Sometimes it takes a crisis to jolt us out of autopilot and to revaluate our lives. The crisis strips it all back and jolts us out of all the striving and accommodating to not only reveal our true selves and what we truly want but also to show us what is actually really important in our lives. It can be a health diagnosis, a divorce, a loss of some sort or even a crisis like COVID19.
Jimmy Barnes in his interview with Anh Do speaks about the time in 1980’s when at the height of his career he bought everything in sight. He had three houses on the same farm with a recording studio that cost a million and half to build. All he actually really wanted was to have a nice house for the kids.
After accumulating more debt that he could service even making $5 to 6 million a year, he was forced to sell everything. He was back to zero net worth. He then moved to France and simply rented a house with his family. He felt like after all those years of fame and success that he was a failure. However, though the experience of eventually having virtually nothing, he said:
“Suddenly this sense of letting go of everything sort of set me free and I realized really quickly that I had nothing but I had everything I needed. I had my wife, I had my children and I had my health and I could make as much money again as I wanted and the only things that were important to me were my family and I had them and I hadn’t really lost anything that was worth any value.”
The world of prestige and status is a contrived world where people jostle for that recognition often at the expenses of their integrity and often at the expense of their families. Outside that world, it actually doesn’t matter and if you leave that world no one will really care if you got that promotion or not, but it will matter if you are loved by your family and friends.
We want more because we think that more things, more money, more status will make us happy. I am all for making lots of money and I think recognition and the rewards that come with it like a sense of achievement are all very good things. But the striving to have “more” should not cost us our happiness or make us lose perspective of how blessed we already are with what we already have.
There is a lovely line in the poem Desiderata (yes I know I was a child of the 60’s!) which says:
If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
There will always be people who have more than you, who are more successful than you or have the lives that you think you want. But there are also so many people who can only dream to have what you actually have right now!
While it is important to keep trying to get the things you want, it also important to never lose sight of what you actually have.
None of this means that what we have lost is not painful or that the disappointment in not having what we want is not at times overwhelming. For me, I know that I can only be truly happy in spite of my circumstances, if I can appreciate what I actually do have despite my losses and disappointments and sometimes because of them.
Sometimes people say: "There for the grace of God, go I". I refuse to believe that the God I believe in plays favourites with anyone, in the same way that I would never favour any of my children over the other.
What we were born with and what we were born into, is just pure unadulterated luck (or unluckiness depending on how you see it)! It is a function of trillion of decisions made before us by millions of generations before us and before our parents or grandparents.
What I do with the luck (or unluckiness) as well as the disappointments and losses if where I come in and my choices. Also if you believe in God (or the Universe), this is where God (or the Universe) comes in to help me change my circumstances or alternatively to help me change how I see my circumstances.
I am often just so thankful we live in Australia with the health system that we have. I often think of what would have happened if I was born in the US.
I am just so lucky that women in Australia have the one of best maternal health systems in the world and I was actually even able to have my children. A nearly five foot woman having two babies over 4 kilo's could have ended very badly!
I am also so lucky that even though it was a battle, I had the opportunity to be educated and to have my career.
I am so lucky to have two wonderful children and two fat hairy dogs.
I am so lucky to live in my house, to sleep in my warm bed and wake up to my morning coffee which I savour with gusto.
None of it is perfect and sometimes far from perfect but I still feel very very lucky to have what I have and to be where I am. Like Jimmy Barnes said at the end of his interview with Anh Do:
“Really I had lost all this stuff all this just stuff and I had kept all these things that were most important to me that I got closer to… I know what’s important to me now…I figure that I am really really blessed. A - to have such a great family and B - to have survived the shit that I was put through as a child.”
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