| living well Is Your Life Really Full Enough? BY Bob Mueller Life itself has a vastness that is beyond the reach of our sight. Fill your life with its vastness. Concentrate on your powers instead of your problems. Our business in life is to take ourselves in hand and see what we can make out of the selves we are. And, in spite of our limited and handicapped selves, we can make a contribution to the world. You never live until you begin to live for something. Our lives should be full. Whenever I see a baby I think, “Here is a perfect human being. This little one has never said or thought or done anything that is wrong. It is absolutely perfect.” But suppose the baby remained as it is. As time went on, that would be a great tragedy. The glory of a little baby is that it has a lifetime before it in which to grow and develop. We are never concerned altogether with what we are. Our greater concern is what we may become, and that is what our dreams are all about. Recently my wife and I spent three weeks on the beach in Kauai, Hawaii, the most beautiful and inspiring place we know of anywhere. The trees and flowers and weather there are so lovely. But I was especially fascinated by the ocean. I would go to sleep at night to the melody of the breakers coming in upon the shore. I would eat breakfast each morning on the porch looking out across the vastness of the water. Each day I would walk several miles down the beach. I would swim out into the deep and then ride the waves back in. Sometimes I would become almost overwhelmed with how big the ocean is and how little I am. Looking at the ocean, one almost feels a sense of helplessness. We recall that Lord Byron once wrote: “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; Man marks the earth with ruin, — his control Stops with the shore.” As you look at the ocean you realize: here is something bigger than any of us, even bigger than all of us. There are many parallels between life and the ocean, but one especially impresses me — the coming and going of the tides. The tides go out and are low. The tides come in and are high. There is no power of earth that can prevent the low and high tides. So it is with an individual life. We experience times of low tide and of high tide and there is no way to stop those tides. Life is so constituted that no person can stand still. Either we are progressing or we are dying. Either we are getting better or we are getting worse. Either we are helping ourselves or we are hurting ourselves. As you live by the ocean for a time, there comes a better understanding of life because the two are so much alike. Life itself has a vastness that is beyond the reach of our sight. Fill your life with its vastness. Think of your mind as being a house with several rooms. One room of your house is your office, which represents your daily work. We may spend all of our time in that room, and never get away from the worries and problems of making a living. Another room in the house is the kitchen, in which your meals are prepared. We may live our lives on the animal level, thinking only of the satisfaction of our physical desires. Underneath the house is the cellar, which might indicate the dingy, dark areas, the secret desires for wrong and all of the other destructive emotions of humankind. We can live on that level. Above is the attic, which stores an accumulation of our past. We can live with old grief and fears, old worries and regrets. In some houses, however, above the attic there is a room to which we can climb, high above the ground, which looks out toward the heavens. No matter where our body may happen to be — walking along the street, working at the job, or standing in the midst of a crowd — we can climb into this mental room high above and there commune with our Higher Power. Bob Mueller is vice president at Hospice Foundation of Louisville. Bob can be emailed at bmueller@iamtodayswoman.com. Bob has two books: Look Forward Hopefully and The Gentle Art of Caring. |