My friend Karen is about to take on a new job. At 61 she is ending a tough 12 year period where she tried being an entrepreneur in the Inland Pacific Northwest. It didn’t work out. She developed a considerable following for her regular essays which were very well written, a lively spiritual commentary on seeing things in new ways that eventually became a wonderful book. She led seminars and retreats, she was a very capable facilitator. But her business never took off. Ultimately she moved in with her mom and took on what she felt were very menial jobs for a few years, well below her dreams of helping people find their great purpose in life.
She wrote me today and said, “I’ve felt since I was little that I had some magnificent destiny to fulfill.” Now at 61 she was getting ready to take a job to make sure she had a secure future, far from the perhaps more glorious future she had imagined many years ago.
Are you at a point in your life where you’re railing at yourself for what you haven’t accomplished? Are you entering your last thirty years and unhappy that your grand destiny never showed up? Life showed up instead. And here you are, perhaps not in the shape you’d like to be, a little grayer, and this is just not what you had in mind. And you and the mirror aren’t getting along.
I told Karen that I finally realized that my destiny wasn’t arriving in some hazy far off future. Life wasn’t a dress rehearsal for a someday. It was happening every single day. The lives I wanted to impact were all around me. In the grocery stores and the airplanes and the street corners. In the buses I ride when I travel. They are in your children’s faces and in your friends. Destiny is life, and life gives us a chance to transform people with our kind words all the time. I had to let go of my big fat egotistical notion that I was meant for bigger and better things than what was going on around me. What was going on around me was my real work.
The great teachers: Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, all of them taught the common man. So many of their lessons were about how we talk to each other every day. Stories about them abound about how they treated everyday people. They taught by example and they transformed lives. That is destiny- in a life lived by example.
We need to stop telling ourselves that we must be measured by how famous, rich, publicized, popular we are. These things mean little. Our ticker tape parade is the joy that lives in a child’s eyes when we play with them. The pleasure on an old man’s face when we take the time to listen to a story. The smile on a friend’s face when we pay a gracious compliment. This is your destiny, your grand moment. Seek it. It awaits you.