Reflecting on Your Eulogy
We are the roots and the branches. Where do you feel the sun’s rays nurturing you to grow?
What a surreal place to begin, with your end. You can thank synchronicity which placed Arianna Huffington’s book Thrive in my lap as I sat for many hours in the Denver airport. She described the disconnect between what I refer to as the “hamster wheel” lives on which some of us may feel stuck and the messages shared about us after our passing. If you feel at times out of balance between your work and life commitments, striving for a success goal that feels consistently out of reach, you may be experiencing a “hamster wheel” life.
Ultimately, what of our gifts, wisdom, and love live on in the hearts of those we leave behind when we go on ahead? To consider this, I invite you to create for yourself two eulogies: a “hamster wheel eulogy” and a “eulogy from the heart.” Fill your hamster wheel eulogy with remarks about your accomplishing the myriad tasks on your to-do list; your jaunts up, down, across, even dangling upside down on the success ladder; all the connections left perhaps less nurtured; special times perhaps missed; your special relationship with your smartphone — even at the collateral damage cost of your opposable thumbs (something our ancestors took a long time to perfect)! This does not have to be a doom-and-gloom tale of woe. Likely your hamster wheel eulogy would be filled with highs as well as lows.
In your eulogy from your heart, consider the messages you would wish others would convey about you if they truly knew your heart and soul’s desires, values, and dreams. This is a eulogy hallmarking your core self — that remarkably mystical part of you connected forever to life’s thread that binds us all.
A false dichotomy, I agree, our lives are no doubt a measure of what you described in both eulogies. You are the author of your life. How would you like to script it so that your life becomes the very stuff of your most cherished eulogy?
Arianna Huffington (2014) Thrive: The third metric to redefining success and creating a life of well-being, wisdom, and wonder, Harmony Books, New York.