Many years ago, I attended a seminar given by the late Stephen Covey, author of the best-selling book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. An entire day was dedicated to learning about these seven habits he had researched. Today, there is only one thing that I recall from that event. It shook me when I heard it and the vibrations have not stopped since. Allow me to give my rendition of this one pearl.
Everyone, every day spends their waking hours climbing a ladder. It can be related to work, school, social gatherings, even PTA meetings. We seem obsessed with advancement, higher levels of responsibility, greater heights of influence. We work hard, sometimes fighting and clawing our way around impediments or people determined to halt our progression. The goal, the prize, always beyond our grasp, keeps us moving upward and onward, until one day, joyfully we reach the mark, the pinnacle of our vaulted success. As we survey the horizon of our garnished accomplishment we might look back from whence we’ve come recalling the journey we have taken to get us to this point only to realize that the ladder we’ve been climbing is perched beside the wrong wall.
Thomas Merton puts it another way, we each live a dual life – our false self and our true self. Our false self is, regrettably, more apparent to all since it is the disguise we feed to keep up our created identity. The false self is the image we maintain while traversing the ladder on the wrong wall. Keeping up appearances is the rational expression to our false self.
However, there comes a point of exhaustion. When appearances be damned, you can’t continue to live the lie. Has this happened to you, yet? Some might call it a mid-life crisis or possibly a crisis of faith. Some don’t know what to call it even as their world begins to unravel thinking how they’ve expended all this energy, an entire life, for what?
Fr. Richard Rohr, in his book Falling Upward calls this moment the end of the first half of your life. You’ve built things for others to enjoy and be comfortable within, yet you’re not satisfied. You’re drained. Your life has been poured out, as the apostle Paul would say, in the service of others and there isn’t any fruit left for you to partake of or a drop to slacken the stifling thirst to live just one more day.
At this junction you face a choice. Continue to live the lie as a zombie; or decide to find your true self and live a life of real worth, of real passion, of real purpose. The ladder for your true self isn’t your work, it’s your rest; it’s understanding how who you’ve always been never needs to hide behind veiled agendas of hidden motives. The true self thrives in the pursuit of purpose-filled passion.
Have you succumbed to the boredom found in reaching for another wrung upon a ladder laden with the rumpled garments of false appearances? Do you find it difficult to activate any part of your being to accomplish the simplest of tasks which assault you daily? Do you not know what you believe to be true anymore? A ladder awaits. It reaches to places you’ve yearned to experience but felt reluctant to consider. How true, how real, do you want to be? How much are you willing to die in order to live resurrected?
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