I am a midwife as my grandmother was, but of possibilities within and between people. I’ve lived many incarnations in the past seven decades: as a teacher, psychotherapist, researcher, and organizational fairy godmother. When I have to fill out a form that asks for my occupation, I write “professional thinking partner.” The Latin root of the word “professional” is profere, meaning to profess faith. I profess my faith by being present with others in such a way that what was broken can be made whole again. When I think in partnership with someone, I listen deeply enough to hear the question his or her life is asking. I am constantly wondering how to make connections within and between the best of a person and the challenges he or she is facing. Stories then rise in my mind, stories that synthesize, connect, and widen the horizon each is facing. It feels like a great melting, as if Life is saying, “Yes!” to and through me.
I also write books as a way of fumbling through this endless path of confusion we call a human life. Most of the ones I have written are rooted in a lifelong curiosity about thinking. In graduate school, I did research in cognitive psychology and intellectual diversity. None of that rational training helped much, though, with the personal relational and physical challenges of abuse, divorce, and cancer. My mind broke apart with questions that no one could answer: “How can I love this life while living with a ‘terminal’ disease? What will balance all the random acts of violence that are happening to and around me? What’s unfinished for me to give? What difference have I made—and what difference can I make—in a world that seems to be growing crazier and more chaotic by the hour?” Since I couldn’t answer them, these questions opened my mind to a state of wonder. And it was wonder and the stories that emerged from it which led me to discover the Promise of my life.
Grandma taught me that there is both perspective and wisdom hidden in our greatest difficulties. They can help us realize how we matter as well as what really matters to us. I learned from her that certain unanswerable questions can encourage one’s mind to open and to wander like a kite in a wind, noticing what emerges rather than struggling helplessly to find a single answer on which to land in certainty. When I have done this, what often bubbles up is a story about something I’ve experienced. I have woven these stories with those of others into several books: Random Acts of Kindness, Spot of Grace, and I Will Not Die an Unlived Life.
I didn’t know where the ideas for any of those books really came from. I had no idea anyone would want to read them. Winter in Vermont can be extremely stormy. When I first moved there, I frequently had to tie a rope to the back of the old farmhouse where I lived so my six-year-old son David and I could find our way to the barn in the blinding snow, feed the horse, and then find our way home again. The books I wrote were also a kind of rope to which I clung through the twin storms of losing my father and my diagnosis of terminal cancer.
In 1999, I withdrew to a tiny cabin on a snowy mountaintop to explore how to love the life that remained. Once more I turned my grief to ink in order to find my way through this storm of unanswerable questions. I had no intention of anyone else reading the words I scribbled. I was just writing myself home. In three months, I realized that I had written a book to help me explore the most essential questions I couldn’t answer: How do I live a life I can love? How do I love the life I am living? I was habituated to questions I could answer. But these questions couldn’t be answered, and something very different emerged in my mind. They lifted me and carried me beyond the image of myself that I had been holding onto so tightly. They floated me to a place beyond right or wrong, into an ocean of inner resources, stories, and wisdom that I hadn’t even imagined existed. I came to understand that when faced with a grand challenge, as I was then and as we all are now, there is also a call to live from everything that is within you.
Six months after I withdrew to the cabin, the questions and stories that had emerged were published as a book, I Will Not Die an Unlived Life: Discovering Passion and Purpose, with a poem I had written after my father died printed on the back cover.
I began to get letters and emails from people who told me how much the poem had helped them. That wasn’t my intent. I just wanted to learn how to love the life I was living and what changes I had to make so I could create a life I could love. Twenty years later, it is rare that a day goes by without one of those letters arriving either as an email or in my mailbox. A woman in New Mexico wrote an opera based on the poem, and a Canadian artist created a huge oil painting which now hangs in a Toronto museum. A woman in South Africa, Nomathembe Luhabe, took the poem all over her country and read it to crowds of people as she helped grow Nelson Mandela’s movement to liberate their country. In 2004, she called me from Cape Town and said there was someone on the phone who wanted to ask me a question. In a deep resonant voice, Mandela asked, “What do you think the connection is between grief and the passion it takes to live a loved life?”
A year later, the Dalai Lama invited me to come to Dharamsala to meet him. He told me how the poem and the book had touched him deeply and asked me to sign his well-worn copy. My tears had indeed turned to ink. Inspired by an illiterate man born to an illiterate mother, the poem, carrying the transformative question, “How can I love the life I am living?” has circled the globe, appearing in places as far-flung as South America, China, Mexico, and Minnesota. Seeming strangers tell me a copy of it has been hanging over their desks for years, carrying them forward. The seed my father planted in my mother has indeed gone on to blossom and, through me, to fruit.
In these dark and fragmented Humpty Dumpty times, at a moment in history when possibility seems eclipsed and all the King’s horses and all the King’s men have convinced so many people that they can’t and don’t make a difference, I feel a great sorrow that so much innate talent and valuable life experience is undiscovered, untapped, and unloved. I long to inspire you who are reading these words to search for the reservoir of wisdom and capacity within you waiting to be discovered and shared with the rest of us. I know it is exactly the glue that can connect and help us create a possible world for those who will follow.
My grandmother didn’t pass away from me, she passed into me. She saw things in people that they didn’t recognize in themselves. When I was born, she looked at the palms of my tiny hands and realized that I was the one of all her grandchildren to whom she would pass on what she had learned. She told my father to bring me to her every Friday so she could teach me to birth possibility in people. He must have rolled his sky-blue eyes and shaken his head, as all of her children did at her “old country superstitions,” but her will was stronger than his. For the first fourteen years of my life, he drove me to Hell’s Kitchen every Friday morning to be with her.
As far as I know, there is not one other living person on this planet now who has felt her warm dry lips place kisses at the end of each fingertip. There is no one who remembers her faded yellow apron with tiny red roses or who tasted the end slice of the golden bread she baked every Friday. There’s also no one else alive who sat next to her on the rusty fire escape outside her living room, listening to the whispery wisdom that emerged from her lips. It has nourished me in the leanest of moments. It has been sliced and served to friends, family, students, and every person with whom I have worked. They have licked the butter off their chin and said, “I wish I had a grandmother like yours.” I kept promising them that someday I would write a book about her. Now I, too, am an old lady. If I don’t serve her wisdom to you on these clean white pages, it will be lost forever. I once asked her why she kept teaching me each week. She replied simply, “So I can share my zava’ah with you,” as if that should explain everything. Since no one in my family spoke much Hebrew, the word stored itself in the dark recesses of my unconscious mind until a few weeks ago, when it emerged in a dream where she was giving me a purple T-shirt. Emblazoned across the front in gold letters was the word “Zava’ah.” The next morning, I leapt out of bed and looked up its meaning: “An ethical will describing the moral and spiritual understandings accumulated