"Did You Get What You Wanted In This Life?"

By Gordon S. Livingston

"We are all burdened by memories of injury or rejection or unfairness. Sometimes we hold on to these grievances with a bitter determination that causes us to become preoccupied with the persons or institutions we hold responsible for our unhappiness.

We live in a culture in which the sense of being wronged is pervasive. If every misfortune can be blamed on someone else, we are relieved of the difficult task of examining our own contributory behavior or just accepting the reality that life is and has always been full of adversity. Most of all, by placing responsibility outside ourselves we miss out on the healing knowledge that what happens to us is not nearly as important as the attitude we adopt in response.

Some years ago, while standing in a ski lift line, I was run down by a riderless snowmobile with a frozen throttle. My injuries, while temporarily disabling, were not permanent, and it was hard for me to see this as other than an example of life's unpredictable hazards. I couldn't convince myself that the cause of snowmobile safety would be materially advanced by my collecting money from a lawsuit. The operators of the ski slope apologized and gave me some free lift tickets, and that was that. I came away from the experience with a good story and a new respect for the power of large moving objects.

Think of the slights, the insults, the rebukes, and, most important, the unfulfilled dreams that are a part of every life. Think of the ways in which our closest relationships are subject to complaint and score keeping. For most of us the process of nursing blame for past injury distracts us from the essential question of what we need to do now to improve our lives.

For many people the past is like an endlessly entertaining, if frequently painful, movie they replay for themselves over and over. It contains all the explanations, all the misery, all the drama that went into making us what we are today. That it may also, when checked against the versions of others who were there, be largely a work of our imagination does not detract from its power to occupy our attention. And to what end? We cannot now change the parts that we wish were different, the unfairnesses, the injuries. What is the point in holding on to our outrage and unhappiness? Do we have a choice?

Coming to terms with our past is inevitably a process of forgiveness, of letting go, the simplest and most difficult of all human endeavors. It is simultaneously an act of will and of surrender. And it often seems impossible until the moment we do it.

As a way of inducing reflection I frequently ask people to write their own epitaphs. This exercise in summarizing their lives in a few words inevitably produces puzzlement and often results in some humorous and self-denigrating responses. Among them: "He read a lot of magazines," "She started slowly, then backed off," "I told you I was sick," and "I'm glad that's over." I encourage more thought about this and people begin to identify those aspects of their lives of which they are proud, their roles as parents, spouses, people of faith.

I think this exercise should be incorporated into every written will. At the point when people are contemplating their deaths, why not suggest that they add a paragraph that reads "And for my epitaph I would like the following, . . . "? People sometimes ask me what I would choose for my own. I tell them I like the words of Raymond Carver:

'And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.'

Gordon Livingston writes and practices psychiatry in Columbia, MD.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/lifelines/200905/forgiveness-is-form-letting-go-part-2