Creating my Future

“Have you found joy? Has your life brought joy to others?”

- Carter Chambers (Morgan Freeman) explaining to Edward Cole (Jack Nicholson) the questions asked of ancient Egyptians as they entered heaven, in The Bucket List

But why should I wait until the portals of an Egyptian heaven to answer these two questions? Four days ago I turned 51 and traveled to Bali to celebrate the day, like I did last year when I passed through the grand doorway of midlife. The future I am creating is now taking shape, and it is a perfect time for good questions.

Have I found joy in my life? My answer is a wholehearted yes. What comes to my mind is the movie Bienvenido a Casa, where actress Pilar Lopez de Ayala tells her boyfriend that she loves him for five minutes, and then another five, and so on. My love affair with life is growing in that way, as I learn to celebrate each moment, every five minutes, and every day.

Over the past few years, I have invested more and more in this love affair, and I enjoy the daily sense of thrill, joy and risk it brings into my life. I feel that Richard Carlson was right when he encouraged his male readers to nurture their passion for life with the intensity of having an affair. “The idea is to reignite your passion for living, and to see the extraordinary in the ordinary,” he wrote in Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff for Men.

Have others found joy because of me? This question enters into my thoughts more often these days. It feels as if I am entertaining a smiling visitor with a mission, like “God” (Morgan Freeman – again!) popping repeatedly into the life of Congressman Baxter in the movie Evan Almighty, to remind him of life’s purpose. I know I am on the right track, and the results will surely follow.

My life coaching is one way to help others enrich their lives. I have been making good progress with my course in the past weeks, which encourages me. I also noticed that when I live in the moment, in “the zone”, it sends a good signal to those around me. It must be generating a field of positive energy that affects others in a good way.

Normally I like to keep the subject of my blog post to myself while I am reflecting and writing it. Yesterday, however, I decided to ask a good friend about the second question, and her response startled me.

Joy is a choice, she said, going on to illustrate this with her own experience. She explained how a lot of people she met from all walks of life, would find joy in meeting her, and were able to express it readily. However, some others would look as if they were caught up in a self-spun web, that prevented them from expressing joy, regardless of the circumstances or the people they met.

I appreciated and learned from her point of view, as I realized anew that making a difference in someone else’s life requires giving, as well as a willingness from the other side to benefit joyfully from the relationship.

Recently, I met a professional coach from Australia who told me of his first job as a parole officer, when he was still in his early twenties. The lesson he shared with me was that only a few of the delinquent boys under his care would show interest and benefit from their interaction with him, while the majority did not, or at least not yet. This pattern, he said, continued all through his career as a coach. He learned to enjoy the process of discovering the people who were ready to benefit from his service.

Here in Bali, where I am spending a week to select an architect to design my Ubud home, it seems to me that most people are innately endowed with an ability to find joy in meeting people. They show it with happy faces, warm smiles, and friendly words. I have experienced it with shop keepers, bank staff, farmers, architects, home owners, passers by, and even the manager of the laundry shop. Their smiles reflect, and amplify mine.

I feel that I can tick two boxes on my own bucket list, and will check out the Egyptian heaven some day.


Photograph: Carter and Cole discussing the Egyptian questions, in The Bucket List.