Living Life On The Edges!
I think that a well-balanced and well-lived life will find us going to the extremes of life regularly but not often. By that, I mean that we will be doing things and entering into relationships and activities that produce great joy in our spirits, and we will also be doing or enduring things that will cause us great physical or spiritual pain or grief from time to time. Both joy and grief are very intense emotions, and it is difficult to experience them on a sustained basis, but if we avoid them, then we really haven’t experienced life at the extremes that we were created to endure for short times.

Analogies to explain this are hard to come by. The best I have been able to come up with is that failing to experience the extremes of life is sort of like owning a high performance automobile and driving it for years without ever trying to see what it will do when you put it through its paces. We are made, like some batteries, to be both fully charged and occasionally completely drained, and if we don’t get that, we tend to lose some our capacity for such experiences, just like some rechargable batteries will not take a full charge unless they are completely drained on occasion.

For me, the joy usually comes when I am in the midst of a transformation challenge, and I get to that point where I really start seeing some significant changes in the mirror, or in the poundage of weights I’m hoisting. It can also come when I get away to an event where I meet and get to know people with the same interests in the “miracle” of transformations. As for the grief, it comes as it will, when people I know suffer or die. It can also come when I see someone driven under by an addiction or a marital affair, or when I see them stricken with cancer or some other chronic illness.

There’s a great way to keep yourself regularly going to these extremes of joy or grief without suffering the depressing  effects of grief. Can you guess what it is? It is the wonderful concept of working the universal law of reciprocation. Giving to another who truly needs it, and who has no capacity whatsoever to pay you back, simply gives you great joy. And it also gives you compassion for the suffering person you helped. Compassion, or mercy if you will, is a word that literally means suffering with another. So, when you help another who truly needs help, and is suffering due to a lack of it, you get the joy and take on some of the suffering of another as you serve them without thought or request to ever be paid back. The joy far outweighs the “co-suffering” you take on, and the whole experience is exhilarating.

So, having said all this, though I’m nearly 62 years old, and even though my before photos look about as good as some folks’ after shots, I’m embarking on a new transformation challenge tomorrow, 6/30/08. Why? When I have a goal in front of me, I tend to work a lot harder, and I tend to more willingly go to those extremes of life again. Something inside me wants to just “maintain,” but something bigger than that makes me want to experience all that life has to offer. It makes me a better person, and if I help others while that is going on, it makes them better people as well.

Eighty four days from tomorrow we’ll see what happened.