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LIVING LIFE WITH DIGNITY, GRACE, AND INTEGRITY
In the past few days it seems like many of my plans have gotten sidetracked. Jesseca and I were looking to take a brief get away and had planned it for a few weeks. Three days, that’s all. With the various demands on our lives we finally settled on a date two weeks away. Not going to happen though. My nieces from Arizona are coming to visit that weekend and it’s important to spend time with them.
So we moved it up a couple weeks then learned that another event would take precedence, so we let that go. By now we’re starting to encroach on Christmas, and we knew that too much would be going on to really allow us the luxury of a mini-vacation or to really enjoy it; so back to the drawing board. We were both disappointed, but I confess that my wife handled it with much more grace and dignity than I managed to muster—at least until later. Took me about a half hour to work through it.
I recall a talk by Albert Ellis, the founder of Rational Emotive Therapy who said in his deep New York dialect, “all adult neuroses are merely adult forms of whining and pouting!” Now I personally can’t agree with Albert completely, but there is some truth in that. So I would agree with Albert on this one, as I was truly in an adult pout!
So I had a little talk with myself, getting a dialogue going between the Wise Old Man and the Little Boy inside. Eventually they worked it out and I felt much better. I surrendered to the reality of what was and let go of my attachment to Life conforming to my expectations. After all, we had planned this awhile back and we’re both getting excited about being able to take a break like this, so therefore God should have known this and arranged things accordingly, right? Well, you know what’s been said about plans. How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans.
I also reminded myself that, as always, some have it better and some have it worse. In fact we hear about it in the news every day, how some people are facing much, much worse challenges than rescheduling vacations. And here I was fussing about a change in plans. That puts such relatively trivial disappointments in their proper perspective. It wasn’t too long before I heard my inner voice telling me just to get over it and move on. So I did.
That experience got me to thinking about dignity, grace, and integrity. Dignity is “the state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect.” The question: can I maintain my dignity, my self-respect and sense of inherent worthiness as a form of life called a human being, and extend this to all of life? It’s ideal to think I could carry myself through any and all experiences with dignity, but during those moments of fear, whether based in manufactured illusion or an actual life-threatening situation, I suspect it would present a challenge to do so. But at least I can strive for this as a standard as much as possible.
Grace. It’s defined as “simple elegance or refinement of movement.” Jesseca became my model for grace in this instance. Of course she was disappointed as well, but she moved through her disappointment like a leaf dancing in the breeze, coming to rest in the quiet ground of Earth Mother. There are moments I watch her when she’s not aware of it and my own heart fills with grace. Reminds me of a line from one of our wedding songs, by Snow Patrol, called Chasing Cars: “I need your grace to remind me to find my own.” When I feel love for any of my family, friends, or anyone or anything in our world, I am in grace. An added bonus is that the more I remain in grace, the more love flows back to me.
Ah, then there’s integrity. It has two different meanings that harmonize nicely with each other. First is “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles,” while the second related meaning is “the state of being whole and undivided.” Over the years this has moved to the top of my list, an inviolable yet forgiving value that I’ve worked hard to honor. My aim is to walk my talk, to truly be a man of integrity. I’m one of these wounded healers, from day one compelled to figure out this world and how the dickens I can fit into it while honoring my soul’s purpose. These days the utmost in integrity is maintaining conscious contact with God. Since God speaks to us in so many different ways, it’s a matter of learning to be a good listener.
Dignity, grace, and integrity. That’s not all there is to life, but these values are certainly something that we humans strive for and attempt to attune to as much as possible. When we do, life becomes smoother and easier to navigate, no matter whether our expectations are met or not.
