said
Sunday, eulogizing the 12 men and women killed in the Washington Navy
Yard shooting. He spoke of volunteers who made time to give back to
their communities, like "Frank Kohler, giving dictionaries to every
third-grader in his county," and "Marty Bodrog, leading the children's
Bible study at church." There were fathers like Mike Ridgell, "coaching
his daughters' softball teams and joining Facebook just to keep up with
his girls, one of whom said he was always the cool dad." There were
mothers like Mary Francis Knight, "devoted to her daughters ... who had
just recently watched with joy as her older daughter got married," and
grandparents like John Johnson, "always smiling, giving bear hugs to his
10 grandchildren ... who would have welcomed his 11th grandchild this
fall."
Have you noticed that when people die, their eulogies
celebrate life very differently from the way we define success in our
everyday existence? Eulogies are, in fact, very Third Metric. At
HuffPost we've made the Third Metric
-- redefining success beyond money and power to include well-being,
wisdom and our ability to wonder and to give -- a key editorial focus.
But while it's not hard to live a Third Metric life, it's very easy not
to. It's easy to let ourselves get consumed by our work. It's easy to
use work to let ourselves forget the things and the people that truly
sustain us. It's easy to let technology wrap us in a perpetually
harried, stressed-out existence. It's easy, in effect, to miss our lives
even while we're living them. Until we're no longer living them.
For
most of us, our eulogy will be not just the first formal marking down
of what our lives were about but the only one. The eulogy is the
foundational document of our legacy, of how people remember us, of how
we live on in the minds and hearts of others. And it is very telling
what you don't hear in eulogies. You almost never hear things like:
"Of course his crowning achievement was when he made senior vice president."
Or:
"What everybody loved most about her was how she ate lunch at her desk. Every day."
Or:
"He
was proud that he never made it to one of his kid's Little League games
because he always wanted to go over those figures one more time."
Or:
"She didn't have any real friends, but she had 600 Facebook friends, and she dealt with every email in her inbox every night."
Or:
"But
he will live on, not in our hearts or memories, because we barely knew
him, but in his PowerPoint slides, which were always meticulously
prepared."
No matter how much a person spends his or her life
burning the candle at both ends, chasing a toxic definition of success
and generally missing out on life, the eulogy is always about the other
stuff: what they gave, how they connected, how much they meant to the
lives of the real people around them, small kindnesses, lifelong
passions and what made them laugh.
So the question is: Why do we spend so much time on what our eulogy is not going to be?
"Eulogies aren't résumés," David Brooks wrote
in June. "They describe the person's care, wisdom, truthfulness and
courage. They describe the million little moral judgments that emanate
from that inner region."
And yet we spend so much time and effort
and energy on those résumé entries, which are gone as soon our heart
stops beating. Even for those who die with amazing résumés, whose lives
were synonymous with accomplishment and achievement, their eulogies are
mostly about what they did when they weren't achieving and succeeding --
at least by our current, broken definition of success.
For example,
look at Steve Jobs, a man whose life, at least as the public saw it, was
about creating things, things that were, yes, amazing and
game-changing, but when his sister, Mona Simpson, rose to memorialize
him at his memorial service at Stanford University, that's not what she focused on.
Yes,
she talked about his work and his work ethic, but mostly as
manifestations of his passions. "Steve worked at what he loved," she
said. But what really moved him, what he really loved, was love. "Love
was his supreme virtue," she said, "his god of gods." And though yes, he
loved his work, he loved his family too:
When [his son] Reed was
born, he began gushing and never stopped. He was a physical dad, with
each of his children. He fretted over Lisa's boyfriends and Erin's
travel and skirt lengths and Eve's safety around the horses she adored.
And
then she added this touching image: "None of us who attended Reed's
graduation party will ever forget the scene of Reed and Steve slow
dancing."
And about his wife: "His abiding love for Laurene
sustained him. He believed that love happened all the time, everywhere.
In that most important way, Steve was never ironic, never cynical, never
pessimistic."
And then there were lines like these, sprinkled throughout:
"Steve was humble."
"Steve liked to keep learning."
"Steve cultivated whimsy."
"With his four children, with his wife, with all of us, Steve had a lot of fun."
"He treasured happiness."
"He was an intensely emotional man."
His
sister made sure in her eulogy that we knew that Steve Jobs was a lot
more than just the guy who invented the iPhone. He was a brother and a
husband and a father who knew the true value of what technology can so
easily distract us from. Even if you build an iconic product, even one
that lives on, what will be foremost in the minds of the people you care
about most will be the memories you built in their lives. In her 1951
novelMemoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar has the Roman emperor meditating on his death: "[I]t seems to me as I write this hardly important to have been emperor."
And Thomas Jefferson's epitaph describes him as
"author of the Declaration of American Independence ... and father of
the University of Virginia." No mention of the presidency.
What
the old adage that we should live every day as our last usually means is
that we shouldn't wait until it's our last day on Earth to begin
prioritizing the things that really matter.
Anyone with a few
smartphones and a full email inbox knows that it's easy to live while
not being aware we're living. So a Third Metric life would be one lived
in a way that's mindful of what our eulogy will one day be. "I'm always
relieved when someone is delivering a eulogy and I realize I'm listening
to it," joked
George Carlin. We may not be listening to our own eulogy, but we're
actually writing it all the time, every day. The question is how much
we're giving the eulogizer to work with.
This past summer an obituary of a Seattle woman named Jane Lotter, who died of cancer at 60, went viral. The author of the obit was Lotter herself.
"One
of the few advantages of dying from Grade 3, Stage IIIC endometrial
cancer, recurrent and metastasized to the liver and abdomen," she wrote,
"is that you have time to write your own obituary." After giving a
lovely and lively account of her life, she shows that she lived a life
with the true definition of success in mind. "My beloved Bob, Tessa, and
Riley," she writes. "My beloved friends and family. How precious you
all have been to me. Knowing and loving each one of you was the success
story of my life."
Just months before the historian Tony Judt died of ALS in 2010, he gave an amazing interview to Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air. She asked him about his spiritual beliefs. He replied:
I
don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in a single or multiple
godhead. I respect people who do, but I don't believe it myself. But
there's a big "but" which enters in here: I am much more conscious than I
ever was, for obvious reasons, of what it will mean to people left
behind once I'm dead. It won't mean anything for me, but it will mean a
lot to them, and it's important for them, by which I mean my children or
my wife or my close friends, that some spirit of me is, in a positive
way, present in their lives, in their heads, in their imaginings and so
on. So in one curious way I've come to believe in the afterlife as a
place where I still have moral responsibilities, just as I do in this
life except that I can only exercise them before I get there. Once I get
there, it'll be too late. So no god, no organized religion, but a
developing sense that there's something bigger than the world we live
in, including after we die, and that we have responsibilities in that
world.
So whether you believe in an afterlife, as I do, or not, by
being fully present in your life and in the lives of those you love,
you are creating your own afterlife and writing your own eulogy. It's a
valuable lesson, even more so while we have the good fortune of being
healthy and having the energy and freedom and lack of impediments to
create a life of purpose and meaning.
It shouldn't take a near-death experience to remind us of what we're all going to lose one day. According to Colors magazine,
something called "living funeral therapy" is becoming increasingly
popular in South Korea, which has the highest suicide rate of developed
countries. It can involve actually getting in a coffin and having it
nailed shut, to experience a glimpse of the finality and closure of
death. One operator sometimes has the participants make a list of the
people in their lives who matter to them. One woman said the process
made her realize she'd been neglecting her husband. "I feel like I've
been reborn," she said. "I want to call my husband, to tell him 'thank
you,' and 'sorry.'"
It's an extreme method, and hopefully most of
us won't need to be nailed shut inside a coffin to get a sense of what
we really value. But the good news is that if you're reading this,
there's still time to live up to the best version of your eulogy.
Here are some of my favorite eulogies, courtesy of Alison Nastasi of The Atlantic. Do you have a favorite eulogy, or something in particular you remember from a eulogy you heard?
"Today I want every American to see how these men and women lived," President Obama Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
Wishing everyone a good year!
I read an interesting article on aish.com about the difference between wishing someone a happy new year versus a good new year.
The typical greeting for the Jewish New Year is Shana Tova. This has typically been translated as as Happy New Year. However, it actually means Good Year.
If someone has a good year, they have achieved their purpose and fulfilled what they are meant to be.
Therefore, I wish all my family and friends a healthy, prosperous and good year!
The typical greeting for the Jewish New Year is Shana Tova. This has typically been translated as as Happy New Year. However, it actually means Good Year.
If someone has a good year, they have achieved their purpose and fulfilled what they are meant to be.
Therefore, I wish all my family and friends a healthy, prosperous and good year!
What’s
the best wish for the new year?
Ever notice that Jews don’t traditionally wish each other
“happy new year”?
Instead we say the Hebrew phrase “shanah tovah” which
— in spite of the mistaken translation that appears on almost all greeting
cards — has no connection at all to the expression “have a happy new year.”
Shanah tovah conveys the hope for a good year rather than a happy one.
And the reason for that distinction contains great significance.
This past January, the Atlantic Monthly had a
fascinating article titled There’s More to Life than Being Happy. The
author, Emily Esfahani Smith, points out how researchers are beginning to
caution against the pursuit of mere happiness. They found that a meaningful
life and a happy life overlap in certain ways, but are ultimately very
different. Leading a happy life, the psychologists found, is associated with
being a "taker" while leading a meaningful life corresponds with
being a "giver."
"Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively
shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and
desire are easily satisfied and difficult or taxing entanglements are
avoided," the author writes.
Happy people get
joy from receiving while people leading meaningful lives get joy from giving to
others.
She quotes Kathleen Vohs, one of the authors of a new study
to be published this year in The Journal of Positive Psychology: "Happy
people get joy from receiving benefits from others while people leading
meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others." In other words,
meaning transcends the self while happiness is all about giving the self what
it wants.
According to Roy Baumeister, the lead researcher of the
study, “What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of
happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of
meaning, which is unique to humans.”
Long before all of these studies, Jews somehow understood
this intuitively. Happy is good, but good is better.
To hope for a happy new year is to give primacy to the ideal of
a hedonistic culture whose greatest goal is “to have a good time.” To seek a good
year however is to recognize the superiority of meaning over the joy of the
moment.
The word “good” has special meaning in the Torah. The first
time we find it used is in the series of sentences where God, after each day of
creation, views his handiwork and proclaims it “good”. More, when God completed
his work he saw all that he had done “and behold it was very good.”
What does that mean? In what way was the world good? Surely
it was not in any moral sense that it was being praised. The commentators offer
a profound insight. The word good indicates that every part of creation
fulfilled God’s purpose: it was good because it was what it was meant to be.
That is the deepest meaning of the word good when it is
applied to us and to our lives. We are good when we achieve our purpose; our
lives are good when they fulfill what they are meant to be.
We know many people of whom it can be said that they had
good lives in spite of their having had to endure great unhappiness. Indeed,
the truly great chose lives of sacrifice over pleasure and left a legacy of
inspiration and achievement that they never could have accomplished had they
been solely concerned with personal gratification.
A shanah tovah, a good year, from a spiritual
perspective, is far more blessed than a simply happy one.
Meaning Leads to Happiness
A shanah tovah may not emphasize happiness, yet it is
the most certain way to ultimately achieve happiness.
Because another powerful idea discovered by contemporary
psychologists is that happiness most often is the byproduct of a meaningful
life. It’s precisely when we don’t go looking for it and are willing to set it
aside in the interest of a loftier goal that we find it unexpectedly landing on
us with a force that we never considered possible.
Happiness is the
byproduct of a meaningful life.
You would think that acquiring ever more money would make
people happier. There are millions of people ready to testify from their own
experience that it just isn’t so. But if getting more won’t do it, what will?
Social scientists have come to a significant conclusion: while having money
doesn’t automatically lead to happiness, giving it away almost always achieves
that goal!
The prestigious Science magazine (March, 2008)
tells us that new research reveals when individuals dole out money for gifts
for friends or charitable donations they get a boost in happiness while those
who spend on themselves get no such cheery lift. “We wanted to test our theory
that how people spend their money is at least as important as how much money
they earn,” said Elizabeth Dunn, a psychologist at the University of British
Columbia. What they discovered was that personal spending had no link with a
person’s happiness, while spending on others and
charity was significantly related to a boost in happiness.
“Regardless of how much income each person made,” Dunn said,
“those who spent money on others reported greater happiness, while those who
spent more on themselves did not.”
In a fascinating experiment, researchers gave college
students a $5 or $20 bill, asking them to spend the money by that evening. Half the
participants were instructed to spend the money on themselves, and the
remaining students were told to spend it on others. Participants who spent the
windfall on others — which included toys for siblings and meals eaten with
friends — reported feeling happier at the end of the day than those who spent
the money on themselves. Spending as little as $5 on other people produced a
measurable surge in happiness on a given day, while purchasing supposedly
pleasure -gratifying personal items produced almost no change in mood.
“It doesn’t surprise
me at all that people find giving money away very rewarding,” Aaron Ahuvia,
associate professor of marketing at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, explained.
“People spend a lot of money to make their lives feel meaningful, significant
and important. When you give away money you are making that same kind of
purchase, only you are doing it in a more effective way.” He added, “What
you’re really trying to buy is meaning to life.”
Meaning is our ultimate goal; in our pursuit of the “good”
life we will discover the reward of true happiness.
So shana tova, may you have a year filled with
meaning and purpose. And happiness that will surely follow.
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