“The Time Between”

Dave Weissbard

UURockford

11/09/03

The Reading

Anna Quindlan's Villanova Commencement Address

   "It's a great honor for me to be the third member of my family to receive an honorary doctorate from this great university. It's an honor to follow my great-uncle Jim, who was a gifted physician, and my Uncle Jack, who is a remarkable businessman. Both of them could have told you something important about their professions, about medicine or commerce.

I have no specialized field of interest or expertise, which puts me at a disadvantage, talking to you today. I'm a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is all I know.

Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first. Don't ever forget what a friend once wrote Senator Paul Tsongas when the senator decided not to run for re-election because he'd been diagnosed with cancer:

"No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time in the office."

Don't ever forget the words my father sent me on a postcard last year: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat."

Or what John Lennon wrote before he was gunned down in the driveway of the Dakota: "Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans."

You walk out of here this afternoon with only one thing that no one else has. There will be hundreds of people out there with your same degree; there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you will be the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life on a bus, or in a car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.

People don't talk about the soul very much anymore. It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is a cold comfort on a winter night, or when you're sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you've gotten back the test results and they're not so good.

Here is my resume. I am a good mother to three children. I have tried never to let my profession stand in the way of being a good parent. I no longer consider myself the center of the universe. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.

I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make marriage vows mean what they say. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.

I am a good friend to my friends, and they to me. Without them, there would be nothing to say to you today, because I would be a cardboard cutout. But I call them on the phone, and I meet them for lunch. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.

I would be rotten, or at best mediocre at my job, if those other things were not true. You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is all you are. So here's what I wanted to tell you today: get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house. Do you think you'd care so very much about those things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a lump in your breast?

Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over Seaside Heights, a life in which you stop and watch how a red tailed hawk circles over the water gap or the way a baby scowls with concentration when she tries to pick up a cheerio with her thumb and first finger.

Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Each time you look at your diploma, remember that you are still a student, still learning how to best treasure your connection to others. Pick up the phone. Send an e-mail. Write a letter.

Kiss your Mom. Hug your Dad.

Get a life in which you are generous. Look around at the azaleas in the neighborhood where you grew up; look at a full moon hanging silver in a black, black sky on a cold night. And realize that life is the best thing ever, and that you have no business taking it for granted.

Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around. Take money you would have spent on beers and give it to charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Be a big brother or sister. All of you want to do well. But if you do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.

It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the color of the azaleas, the sheen of the limestone on Fifth Avenue, the color of our kids eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again.

It is so easy to exist instead of live. I learned to live many years ago. Something really, really bad happened to me, something that changed my life in ways that, if I had my druthers, it would never have been changed at all.

And what I learned from it is what, today, seems to be the hardest lesson of all. I learned to love the journey, not the destination.

I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and to try to give some of it back because I believed in it completely and utterly.
And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I had learned. By telling them this:
Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby's ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness because if you do you will live it with joy and passion as it ought to be lived."

THE SERMON

[the dash]

        Many years ago I heard a sermon – it was most likely in Chautauqua – the details of which I have forgotten, but I have never forgotten the central conceit: our lives are commonly reduced to a dash. Go down to our memorial patio and there you will see it: Marjorie Taylor Casson, 1904-2000; Winfield W. Foster, 1911-1998; H. Walter Lewis, 1920-1995; Sarah P. Voss, 1897-1995. They were born, they died, and all of the time between (everything that went on in their lives: their labor, their loves; their successes, their failures; their joys, their sorrows) is encapsulated in a dash.

        In his little book, Lifecraft, my colleague Forrest Church, points out the belief we have that drowning persons see their lives pass before their eyes in about a minute. He asks his readers to take a minute and assume that they are drowning. “One minute is all you have left. Your entire life is going to pass before your eyes. Close them.” He asks, “What do you see?” Let me ask you to do the same. Close your eyes for a minute – watch your life pass by in high speed. [I’ll tell you when the minute’s up.]

        What did you see? How do you feel about it?

[what is important?]

        When we have a Memorial Service, celebrating someone’s life, we try to unpack the dash – to open up what was important, what gave richness to the life of the one deceased. To prepare for those services, I meet with as many members of the family and close friends as I can, generally for about two hours of reminiscing. I always encourage the families to talk about the whole person – no one I’ve encountered yet has walked on water. Rich lives have dimensions of pain as well as joy. We want to idealize the dead, which I believe does them and us a disservice. By glossing over the pain they have caused us, we exaggerate its importance – we are suggesting that it is so overwhelming that to speak of the pains would obliterate the good. In my experience, the positives have, in virtually every instance, far outweighed the negatives. The best conversations are those in which family members feel free to say, “It really drove me crazy when Frank or Mary would _____.” By “best conversations,” I mean those which deeply serve to help a family to begin to come to terms with the loss they have experienced.

        What is important about people’s lives? What was important about the capsule of your life that passed by your eyes during that minute of silence?

        As Anna Quindlan pointed out to the Villanova graduates, it is virtually unheard of for anyone to say, “I wish I had spent more time in the office.” How many people would say, “I wish I were leaving a bigger estate to my survivors?” “I wish I had driven a Jaguar?”

        What is strange to the point of being neurotic, if not psychotic, is that in most cases, we devote the greatest portion of our lives to the things that are the least important in the grand scale. The regrets that people express are that they did not have their real priorities in order. We go from minute to minute, driven by what feels the most important, but which, in the final analysis, hardly ever is.

[the audience]

        I want to pause at this point to be clear about the audience to which this sermon is addressed. We are not a cross section of the population of the world, nor even of the United States. Abraham Maslow pointed out that people who do not have food and shelter and safety are generally not devoting a lot of energy to worrying about the meaning of life. Few, if any of us, have to worry about meeting the basic survival needs. What is strange, however, is that we often feel and act as if our survival is in jeopardy. You know how kids say, with feeling, “I’ll just die if I can’t have the same kind of shoes that everyone else is wearing!” They mean it – it feels to them like a survival need. Often, people like us feel as if our survival is in jeopardy if we can’t have this or that. If only we had just a little more – except that it is always just a little more than whatever we have.

[not materialistic]

        In my sermon on death and afterlife, I mentioned in passing David Loy’s book on Lack and Transcendence, and said I would be coming back to it. Dr. Loy is an American who has become a Buddhist scholar. I find his thinking fascinating. He was my guest on Fusion last month, speaking about peace issues. He is coming back this week and we are going to have a discussion of Buddhism.

        Loy has a fascinating insight which is that while we call ours a materialistic culture, that really is a misnomer. He contends that we are not about material goods at all. The real difference between a Hundai and a Lamborghini is not material – it is purely symbolic. He points out:

Money is the “purest” symbol “because there is nothing in reality that corresponds to it.” The coins and paper bills we pass around are in themselves worthless, as Midas discovered about gold. You can’t eat or drink them, plant them, or sleep under them. At the same time, money has more value than anything else because it is value; it can transform into everything because it is how we define value.

Loy goes on to say:

When everything has its price and everyone his price, the numerical representation of the symbol-system becomes more important – more real – than the things represented. We end up enjoying not a worthwhile job well done, or meeting a friend, or hearing a bird, but accumulating pieces of paper.

[free?]

        Look at how we live in America today. We talk about our freedom, but when you come right down to it, how free do people really feel? I don’t mean about what church to attend, or how to vote, or whether or not to have an abortion. I mean, in terms of what we do with the time between our births and deaths. Are we really free or are we driven? Look at the reality. Americans, on the average, work 350 more hours a year than do our European counterparts. It is estimated that we work more than did the serfs in the Middle Ages, who had frequent holidays from work. And it is getting worse, not better, year by year. As the economy declines, employers are demanding that fewer people work more hours. Overtime is often compulsory if you want to keep your job. By reducing the number of workers, employers reduce overhead. As corporate profits go up, effective earnings by employees go down. Trickle down economics is a sham.

        But it is not only blue collar laborers we are talking about. Professionals who want to “get ahead” have to work overtime – they have to get there before the boss and leave after him or her if they want to be considered dedicated enough to get promotions. And all of this is not focused simply on having enough to provide shelter and food for our families.

[choices I made]

        When I was in college, I had to make decisions about what I would do with my life. Having been raised a Unitarian Universalist, I thought I had a pretty clear sense of my values. I could see where the big bucks lay, and I considered the possibility of going to law school, or going into human resources in industry. I have classmates no brighter and no harder working than I who have done very well indeed – far better than I economically. I knew that choosing the ministry was not going to make me an economic success, but that was not important to me, beyond a point. (I clearly did not take a vow of poverty.) But the reality is that I was, for many years, no less driven than those who were seeking the big bucks. It wasn’t the money, but my behavior was still compulsive. I was determined to do everything anyone could ask a minister to do – to be everywhere anyone could ask me to be – everyone except my family, of course.

[driven by lack]

        Many psychiatrists maintain that we are driven by our fear of death – we try to accumulate goods or power or fame such that will give us some measure of immortality. It is David Loy’s contention, as a Buddhist, that what is driving us is not our fear of what will happen to us later, but a very deep feeling we have that even now, we are not real – that there is a sense of lack within us.

        David Loy believes that sense of lack is based on the fiction that we are separate individuals, disconnected from the universe. We live in an unreal world that is based on that fiction, that mental construction of separateness which blinds us to the reality that we are, indeed, integral parts of an interconnected web of existence.

        The Buddha was not a theologian, but a psychologist. He looked at human suffering and realized that it was all based our striving for things that were not real, that did not matter, that did not satisfy. He discovered that the resolution of suffering did not lie in deities or in rituals, but in the realization that we are fulfilled only when we stop torturing ourselves with the desire for things that do not satisfy us.

[individualism]

        My mind clouded over when I watched the first part of the recent PBS program on string theory, which was, in fact, an expansion of a lecture I heard at Chautauqua a couple of years ago. Atomic theory is enough to confuse us with the recognition that coursing through our bodies are little solar systems that are pulsing to the same beat as the one which marked the beginning of our universe. Nothing really is as it seems to us. We are not what we seem to us. String theory gets even more fundamental, more complex, more mind boggling, and all of this science supports Loy’s contention that we are fundamentally a part of the universe, not separate from it.

        But Unitarian Universalists are at the extreme of the insistence upon individualism. If I take Loy seriously, as I do, I have to re-evaluate what we say in our services of infant dedication because we stress not how a child is a manifestation of being, but a unique individual.

[becoming real]

        I know it seems as if I have strayed far afield, but let’s see if I can help you see the thread that is running through this in my mind.

        It is Loy’s contention that our lives are marked by our attempts to convince ourselves that we are real as individuals. We are driven by the need to prove that we are not frauds, even though we fear that we are.

        One way we do this is through the search for fame, which is supposed to assure us that we are real in other people’s eyes. Remember that embarrassing moment at the 1984 Academy Awards when Sally Field, receiving the Oscar for Places in the Heart, gushed "I wanted more than anything to have your respect. The first time I didn't feel it, but this time I feel it and I can't deny the fact you like me. Right now, you really like me!" Fame has become a kind of validation that we exist – except that it actually reinforces our feeling of being frauds – “Well, I fooled them, for the time being.” Sally Field’s insecurity and search for reassurance was laid out before our eyes, and we knew it was not satisfied.

        Some try to validate their existence through love – except that what we call “love” is often so grasping, so needy, that it is not love for the other but love for the self that drives us, which is why so many people, when they do not find the assurance of their own reality they are seeking in one relationship, try again, and maybe again, and again.

        And then there is the attempt we have already mentioned of trying to assure ourselves we are real by working hard, by trying to create a reputation or accumulate a bank balance that shows we must count for something. The problem is that does not work either. Howard Hughes was, at one time, the richest man in the world. He had access to almost anything he wanted - his resources were virtually unlimited - but they were never enough to bring him the contentment he was seeking. Look at the multi-million dollar executives who are being caught with their hands in the cookie jars, stealing even more. For what? What are they getting when they steal $20 million more? They can’t possibly spend it all - even with extravagant birthday parties. It certainly isn’t happiness or contentment because there is never enough to buy those.

        There has always been a tendency, when clergy preach sermons like this, to dismiss them as attempts to get people to settle for less, as advocating a kind of passivity, acceptance of economic injustice, or maybe sour grapes – “Well I don’t really envy those who have more. . .”

[take back your time]

        After all this, let me tell you where this sermon began. It was my original intention to deliver this sermon back in October close to what was declared by the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy at Cornell University as “Take Back Your Time Day.”

        It was the contention of the supporters of that declaration, among which the Unitarian Universalist Association was counted, that we need to look more closely at the lives we lead so that we can make wiser decisions about how we spend them, rather than being spent by them. It was scheduled for Friday, October 24^th which was selected because it fell nine weeks before the end of the year – the nine weeks more we work each year than Europeans. The intent was that “Take Back Your Time Day” would become like Earth Day - a way of making people aware of the degree to which we have allowed ourselves to become overworked and overstressed. I’ll venture that few of you even heard about it.

        The problem is that as central as exploitation of the environment is to our culture, the drivenness of overwork is perhaps more central: we are afraid of looking at it because to acknowledge it would be to open a can or worms.

        Look at what we do when we have time off work – we schedule or over-schedule ourselves so we won’t have time to think. We keep busy so we won’t have to confront our fears, the deep questions about what this is all about, why we are doing what we are doing. If we can die on the run, we may never have to face the reality that we may be squandering our lives in pursuit of things which do not really matter.

[The Cat’s in the Cradle]

        The thing that got under my skin a long time ago was Harry Chapin’s song, “The Cat’s in the Cradle.” In it, a father keeps telling his son that he’s going to make time for him soon, but he mises his first steps and his first words, and the opportunity to play ball because he was too busy because “there were planes to catch and bills to play.” The son asks, “When you coming home, dad?” and Dad says “I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then, You know we’ll have a good time then.” And then, the son goes off to college and when he comes home, Dad wants him to sit down and spend some time together, but the son has become just like Dad and when Dad asks “When you coming home ,son?” the son responds, “I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then, dad, you know we’ll have a good time then.”

        The last verse says:

        I’ve long since retired and my son’s moved away.

        I called him up just the other day,

        I said, “I’d like to see you if you don’t mind.”

        He said, “I’d love to dad, if I could find the time.

        You see, my new job’s a hassle and the kid’s got the flu,

        But it’s sure nice talking to you, dad.

        It’s been nice talking to you.”

        And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me,

        He’d grown up just like me.

        My boy was just like me.

[what is important?]

        When you took that minute before to think about your life, what was important to you about the time between your birth and now? What is it that you would want people to say about you? How would you want to be remembered? And now comes the second most important question, “How does what you are doing with your life, how you are spending your time, contribute or detract from what you believe is important?”

[what are you going to do differently?]

        And here comes the most important question: “What are you going to do differently with the time that is remaining?” You see, it’s not over until it’s over. As long as we have life, we have the opportunity to change the final chapter, and it is always the final chapter that seems to matter the most.

        If you are satisfied with what you have been doing, more power to you. Unless you are deluding yourself, you are among the blessed few. For the rest of us, the challenge is, instead of accumulating more regrets, to take charge of our lives, to set our course for the balance of the trip, because as much as we tell ourselves otherwise, we do have that opportunity.  

        As Anna Quindlan said:

I learned to love the journey, not the destination.
I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and to try to give some of it back because I believed in it completely and utterly.
And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I had learned. By telling them this: Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby's ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness because if you do you will live it with joy and passion as it ought to be lived."