It’s Never Too Late

(even when you are 108)

[art: old woman dreaming by Johann Kracker, 18th century]

What would you do today if you knew that you had all the time in the world, all the lifetimes of eternity, ahead of you, beneath you, within you, offered freely to you?

My grandmother took her first painting class in her eighties. She confessed to me once that she had dreamed of being an actress as a young girl—but her working class life took her into marriage, six children in eight years, making do, keeping track, getting everyone through until the grandchildren began arriving when she continued as she always had, hard at work from the early morning hours until she began her many prayers for all those in her care at the end of the day. I don’t know if she had time for dreams anymore of what she might have done instead or who she might have been—until these small scenes of rural life began appearing on small boards in her garage. A boat is tethered to a dock near a marsh and a small fisherman’s hut. A father and his child carry a pine tree home through the snow to decorate. Nothing about these paintings suggests any great talent or artistic vision. The reason I treasure them is what they reveal about what this old woman knew about hope and possibility. She wasn’t too old to begin. It wasn’t too late to get started. What does it mean to reach for a dream even if you might be dead tomorrow?

Sometimes I wonder how many different lifetimes preceded the arrival of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. How many times had he been a bird or a whale or a cricket? How many lives had he spent mastering various instruments around the world? How many lives had he spent silenced and unable to sing? How many lives was he hopelessly out of tune, and yet he persisted, despite it all, to try and find the missing key? We cannot know except that we can feel it all resonating in the depth and beauty and wonder of the music he would eventually compose.

In my very favorite movie about the “stages of reincarnate acceptance” Groundhog Day Bill Murray is a tv weatherman reliving the same, seemingly terrible, day over and over again. He tries to game it, using his secret knowledge of the world for seduction, consumption, power. He imagines himself a god until he falls into abject despair. Again and again, he kills himself to no avail. He always awakens right back where he was, Sonny and Cher singing, “I got you, babe.”

One day, tens of thousands of days into his ordeal, he surrenders to the impossibility of his situation—and takes a single piano lesson. Every morning the first person he meets when he leaves his stuffy bed-and-breakfast is, in fact, the local piano teacher, whom he has ignored in his misery. Only on watching the movie for the ten thousandth time did I realize how ubiquitous her presence was—always there, always waiting, ready for him to realize that the heart is the only compass that can guide us through eternity.

How many days, how many lives, and how many lessons pass until we see him again? Various commentators have tried to suggest that it is at least 10,000. At the end of the movie he has been transformed from an angry, inept plunker of the ivories into a joyous, improvisational jazz virtuoso. Everything he has ever wanted flows from this single choice—he finds community, love, meaning, purpose, all that had seemed beyond his reach. The hell to which he had been condemned becomes the heaven for which he has longed the moment he realizes he has all the time in the world to pursue his dreams.

I know that for some people the very idea of reincarnation seems like a purgatorial condemnation. “But I don’t want to be reborn!” they will cry. “I want extinction! I want to be done.” That is simply one of the stages. The truth is that we do not have to relive the same problems life after life…if we can step into the radical possibilities of eternity. The love we had given up on is still possible. The healing that felt impossible awaits us. The dreams and desires we thought we must abandon are not behind us but ahead of us. We’ll write that novel, meet that beloved, compose that music, build that forest, heal that world—in some lifetime. Maybe not this one, okay, but some time.

How many of the blessings we have received in this life come from the prayers we sent forward in lifetimes past?

I wonder about my grandmother and where she is now. She died almost forty years ago. Is she painting still? Maybe she is an accomplished artist at this point. Or perhaps she spent lifetimes as a spider weaving webs, as a maple tree turning red and gold in the autumn and painting the world with her body. Wherever she is, whoever she is, I pray that she is following the wild desires of her heart that will always lead her towards what she most wants and what will heal the world.

What would you do today if you knew you had all the time in the world?

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I will be offering a course that helps participants access the long story of their souls and see with the eyes of the dead through The Shift Network in August. There is a FREE talk on July 12 (and again on July 15) to find out what it’s all about. Please reach out if you have any questions.

And you can pre-order my book—about how the long story is always a love story. I’ll be doing an in-person event on November 2^nd in Woodstock, NY to celebrate. Stay tuned for more details.

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Correction: Please note that I included a typo in crediting artist Rima Staines in yesterday’s newsletter. You can find out more about her work at www.rimastaines.com