Last week I was providing some good thinking to one of my thought-partners. He is struggling with whether to remain in his current executive role or to move on. As we were searching together he asked me, Richard, what do you want to do when you grow up? I woke up this morning with this question embedded in my brain. As I was settling in at one of my favorite coffee houses it occurred to me that my life is not a dress rehearsal; this is it. Legally I am considered to be a senior citizen; personally I like the concept of being an ‘elder’ better, but I digress. I hold a concept that ‘old age’ is ten years older than I am. I have seldom thought of ‘retirement’ and yet I know many who do. What I do find myself doing, however, is postponing stuff. This I find many folks also do.
We all know people who live lives of deferred gratification, waiting until they are. . .who knows, pick an age or a situation. . .so they can. . . live where they want or do what they want or be what they want. How many really get to do ‘it?’ I remember having an afternoon conversing with five ‘movers and shakers’ in the Netherlands. We were in a villa in Hilversum [as a consultant you know you have arrived when your office is a villa] and my host, an intriguing consultant, had invited these five folks to engage in a long conversation. They knew one another and relished the time to be together for an afternoon. What I learned, what they risked to share with me, was that each of them held a vision of what they really wanted to do. As I recall, one wanted to be a concert violinist, one wanted to be a baker, one wanted to be an auto mechanic – these were their passions; what they were living were their ‘duties.’
People who are given twelve months to live find themselves living differently and are often quite serene as they do so. They often find themselves to be much nicer people and more forgiving; not all achieve this as we well know, but enough do and they capture our attention. They are, it seems, experiencing ‘heaven.’ So I ask, why wait? Why do I wait? Why not seek a taste of heaven now, today and tomorrow? This play, my play, is real; this is not a dress rehearsal.
Searcher-Seeker 