How to Be Here Read online

  I froze in the doorway, watching her lying on the bed, as it began to sink in that she was at the end of her life. You know someone is going to die because you know we’re all going to die—you know it in your brain. But then there’s a moment when that truth drops from your brain to your heart, like an elevator in free fall, and lands with a thud.

  My wife Kristen, however, walked right over to the bed, sat down next to Grandma, took Grandma’s hands in her own, and leaned in over her heart and began to speak to her:

  Grandma, we’re here with you now. We see that you’re going to be leaving us soon. We love you and we have loved being with you all these years and now we’re letting you go . . .

  It was so moving.

  We spent a few hours with Grandma that evening, and then we left and within a few hours she died.

  There is a moment when you arrive and you take your first breath, and then there is a moment when you take your last breath and you leave.

  For thousands of years humans have been aware that our lives intimately and ultimately depend on our breath, which is a physical reflection of a deeper, unseen reality. It isn’t just breath we’re each given—it’s life itself.

  Before anything else can be said about you, you have received a gift. God / the universe / ultimate reality / being itself—whatever word you want to use for source—has given you life.

  Are you breathing?

  Are you here?

  Did you just take a breath?

  Are you about to take another?

  Do you have a habit of regularly doing this?

  Gift.

  Gift.

  Gift.

  Whatever else has happened in your life—failure, pain, heartache, abuse, loss—the first thing that can be said about you is that you have received a gift.

  Often you’ll meet people who have long lists of ways they’ve been slighted, reasons the universe has been unfair to them, times they got the short end of the stick or were dealt a bad hand of cards.

  While we grieve and feel and lament and express whatever it is that is brewing within us, a truth courses through the veins of all our bumps and bruises, and it is this: We have received.

  You’re here,

  you’re breathing,

  and you have received a gift,

  a generous, extraordinary, mysterious, inexplicable gift.

  Alert and Awake

  I once visited a man named John who was dying of cancer. I’d never met him before, but a mutual friend had asked me to see him at his house. He was lying in a hospital bed in his living room when I came in, his body frail and ravaged. And yet his eyes were clear and full of shimmering life. After we shook hands and I sat down, he told me,

  People just don’t get it.

  as he smiled and then repeated,

  People just don’t get it

  He said that phrase over and over and over again for the next hour, in between bursts of conversation. When I asked him what he meant by it, he said that people don’t understand how precious and incredible life is. He said he hadn’t understood this truth until he knew that it was being taken from him.

  Because that’s how it works, doesn’t it?

  Suffering and loss have this extraordinary capacity to alert and awaken us to the gift that life is.

  You’re driving down the road arguing with someone you love about something stupid when a car almost runs you off the road—and suddenly your hearts are pounding as you turn to each other and say, That was close! And you aren’t arguing anymore.

  You’re frustrated with your kid and then you hear about someone else’s kid being in the hospital, and when you get home you hold your kid extra close.

  You go to a funeral and you sit there grieving the death of this person you loved but when you leave you realize that mixed in with your sadness is a strange sort of energy that comes from a renewed awareness that you’re here and this is your life and it’s good and it’s a sacred gift.

  Why do we react in these ways? Because deep down we know that all we have is a gift.

  Jesus taught his disciples a prayer that begins,

  Our father, who’s in heaven . . .

  . . . which is another way of saying,

  Begin your prayers—begin your day—by acknowledging that your life is a gift and this gift flows from a source. This source is responsible for the air in your lungs, the blood that courses through your veins, and the vitality that surges through you and everything around you.

  . . . which is another way of saying,

  Begin whatever you’re doing by remembering that you are here and you have been given a gift.

  The blinking line reminds you that whatever has happened to you, whatever has come your way that you didn’t want, whatever you have been through, you have today, you have this moment, you have a life that you get to create. The universe is unfinished, and God is looking for partners in the ongoing creation of the world.

  Bored

  Boredom is lethal. Boredom says, There’s nothing interesting to make here. Boredom reveals what we believe about the kind of world we’re living in. Boredom is lethal because it reflects a static, fixed view of the world—a world that is finished.

  Cynicism is slightly different from boredom, but just as lethal. Cynicism says, There’s nothing new to make here. Often, cynicism presents itself as wisdom, but it usually comes from a wound. Cynicism acts as though it’s seen a lot and knows how the world works, shooting down new ideas and efforts as childish and uninformed. Cynicism points out all the ways something could go wrong, how stupid it is, and what a waste of time it would be. Cynicism holds things at a distance, analyzing and mocking and noting all the possibilities for failure. Often, this is because the cynic did try something new at some point and it went belly up, he was booed off the stage, and that pain causes him to critique and ridicule because there aren’t any risks in doing that. If you hold something at a distance and make fun of it, then it can’t hurt you.

  And then there’s despair. While boredom can be fairly subtle and cynicism can appear quite intelligent and even funny, despair is like a dull thud in the heart. Despair says, Nothing that we make matters. Despair reflects a pervasive dread that it’s all pointless and that we are, in the end, simply wasting our time.

  Boredom, cynicism, and despair are spiritual diseases because they disconnect us from the most primal truth about ourselves—that we are here.

  All three distance us from and deaden us to the questions the blinking line asks:

  How are you going to respond to this life you have been given?

  What are you going to do with it?

  What are you going to make here?

  PART 2

  The Blank Page

  What you know makes you unique in some other way. Be brave. Map the enemy’s positions, come back, tell us all you know. And remember that plumbers in space is not such a bad setup for a story.

  —Stephen King

  I once had an idea for a book called Fire in the Wine.

  I had a big black sketchbook on my shelf and I had this insight about the human body and soil and the food we eat and how when we die we’re buried in the earth, which is what we do with seeds that then grow into the food that we consume that sustains our bodies that will be buried when we die . . . so I made a drawing to represent all of that.

  It was just one sketch.

  And then a few months later I came across a quote which somehow connected with that drawing that I had copied on the next page of that big black sketchbook.

  And then something happened to me that reminded me of that first sketch and that quote which connected to something I’d read in a magazine around that time.

  This continued for several years until I could see a book emerging on the pages of that sketchbook, a book I decided to call Fire in the Wine. As I began to organize the content of Fire in the Wine into chapters I realized that I needed to do some reading to give more breadth and depth to the ideas I was working on. So I
read. And read. And read. Thousands of pages. And whenever I came across something that spurred a thought or clarified something I’d been thinking about, I underlined it or marked the page. I then went back through those books and took notes on what I’d underlined, copying each idea onto a 3×5 card.

  Which took months.

  I then laid all those cards out on the floor and looked for patterns and connections and common threads. There were a lot of those cards, and so just out of curiosity I started counting them. I lost track somewhere past six hundred.

  Once the cards were organized, I started writing the book, crafting the chapters, creating the introduction, working on the first draft.

  Which took months.

  I turned in that first draft to my editor, who visited me a few weeks later to talk about the book—the book that, he informed me, didn’t appear to have a clear point.

  I then rearranged the entire thing, moving the start to the end and the end to the beginning.

  Which took months.

  Months in which it became clear that the book wasn’t really about fire in the wine, it was about something else. I kept using a phrase that I didn’t realize I was repeating until my editor pointed it out. That phrase seemed like it should be the title of the book, so I changed the name of the book. Changing the name then shifted some of the central themes, which meant I had to go back through and rearrange the entire book, moving the quantum physics part to the beginning and organizing the rest of the book around seven central themes.

  Which took months.

  By the fifth draft, I had lost my way. I couldn’t figure out how to take all that content and make it flow. It was like I had all the notes but no melody. I’d sit there and stare at the computer screen for hours, trying to figure out how to make it flow.

  Some days I’d write one new sentence.

  One.

  Other days I’d write one new sentence, and then, at the end of the day, I’d delete that one sentence.

  Many, many mornings—by this point well over a year of mornings—I’d get up and make my kids breakfast and take them to school and then I’d sit down at my desk and go through the book AGAIN, looking for even the slightest bit of help to find a way forward.

  And that’s when the head games started. You know about head games—those voices in your head, questioning who you are and what you’re doing. Telling you you’re no good.

  This was the sixth book I’d written, so you’d think it wouldn’t have been so hard. But it was. It was the most difficult thing I’d ever made. It didn’t matter that I’d done it before. It didn’t matter that I’d done months and months of outlining and arranging. It didn’t matter that I cared deeply about the content.

  The blinking line can be brutal.

  Because the blinking line doesn’t just taunt you with all the possibilities that are before you, the potential, all that you sense could exist but isn’t yet because you haven’t created it. The blinking line also asks a question:

  Who are you to do this?

  And that question can be paralyzing. It can prevent us from overcoming inertia. It can cause crippling doubt and stress. It can keep us stuck on the couch while life passes us by.

  Out of Your Head

  To answer the question, Who are you to do this?,

  you first have to get out of your head.

  I use this phrase out of your head because that’s where it’s easy to get stuck. Somewhere between our hearts and our minds is an internal dialogue, a running commentary on what we think and feel and believe. It’s the voices in your head that speak doubt and insecurity and fear and anxiety. Like a tape that’s jammed on “repeat,” these destructive messages will drain an extraordinary amount of your energies if you aren’t clear and focused and grounded.

  To get out of your head, it’s important to embrace several truths about yourself and those around you, beginning with this one:

  Who you aren’t isn’t interesting.

  You have a list of all the things you aren’t, the things you can’t do, the things you’ve tried that didn’t go well. Regrets, mistakes that haunt you, moments when you crawled home in humiliation. For many of us, this list is the source of a number of head games, usually involving the words,

  Not _________ enough.

  Not smart enough,

  not talented enough,

  not disciplined enough,

  not educated enough,

  not beautiful, thin, popular, or hardworking enough,

  you can fill in the __________.

  Here is the truth about those messages:

  They aren’t interesting.

  What you haven’t done,

  where you didn’t go to school,

  what you haven’t accomplished,

  who you don’t know and what you are scared of

  simply aren’t interesting.

  I’m not very good at math. If I get too many numbers in front of me I start to space out.

  See? Not interesting.

  If you focus on who you aren’t, and what you don’t have, or where you haven’t been, or skills or talents or tools or resources you’re convinced aren’t yours, precious energy will slip through your fingers that you could use to do something with that blinking line.

  In the same way that who you aren’t isn’t interesting when it comes to getting out of your head,

  who “they” are isn’t interesting.

  We all have our they—friends, neighbors, co-workers, family members, superstars who appear to skate by effortlessly while we slog it out. They are the people we fixate on, constantly holding their lives up to our life, using their apparent ease and success as an excuse to hold back from doing our work and pursuing our path in the world.

  Siblings who don’t have to study and still get better grades. Brothers-in-law who make more money without appearing to work very hard. Friends who have kids the same age as ours and yet they never seem stressed or tired and always look great.

  There’s a moving moment in one of the accounts of Jesus’s life where he’s reunited with one of his disciples, a man named Peter. (I started out as a preacher, and so these stories are in my blood.) Peter is the disciple who had denied that he even knew Jesus earlier in the story, and you can feel his relief when Jesus forgives him, telling him he has work for Peter to do.

  And how does Peter respond to this powerful moment of reconciliation?

  He points to one of Jesus’s other disciples and asks, What about him?

  All Peter can think about is someone else’s path. He’s with Jesus, having a conversation, and yet his mind is over there, wondering about John.

  Peter asks,

  What about him?

  and Jesus responds,

  What is that to you?

  Comparisons

  In the movie Comedian, Jerry Seinfeld runs into a young comedian named Orny Adams backstage at a club where they are both performing and Orny says to him,

  “You get to a point where you’re like ‘How much longer can I take it?’”

  Jerry is utterly perplexed by Orny’s sentiment, asking, “What—is time running out?”

  Orny then begins a litany of complaints and excuses—“I’m getting older. . . . I feel like I’ve sacrificed so much of my life.”

  Jerry is amazed, “Is there something else you would rather have been doing? Other appointments or places you gotta be?”

  Then Orny pulls out a new line of complaints: “I see my friends are making a lot of money. . . . Did you ever stop and compare your life? Okay, I’m twenty-nine and my friends are all married and they all have kids and houses. They have some sort of sense of normality. What do you tell your parents?”

  Jerry’s response: “Are you out of your mind? . . . This has nothing to do with your friends. It’s such a special thing. This has nothing to do with making it.”

  I love those lines from Seinfeld:

  This has nothing to do with your friends.

  It’s such a special thing. />
  This has nothing to do with making it.

  Decide now that you will not spend your precious energy speculating about someone else’s life and how it compares with yours.

  We each have our own life, our own blinking line, and every path has its own highs and lows, ups and downs, joys, challenges, and difficulties.

  When you compare yourself with others, you have no idea what challenges they are facing.

  Bruce Springsteen struggled for years with depression. What? The Boss? His shows are three hours long, leaving everybody wondering, How does he do that? Bruce Springsteen, who seems to never run out of energy, who’s thriving more than ever in his sixties?

  Yes. The Boss has had his struggles. Everybody does.

  We rob ourselves of immeasurable joy when we compare what we do know about ourselves with what we don’t know about someone else.

  You have your life.

  And your life is not her life. Or his life.

  And his life is not yours,

  and neither is hers.

  Is there any way in which you’ve been asking,

  What about them?

  when the better question is,

  What is that to you?

  There will always be someone who’s smarter than you.

  There will always be someone with more raw talent than you.

  There will always be someone more experienced and better qualified and harder working and stronger and more articulate and more creative with more stamina who can sing better than you can.

  But who you aren’t isn’t interesting.

  And who they are isn’t interesting when it comes to who you are and what your path is.

  The You Experiment

  That question the blinking line asks,

  Who are you to do this?

  can keep you locked up for years, living in fear and

  doubt, looking over your fence or your shoulder,

  comparing yourself with the people around you.

  But the first word about you is gift,

  and you’re here and you’re breathing,

  and you get to take part in the ongoing creation of