“Life” itself is a fairly indefinable concept. “Your life,” however, is a little bit easier to qualify and quantify. Your life is the sum of your relationships with the people, places, and things surrounding you.
This is a very simple, but very big and important concept when it comes to being Great! All the time!; so it bears repeating in a focused way.
Your life
is the sum of your relationships
with the people, places, and things surrounding you.
Our lives are absolutely defined by our relationships. Relationships are the essence of life and life in essence is nothing but one big complex of relationships.
Almost nothing is more important to our lives than the relationships we have with the people, places, and things around us. If you don’t believe this yet, then look at the other side of the black and white life and death ball – i.e. at death.
When we die, we lose all of our relationships with everything around us. When something important to us “dies” (i.e. it becomes irretrievably lost forever), our attention becomes paradoxically focused on the thing that is no long there. Nothing is more effective at making us focus and realize how truly important something is to us than facing the immediate and real possibility of losing that thing with absolutely no chance of ever being able to get it back again.
My wife, Susan, and I faced this while conquering her ovarian cancer back in 1997. (Think, baseball-sized ovaries, which are normally walnuts, and the doctor saying, “We won’t know if or how much it’s metastasized until we get in there and start cutting them out.”)
Consider this idea for a while. List everything you “own” and how you would feel if you were faced with the immediate and real possibility of irretrievably losing it.
Go through all of the calamities that could happen – someone stealing your car, breaking into your home or office to steal things, burning down your house, or merely trashing your fully-loaded computer hard drive. Most of these material things are insured and can be replaced, but nothing will be exactly like it was. It would be inconvenient, but you could get them back.
Next, think about the irreplaceable things you could lose. What if something happened to your wife or kids or even to your self? You have an obviously different feeling about these things, don’t you?
For many –unfortunately most– of us, our first thoughts of loss often involve the immediate and possible loss of our own life in the short or intermediate term due to a diagnosis of a heart attack, cancer, or some other dreadful disease. For others, the impending loss may be that of a loved one, be it a person, a cat, a dog, or a goldfish. For others still, the loss might be of a house, a car, a tie our dead father wore all the time, a clean stream running behind a country cabin, an honest preacher or politician who at one time had our faith and trust, a glass bowl hand-blown in a class shared with one’s children twenty years ago.
After we consider but a few more examples of what we have and could lose, it should finally dawn on us, what are truly important in life are life itself and the relationships we have with the people, places, and things around us. If something happens to whatever is around us and it permanently hurts our relationships with whatever person, place, or thing it is, then we have truly lost that something and it cannot be exactly replaced.
Perceiving what all of our relationships are is only one early step in becoming Great! All the time! Greatness!, as we have defined it, is not impossible to attain, but neither is it easy. A good deal of the concept of maximizing your relationships in your life depends on your willingness to organize your relationships in a heirarchy of priorities, which will the subject of the next blog post.