Ask Douglas: how do you let go of the life we wanted?
Regret and the particularness of grace
Jean asks: As one ages, how does someone start the process of "letting go" of what we thought our life would go and embracing/celebrating how it's actually turned out?
Dear Jean,
Such a deep, sensitive question. Thank you for it.
A few years ago, my friend Chip Conley quoted an email I wrote to him in his book Learning to Love Midlife on this topic:
“Last week, I was stretching after soccer, leaning up against my dog and basking in the sun. And I was so grateful. So grateful for what life afforded me: financial security, a working body, and time to enjoy life. Time to learn and do things important to me, yummy foods, the beauty of living in the Pacific Northwest, etc. I realized that other people have got other things: an intimate partnership, or children, or a close relationship with their parents. But MY job is to be grateful for MY life, for the things I have. Comparison is the recipe for suffering. My gratitude had to have ‘particularness’ to it, which shielded me from either envy or pride.
We all can be grateful for the ‘particularness’ of grace.”
So I think that’s the beginning of the answer to your question. For some of us, our lives didn’t turn out the way we wanted them to. There’s grief in that, at least for me. How could there not be?
And still grace, all around.
Regrets, I’ve had a few
This is beyond the scope of your question, so feel free to disregard this section, but now especially after the death of my mom/aunt, I’ve been thinking about regret.
Regrets, I’ve had a few.
More than I want to bear.
For me, looking back now from middle age, I was always the one holding me back. I, in my limited perspective, had always been the problem. I don’t know if that is the same for you, Jean, but it has always been that way for me.
And still is.
That is a terrible, yet ultimately freeing realization.
Oprah Winfrey credits her mentor Maya Angelou with the phrase:
“You did what you knew how to do, and when you knew better, you did better.”
My regret is that I wish I had know better then.
But I did not. And sometimes still do not.
My friend Annie was once in a long meditation sit and was confronted with painful past memories. During her consultation, she cried about it to her Buddhist teacher, who responded her, kindly and simply:
“Conditions could not be any different.”
Conditions could not be any different. That is what I do with my regret.1 I wish I treated loved ones differently. I wish I had made so many different decisions. But I did when I knew how to do back then. Conditions could not be any different. Is there grace in self-acceptance?
"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." — James Baldwin
The erotic impulse
Learning to deal with disappointment is something we have to learn our entire lives, especially for those of us to dare to hope for something more than the bland, empty-caloried but safe life that conventional consumer Americanism offers us. I was at a wedding this weekend2 and the homily3 was about a recent, very-worth-reading Substack post about erotic decisions:
(T)he decision, over and over again, to seek intensity over numbness, expansion over contraction, intimacy over control. And that decision (sometimes a whisper, sometimes a roar) is how life begins, and how it deepens.
To choose an erotic life is not simply to chase pleasure or gratification; that would be to mistake Eros for Hedone. Rather, it is to say “yes” to the kind of friction that transforms. It is the decision to let yourself be undone by what draws you in….
[T]he real measure of an erotic life [is] not how much you get, but how deeply you feel, how honestly you inhabit your own pulse.
To do this, how could you not risk disappointment? Guarantee it? And yet grace everywhere, all around. In fact perhaps the erotic life, with its attendant disappointment, grief, and regret, is perhaps the greatest grace there is.
The glory of God is you, Jean, fully alive.4
Your disappointment, your grief, your regret is simply part of you fully alive. Don’t push it away. Your only choice is to experience it, or to wall yourself off.
Everything belongs.
The particularness of grace. In the end, everyone gets blessing.
For some it’s marriage. Children. For others it’s music. Activism. Dancing. Writing. All communion with God.
In the end, everyone gets communion.
The happiness in the striving. In the hope. The Charlie Brown football. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. One must imagine Charlie Brown happy.
In my training as a Franciscan spiritual director, I learned God comes to us disguised as our ordinary lives. And there is a specificity to it. We are a word that God only speaks once. Each of our lives have a unique haecceity, a particular thisness5 to it, that unveils the infinite Mystery of God.
Your life has a particular thisness to it, Jean. A particularness of grace. It includes everything you’ve lost, everything you wanted, everything you never had. Conditions could not be any different. Inhabit your pulse and experience the joy and freedom of Divine Presence.
God comes to us disguised as our ordinary lives. Do what is yours to do with this life, Jean, your life.
Grief. Mistakes. Regret.
The erotic impulse.
Everything, including your gratitude, has a ‘particularness’ to it.
Everything belongs.
I’ve spent many years learning how to fix life, only to discover at the end of the day that life is not broken.
There is a hidden seed of greater wholeness in everyone and everything.
We serve life best when we water it and befriend it. When we listen before we act.In befriending life, we do not make things happen according to our own design.
We uncover something that is already happening in us and around us and create conditions that enable it.
Everything is moving toward its place of wholeness always struggling against odds.
Everything has a deep dream of itself and its fulfillment.
— Rachel Naomi Remen
Funny enough, I had a conversation with Annie last week about my regret. She asked if regret is closely related to shame. Afterwards, I thought about it, as in Asian culture, if you didn’t feel shame, you’d be a sociopath. haha hi Annie!
Blessings, Michael and Sara!
Given by Richard Rohr, ha.
St Iraneaus
My notes: “The doctrine of “thisness” is saying that we come to universal meaning deeply and rightly through the concrete, the specific, and the ordinary. We cannot know something spiritually by saying it is a not-that; we can only know it by meeting it in its precise and irreplaceable thisness and honoring it there."“
THIS is why I'm happy you've returned here, Douglas. Thank you for your terrific insight wrapped in undeniable warmth and love for your fellow humans. I particularly liked: "God comes to us disguised as our ordinary lives." Gentle but powerful.
Meaningful language here, Douglas, with”particularness of grace.”