Landon (00:01.262)
It's not the living that we do that is usually fatal. Oh, the natural course will take its course. The fatal life is the life that we do not live.
Announcer
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Heartbeat, the podcast featuring insights and teachings from 50 plus years of the work of Landon Saunders. Today, we return to Miami, Florida for an excerpt from the final night of Landon's community workshop where he is exploring the question, how do we keep from simply marking time and in the process, miss our life?
Announcer
How not to miss your life.
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It's a good subject, and I hope we can at least get started on it tonight. How to live that good life, how not to miss, how to know that I really lived. As one gets older in the world, it becomes a more important question, because we've said too many times for it almost to have any meaning. It's over so quickly.
It seems like we just get started and then we're counting down the time.
And yet, if there's life in us, there's always time. Always time not only for life, but for a good life, a full life, a rich life. And as Carl Jung reminded us, the only problem children really have is the unlived life of the parents.
It is the unlived life. It's the life that we're missing and we know it. It is the life that we're missing and that because we know something is missing, it leaves us adrift and loneliness and despair, leaves us in depression, leaves us with all these resentments and all these jealousies and all these disappointments and all this emptiness that can be a part of the human experience. How can I live my whole life, my whole experience? And so,
I want to begin with a teaching story. And of all the stories I tell, this is one of my most favorite stories. I would remind you that it is a teaching story, and that means that it is a living story. And that means that it is a story that is not to be gotten in the telling, that when I'm through with it, I don't want you to think, well, I got that. It's not that kind of story, as I think you will see.
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but it's a story that I want you to tell.
I hope you remember it well enough tonight that you can tell it to any family members who did not come.
I hope it's a story that you'll repeat in every remaining decade of your life.
It's a story of a young man who came to the old wise teacher and he was very distressed. And he said, oh teacher, I hate the world. I despise the world. There's so much pain. There's so much suffering in the world that I hate the world. I loathe it. I despise it. Please, please, will you tell me how to live in this world? The old teacher looked at the distraught young man deeply into his eyes and said,
I don't think I can tell you anything. Oh, but you must. You don't know how distressful I'm finding life. I want to live. But life has so many disappointments and there are so many trials. And even I, I have already suffered so much. I hate the world. Please tell me how to live in the world.
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And the old teacher said, well, I'll tell you, but I don't know if you'll do it.
I want you to go and for one year you may not do anything that you do not enjoy.
Nothing. If you're walking down the street and you're not enjoying it, you must sit down.
If you're working and you're not enjoying it, you must stop immediately.
If you're with friends and not enjoying it, but you must dismiss yourself.
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that the only thing you may not do is those things you do not enjoy. When you realize you're not enjoying it, you must stop immediately. The young man said, nobody can do that. I couldn't get through a day. I couldn't get through a week. You know no one can do that. And the old teacher said, I didn't think I could tell you anything.
and the young man left. And after a year, he returned.
Announcer
Lennon will return with the conclusion of his story in less than a moment. But right now, friends of Heartbeat want to invite you to subscribe to the weekly email, Joyful Jumpstart. It's free, arrives in your inbox every Monday, and provides an encouraging perspective for the coming days. To receive your free subscription, simply sign up at thisishartbeat .com. Now let's get back to Landon for the end of the story.
Landon
...And when he returned, there was a great smile on his face, a lot of joyousness in his eyes, and the old man knew that he had understood what he had told him. And he put his hand on his shoulder and said, now, my son,go and perhaps you can be of some use to the world.
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What would happen in the United States of America if suddenly the 250 million people stopped doing anything they didn't enjoy?
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What would happen in the political? What would happen in the work world? In your home, what would happen if everyone stopped doing anything and everything that they did not enjoy? What would happen?
What would happen in your life if you didn't do anything that you didn't enjoy? Now, like I said, that's a teaching story. And you get it only as you repeat it. Let it live in you and tell it over and over and over. Did you see Dances with Wolves? Oh, what a wonderful, you know, one of my favorite places was when the old gentleman kicking bird was talking with dances with wolves. And he said to him, you know, I've been thinking. Of all the trails there are in this world, there is one that matters most. It is the trail of a true human being. I believe you are on that trail, and it is good to see.
Isn't that the truth? Of all the trails in this world, the one that matters most is the trail of a true human being. And each of you is on that trail of a real human being. Are you not on the trail? You say, I don't know if I'm on the trail or I'm not on the trail. Let me say it for you. You're on the trail tonight. You're on the trail of a true human being. We may need to make some corrections here and there, but go ahead and accept it and live it and embrace it....that you are on the trail of a true human being and however much trueness may not be there. Yes, we need to get to that. I've talked a good deal about joyousness and one of the reasons is that the word rejoice means to penetrate through to what is really real. That's what rejoice means. That one will not be able to enjoy all the things that we do in this world unless we can penetrate the illusions.
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unless we can get through all the games that are being played in life and begin to get down to what is really real in life. Rejoicing is penetrating this veil to see what is really real. Now, being on the trail of a true human being means that I'm going to have to give some real attention to that. How does one do that?
There are so many problems.
It's so easy to lose our lives. It's so easy to get unhooked, to get disconnected, to get distracted. It is so easy to give our lives up for someone else's life. It's so easy for us to be bit players in the drama of our own existence. In Wendell Berry's marvelous novel, A Place on Earth,
And this is one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. He has Matt Feltner, who's just received word that his son is missing in action. It's set during World War II. And then he goes out with his son's wife, who's eight months pregnant. And he sits down and he begins to talk about Virgil. There are things he wishes he could tell Virgil.
that sometimes he was hard on him. And he just hopes that Virgil knew that everything he did was done in love as best he knew it, even though there were so many blunders and so many failures and so many upheavals in it, that he just hoped he knew. And Hannah, as she heard the older father speak, she knew that in his mind he thought he might never have the chance to tell Virgil. And then there is my life.
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and your life, all of these things that we could refer to as the wilderness of our lives, all of these things happening in this wilderness time, these things that happen to us that we do not choose, these things that happen to us that sort of come out of nowhere and they take our lives and they redefine our lives and sometimes they change our lives forever. And sometimes the blows are so severe that we are knocked down so hard that we feel like that we can never rise again, that we can't come back...that there is no tomorrow for us and so we settle in for the long wait for our own death.
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So many things happen to us in the wilderness moments of our lives. Is there anything that is more difficult and more painful and more harder to get over than just the breakup of a powerful and wonderful?
But when it happens, you can't lose your life. There are people all over this city who have lost their jobs. And somehow that threatens everything that we've ever counted dear to our lives. It threatens who we are. It threatens our sense of worth, our sense of value. It threatens relationships. It can threaten our families. It can threaten our marriages. It can threaten our children. There's something tremendously upheaving about the loss of a job. Oh, and.
wilderness presses in and we wonder where is the trail? Where is the way out? Is this what I was born to be? Is this what I was born to experience?
We have physical ailments. I've been through back surgery and heart attack and open heart surgery. The other day even had to have a hernia.
You can't even get any sympathy for that one.
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If it's something major, it hurts worse than some of the others. But you can't even get any sympathy for that. The things that strike us down in the midst of our years.
How we deal with all of these things. The wildernesses of our lives. Some of us have to deal with so much depression. And you wonder, will the black death ever?
Oh, life can do such numbers on us. And we lose our sense of direction, and we lose our way and the trail of the true human being. And then we talk about, you may do nothing that you do not enjoy. Where does it all fit? How do I not miss my own life? I saw in something written a few days ago, Ingmar Bergman...filmmaker, confess to a friend, I'm about to lose my joy. I can feel it physically. It's running out. I'm just drying up inside. And then I recalled the words of Johann Sebastian Bach, who discovered that his wife and two of their children had died while he was away on a trip. And he sits down in the dampness and cold of his room...writes in his journal, Dear Lord, may my joy not...
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And in his autobiography, Bergman wrote, all through my conscious life, I lived with what Bach calls his joy. It carried me through crisis and misery and functioned as faithfully as my heart, sometimes overwhelming and difficult to handle, but never antagonistic or destructive. Bach called this state his joy.
Announcer
On behalf of the Friends of Heartbeat who make this podcast possible,
We're so grateful that you joined us today. Here's a reminder that a new episode drops every couple of weeks. And if you appreciate Landon's content, we hope that you'll follow or subscribe, rate and comment wherever you get your podcasts. Interacting in this way helps broaden the reach of every episode. Until next time, when we'll pick up with this question of how do we keep from missing our life?
This is Heartbeat, the podcast.
