What drives you in this lifetime?
The Dave Matthew Band has a sad, beautiful, hopeful song called Mercy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT_d2yjkUaY The opening lines are:
Don’t give up
I know that you can see
All the world and the mess that we’re making
Can’t give up and hope God will intercede
Come on back, imagine that
We could get it together
I am past trying to convince anyone that we are making a mess of things in the world. We are. This does not mean we are not also doing some great things. We are, but the mess is undeniable.
The phrase that rocks me in the opening lines is “Come on back.” I know this feeling. I know it deeply. My life since the age thirteen has been about coming back. I was in a car accident that devastated my family. During a long road trip, I went to sleep snuggled up against my sister. I awoke three and one half days later to paralysis from the chest down and the deaths of my father and sister.
Since then, I have been working myself back….to so many things – my body, my life, purpose, meaning, and of course, to us. Along the way, I have noticed that many people are on the same journey or they have lost track of their yearning for it.
I have spent the last two weekends training healthcare professionals. At my non-profit Mind Body Solutions, we help them integrate mind-body principles into their every day life, including their interactions with patients. Ultimately this means helping them connect more deeply and more subtly with their own bodies and thus to the dynamic that they experience with their patients. In other words, despite all the complexity and constraints that exist in healthcare, we help them come on back to why they started in the first place – the desire to help others.
Tomorrow I leave to teach yoga in London for a week. My teaching training is sold out. This means 40 teachers from around Europe and beyond are coming to learn how to share the principles of yoga with anyone, regardless of their level of ability. This training helps teachers reconnect more deeply and subtly to what they ‘feel’ in yoga poses, not just what poses they can do and teach. In other words, I entreat them to come on back to what is universally shared in yoga poses and thus to our collective humanity.
If we are honest, we can see the mess that we are making. We all have stories as to how and why we avoid this truth. Although our individual stories differ, we all share the possible journey to come on back to the world in front of us.
So I ask, what’s going to drive you in this lifetime? I hope it is the collective us. The song’s chorus is:
Mercy, will we overcome this?
One by one, could we turn it around?
Maybe carry on just a little bit longer?
And I’ll try to give you what you need.
The song is beautiful.