, but rather an awareness that death gives gravitas and greater meaning to life because life is finite.
As Benedictine writer Sister Joan Chittister once observed, “The fundamental question for a Christian isn’t whether there is life after death, but whether there is life before death.”
The philosopher Steve Cave gave a TED talk a while back on NPR on “Why Are Human Beings Afraid To Die?” Cave spoke of confronting is own immense fear of death.
He said, “I find it helpful to see life as being like a book. A book is bound by its covers … So our lives are bounded by birth and death.” The characters in a book know no horizons, Cave said. They are not afraid of reaching the last chapter because they only know the moments that make up their story.
We humans who are the protagonist of our life story “need not worry how long our story is, if it’s a comic strip or an epic,” Cave says. “The only thing that matters is that it is a good story.”
That is why we keep death daily before our eyes. That is why it makes sense to keep focused on what brings meaning, passion and delight to our lives — whether one is 20, 40, 60, 80 or beyond.
The artist Candy Chang has traveled across the U.S. creating art installations with just a blackboard and a bucket of different colored chalk. On the board she writes, “Before I die, I want to …” then leaves a space for people passing by to fill in their response.
How would you finish the sentence, “Before I die, I want to …”
How would you define “a life well-lived?”
To watch the “Eldering In Grace” workshop videos, please visit https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGExIeryp7X-1zxXU8fCmi7Chm0-yoz0I
To hear Candy Chang’s TED Talk, please visit https://www.ted.com/talks/candy_chang_before_i_die_i_want_to
