The Treasure Within…

It was raining; it was cold and wet; I walked; my clothes damp—none of these things discouraged me from taking in the moment.  A dreary, rainy Monday morning spurred something inside me to get out into nature as I watched people hurriedly drive to work and I wondered: why are we all rushing around so much?  What are we chasing?  We rise each morning to rush to work in order to pay for things that bring us little joy.  If anything, they become the anchors of our life—the luxury car, the over-sized house, the name-brand clothing and jewelry, 50 weeks of work to claim two weeks of rest and relaxation.  Why?  The keeping up with it all is the very thing that drags us down below the surface of the true beauty of life.  What does it all mean, I thought silently to myself?  The American Dream has become a nightmare.

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We strive for material comforts only to discover that they bring little joy and an insatiable desire to acquire more.  We place our family in the background in order to achieve something—very few of us know what that something is.  The moment we “arrive” there is a new goal to capture, the goal lines continually moved, until we notice that years have passed, and we have made little progress in our attempts to find peace and happiness.  And isn’t this what all of us long to discover?  Peace and happiness.  It seems so simple yet so elusive.  In all of our efforts to “achieve” we miss the true nutrition of life—we overlook the journey and search only for the ever-elusive destination.

Family Treasure:

I was talking with a friend yesterday that is leaving this race soon.  He has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and faces an inevitable conclusion to a long life.  All of this striving has come to an end and his conclusion is: why?  What was all the hustling about?  A lifetime spent searching for approval from the outside only to recognize that the only way to “acquire” peace and happiness was by going inside—of ourselves.  The treasures that lie within are far more valuable than those that we chase externally, yet we forgo that which is truly valuable for things that we will never remember when we are reminiscing about our life when the end comes.

My friend is teaching me to slow down and drink in the small things in life that are the true worthwhile treasures on this journey.  The simple interaction with a family member, a phone call with a friend on a lazy Sunday, the setting sun that casts the perfect slice of light on a blossoming flower—these are the treasures of life, all too often missed while we scurry about to achieve our goals.  Something inside of us has convinced us that we are incomplete the way we are—if only we could somehow obtain that “Holy Grail” of an accomplishment—then we would be whole.  This is the great illusion of modern-day man: we must achieve to succeed.

My own father passed away six years ago.  He wasn’t a rich or accomplished man—he was simply a father and husband.  When he was a young man, he was a very good baseball player, one of the best in the country at that time.  He had the chance to make the major leagues but for some inexplicable reason he passed on the chance.  When I was growing up, I would always ask him if he regretted not pursuing baseball further.  Without fail, he never said that he regretted it.  I didn’t believe him at the time.  In my young mind I convinced myself that he quit on his dreams.  When I asked him why he didn’t pursue baseball he always responded the same way:

“If I continued playing baseball, I would have never met your mother.  I would have never had my children.  I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything, especially baseball.”

As I have gotten older, I came to understand my father more.  He understood that “accomplishment” was something you held in your heart.  It was not something that could be displayed externally with a trophy or medal—it was a feeling that a person held in their heart and soul.  My father understood things that I didn’t at the time.  It took me years to catch up to him.

What are the 12 Universal Laws?

As I talked with my friend yesterday (he is much older than I, almost 23 years older), I realized that he too is coming to this place in life.  He spent his career as an architect and he longed to build something to rival Frank Lloyd Wright, his hero.  This was his de facto goal in life.  That goal won’t be accomplished, he knows, and he now understands that even if he had achieved the goal eventually the edifice that he constructed would wither to dust in some future time and space.  What won’t wither to dust is the power and energy of love.

He understands now that the legacy he is leaving is his family who will carry on that love deep into the future.  This is something which has such deep value it would be impossible to put a price tag on it.  It’s something we cannot chase or achieve, it is done through small actions each day, brick by brick, that builds the foundation for an ever-lasting love.  There is no greater testament to a life well-lived than this.

So, while we race around trying to achieve all that we have set out to accomplish, we are ignoring the very foundation of our own personal legacy.  The big house will crumble, the luxury car will eventually end up in a dump site one day, the corporation will replace us with a younger, newer model, a new hotshot actor will arrive on the scene, and the next great slugger will hit the game-winning home run in the World Series—all the while our family will be waiting when the dust clears and our world of illusion crumbles around us.  Maybe it would be a good idea to thank them for that now.

The inevitable is coming for us all.  Knowing this, why not take our loved ones for a walk; share an ice cream cone with them; lay out a blanket and enjoy a picnic.  And don’t worry about those accomplishments that you’re putting on hold while you spend time with those you love the most—the accomplishments were never real to begin with.

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