Conscious Choice: When Abundance is Ours

July 2000

When Abundance is Ours

Some Personal Reflections

by Mark Harris

"And so long as you have not experienced
This: To die and so to grow,
You are only a troubled guest
On the dark earth." — Goethe

Sometimes a memory comes out of nowhere and I am changed, if only for a moment. Trick-or-treating at age five, I ring the doorbell to our Los Angeles home, convinced my own mother will not recognize me in the skeleton costume and mask I wear. My mother plays along and pretends not to know the scary little fellow who stands before her. I am highly amused at the cleverness of my deception. When she drops candy in my bag, I whip off my mask to revel in my duplicity.

At fifteen years old, I kiss a girl for the first time. It’s a Friday night and I’m at a home set in the hills north of Ann Arbor, Michigan. The house has an indoor pool and there are eight of us present, evenly divided by gender. Everyone is a stranger except for the friend who drags me along at the last minute. It doesn’t take long before I realize his invitation is motivated more by mathematics than altruism. I discover this when the pool party shifts gears and becomes a kissing party.

Almost as if by script, everyone is suddenly paired off and kissing — except for me and the poor teenage girl who is my de facto partner, that is. Not wanting to seem impolite, I kiss her. But I do not imagine I’m doing her any favors, as I feel utterly inept. This drags on for half an awkward hour. Finally, our host announces the party must end; the parents will be home soon. The girl seems as relieved as the boy.

When I think about those times, I can only laugh at myself. How innocent were the days when life was defined by a small boy’s playful heart or a teenager’s gangly self-consciousness! The vivid imprint of those moments also clashes with another sense, that of the distant, irretrievable fade of time. Emotion washes over me as I realize how long ago it all was. I feel the desire to jump headlong into the undefended intensity of those early days. If there were always challenges, life then also had a kind of abundant ring to it, as if the church bells chimed in every new passion and discovery.

Yet it is not exactly nostalgia I am describing. I don’t especially desire to go back to those days. Looking back, I do so through a certain mature prism I do not care to relinquish. In the reflective glow of the past I bask, perhaps, in a tenderness of feeling for myself I usually more easily reserve for others. I recognize also a certain familiar innocence that remains alive in me, despite everything I’ve learned over the years.

Or maybe because of everything I’ve learned.

The Spiritual Path

The memories I recount are reminiscences of appreciation, and in their embrace I feel a richness in feeling for this life that is mine. But this appreciation is tempered by hard-won wisdom. Other memories evoke the tenderness more akin to a lacerated wound. Those are the wounds I’ve inflicted upon myself through self-doubt or fear or thinking I somehow don’t measure up to my own or other people’s standards. Those are the wounds of disappointment or betrayal, of lost loves or broken trusts, of contentions in health as well as encounters with that most cardinal of life’s visitors — death.

Yet as I write these words, I feel touched by grace in ways I cannot ignore. I feel an abundance in living that is rooted in meaning and values, in creativity and expressiveness, in the compassion I feel for others, and in the gratitude I have for knowing that I have tried to love well.

What does it mean to live graced by hopefulness? Admittedly, such grace does not always come easily in a difficult world. So many people appear to struggle with life; from battles with depression and addictions to unfulfilling relationships or the sense that their lives lack any grander meaning beyond the minutia of demanding daily routines.

For some, money becomes the answer. This is hardly surprising in a culture where the consumerist static of advertisers plays like a loud and constant backdrop to our world view. Copywriters have become the holy scribes of our modern-day desires, crafting a kind of calculated imagery of abundance that tries to assure us that our most human longings for connection, meaning, or even spiritual salvation can all be had in a product and for a price.

And so we consume and consume some more, even when it means living beyond our means or working more hours than we used to. If we can’t buy everything we want, we browse the bookstores or tune in to PBS to discover what’s blocking us from "the courage to be rich." Or we run through the smorgasbord of personal growth workshops in search of the secret to transforming our fear into power and our power into prosperity.

Yet something seems awry. Even many of the more financially fortunate today report a kind of enervating mist of exhaustion and emptiness wafting through their lives, like some sour smell they can’t quite identify. What does our affluence mean when it’s bought at the price of separation from each other, in the form of competition for material advantage? Or separation from ourselves — our creativity and passion — in the form of work that is lacking in fulfillment or meaning?

Indeed, why must we even speak about abundance in a country and a time so alive with possibility? Is it perhaps because our abundance is so precariously one-sided, so constrained to the surface of a society that still largely defines who wins by who loses? Consider only the contrasts that surround us. While daily the media remind us of our current "boom" economy, the average CEO now makes in a day what the average employee earns in a year. Meanwhile, commuters in Chicago’s affluent western suburbs were greeted earlier this year by the sight of striking janitors who blocked traffic and risked arrest because they believed they, too, deserved some modest abundance, in the form of the right to health insurance and a livable wage.

Giving, Receiving, and Healing

Certainly contemporary society remains shaped by a vast expanse of unfairness, most of it rooted in political and cultural norms that gravely limit our collective abundance. But if life has a way of tearing at us with its injustices, it also has a way of girding us, when our purpose here on earth is rooted in values and ideals that go beyond the rewards of self-aggrandizement. The life that is rich in reward moves in a kind of balanced rhythm of giving and receiving, in gratitude for and service to those ideals that promote the greater good of human cooperation and partnership. The writer Jack London put it simply, "He who serves all, best serves himself."

What most tests us can become fertile soil to cultivate caring and compassion, courage and vision for everything that lights our faith in the human experience. For example, one story from the Columbine High School shootings last year is an unlikely source of inspiration. It begins with the fate of Rachel Scott, the student reportedly pulled up by her hair by one of the killers and asked if she believed in God. When she answered yes, the boy took the already-wounded girl’s life, with another bullet.

All my life I have felt a deep empathy for the victims of such injustice and violence, whether it originates in the senseless fury of the street or the calculated atrocities of governments or those who claim power. Clearly, the Columbine shootings confront us at an almost visceral level to keep strong whatever faith or gratitude we feel for the beauty of the world. One wonders, at first, should we just try to be grateful that it wasn’t us who was killed? But the yardstick of personal privilege is hardly the measure of true abundance.

Rachel’s sister, however, found grace through her grief. "Something like this is either going to tear you apart from God or bring you closer," she said. "If I pay attention to the things that have taken place as a result of Columbine, something as simple as a parent reconnecting with a kid, that’s healing." There is courage in this young woman’s words. And perhaps this is one essential aspect of what true abundance is — psychological courage — the courage to accept life as it is, and then still to go forward, not complacently but dynamically and expectantly. With hope.

When I feel abundance, I am in a kind of centered, active place where all of my energy just flows right through my fears. I feel on intimate ground with my most heartfelt desires, as if I touch their promise in every move I make. This is a sense of promise not only in life’s hard realities but in happiness. Think about the first time you told someone that you love them. If you’re like me, you were nervous and maybe a little fearful and also about as alive as you will ever feel. Isn’t that how it usually works? Courage does not imply an absence of fear — God knows I’d be in trouble if that were true! — but the capacity to do the right, strong, and passionate thing, despite the fear.

Living With an Open Heart

The philosopher and futurist Buckminster Fuller once said that our modern world has enough resources for every human being to potentially live like a millionaire. What is lacking is only the social consciousness, the collective will to make it happen. Instead we cling to outdated cultural norms that tell us greed and inequality, poverty and war, are just the way things are, and always will be.

Such illusions persist not because of inherent limitations in our human or social potential. To some extent the same can be true in our more personal choices, the ways we come to view our own lives. As I write this essay, I’m thinking about the other day when a new friend showed me pictures of her late son, who died in a car accident more than a decade ago at the age of seven. It is the day after Mother’s Day. "He was a gift," she says quietly as I examine the pictures. I can feel years of emotions behind the words, a long measured intensity now pressed into the acceptance and calm and dignity of this moment. I want to say more, but hesitate.

"I know," I simply tell her.

Even in sadness, she had an open heart. Perhaps this capacity for openheartedness, when love’s current flows free and undefended in the pulse of who we are, is the truest, most singular expression of what it means to be abundant in life. Sometimes we discover what makes us real in hard ways, as when illness or some other calamity hits us in the head with a two-by-four, and everything we’ve taken for granted becomes up for grabs. Other times grace taps us more gently on the shoulder, in the spark of recognition you feel for a person you’ve just met, the certainty of your intuition that you could love the graceful and gentle soul who stands before you. And, months later, knowing that the veracity of that first feeling remains as true as anything you’ve ever known.

If I have learned these things, it is because I do not take them for granted. Perhaps they are, anyway, lessons I must continually relearn. I think back now to several years ago, lying on the floor of my living room one cold January morning, a collapsing fatigue clutching at me like some drunken, staggering friend. I had felt like that for a while, since the day of my emergency hospitalization for a kidney infection nearly a year before. Antibiotics had within days subdued the infection, but in the weeks, and then months, that followed I could not seem to regain the old stamina. I could only stumble through endless days, depleted nearly beyond struggle. I was chronically fatigued.

I recall then that my thoughts roamed through a very bleak terrain. I felt like giving up. As a teenager, I had once scoffed at my dad’s words that life was about learning to cope: I didn’t buy it. To my young mind coping was equal to copping out. I had grown up watching the barbarism of the Vietnam War, and at age sixteen had resolved I would never compromise with a world that would allow such things. Life was to be conquered and mastered and the world remade, if life was to mean anything at all.

Now, years later I had almost given up. The official diagnosis was a weakened immune system (and a cascade of related symptoms). Unofficially, I look back and see that my whole soul was in protest, crying out, fearful and not trusting. I felt as if everyone I had ever opened my heart to had abandoned me. I also wasn’t sure I blamed them. In truth, I was already abandoning myself, in the sit-down strike of the near total exhaustion that consumed me. My whole outlook then was set to a slow and steady cadence of self-doubt. If only I could cope!

But something else was also happening. In this new and unfamiliar vulnerability I found myself beginning to confront old wounds and forgotten traumas, questioning everything and taking nothing for granted. At a more profound level, I was, in a sense, rewriting the story of my life, letting go of an "official" version of myself — the version in which I stood condemned for not appreciating a father who left this life before I was ready. I was letting go of impossible standards of perfectionism, of other negative or self-limiting beliefs. I was starting to give myself a break.

You could also say I was reclaiming my life on higher ground, not in a nicely managed and linear trajectory, like some made-for-TV drama, but fitfully, painfully, and relentlessly. I took a new approach to my living, one rooted in emotional honesty and a commitment to know myself as authentically as I knew how. And to care for myself more.

I would say I was learning something about abundance.

Remembering Who We Are

The writer C. S. Lewis once spoke of how memory can transfigure our lives, acquiring a radiance in time that grows only more brilliant, if no less real to the truth of our story. For what was once only a transitory moment in our experience now sounds as a "chord in the ultimate music" of who we are, who we are becoming, of all that has enriched our lives.

These days such memories often come to me in rushes, touching some part of me that feels close to gratitude. Sometimes one special memory will come out of nowhere, almost like a prayer, to enlighten me in my moments of discouragement. In this memory I see myself at age twelve, running as fast as I can in the vacant lot near our home. One of the neighbor kids has hit the baseball over my head and I’ve taken off after it. It’s just the two of us, pitching and hitting in the field. The day is Memorial Day and the sky is as alive as the changing season. Only in the last week have the spring rains run their course. Now, majestic clouds float restlessly above the holiday sky, almost like some artist’s rendition of the skies of heaven.

But on this day heaven is on earth, and it seems as if the whole neighborhood is out, bustling with life. This day, I don’t mind chasing after the ball. I run like the ground was made for me. I don’t even mind pitching, as I’ve finally got the hang of the curve ball I’ve been trying to teach myself to throw, and I’m eager to perfect it.

Now look! There’s my dad flying down the driveway on a skateboard. The afternoon wind has picked up and he’s got an idea. He nails a bed sheet to two long sticks hammered together like a cross. Soon he’s riding the wind, sailing fast down our long driveway, grinning widely. My six-year-old brother is jumping up and down he’s so delighted; laughing with his whole body. To us kids, it’s an impressive show of well, not acting like the adult he is. And we love it!

In my memory of this day, filtered and compressed as it is into some idyllic moment in time, I discover a part of myself that remains untouched by all the dirt roads I’ve walked down. I discover a kind of reassuring inner vitality, as alive now as it was then, tempered only by the lessons of the years. Deeply alive, I remind myself that true abundance is about the beauty of human relationships; the grace of feeling connected and cared for; caring for others.

If this sounds a bit exalted, just think of a four-year old splashing around in a pool, all forty pounds of mock swimmer counting on your grown-up arms to keep her afloat. Then, as if she just knows this is the moment, abruptly yelling, "let go, let go," and as you do so your little friend is suddenly, magically, and wondrously swimming. That is spiritual grace, captured in a moment.

I try now to be grateful for what I have, and embrace what could be better, both for myself and for the society I live in. I try to be grateful for the grand sweep of my vision and social ideals, and for the small victories that get me through the day. I try to live my life in this spirit, and when I do, I feel rich inside. When I do not succeed, I try to forgive myself.

And then I try again.

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