Halfway to Heaven

When the days in front of you are fewer than the days before you, when the time you have left on earth is shorter than the time you have already been here, your perspective begins to shift.

When you are young, life is filled with so much hope and promise of joys to come. All that is before you is potential, dreams to come true, and hopes to be realized. And whatever is plaguing you—whatever angst’s you may be experiencing—“will be dealt with and resolved…sooner if not later.” All will be well. By the time you pass the halfway-to-heaven-years, you have experienced enough “hopes deferred” that you are now somewhat cautious with “hope,” and much of what plagued you and elicited your angst is ever with you: often more powerful than ever. For some idiotic reason, you just never got around to dealing with them. After all, as you sang along with Jagger, “Tiiiiiiiime is on my side, yes it is.”

Now that life is narrowing, time is no longer on my side. Whereas in what Shakespeare referred to as the green salad days of life we can move at almost a lackadaisical pace, when the view of our end here is taking on ever increasing clarity, there is an ever increasing intensity to get to what matters most, to let go of what we once felt was of Monumental Importance but now know to be only so much Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing.

Samuel Johnson said, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Such is the potential blessing of considering one’s inevitable death: “I am soon to die…what must be done, what needs to be accomplished, what do I want to experience of life before the end?” I say “potential” because it is only a blessing if we fully embrace the reality that our “fortnight” is coming.

Solomon said that it is better to hang out at funerals than at weddings, because funerals confront us with the reality of our own coming death. Sadly, tragically, most of us refuse “to go there.” We willfully choose to not consider and ponder our death and, consequently, are robbed of the blessings that could come our way through the concentrating of our mind.

There is an end to this life: therefore, I must make decisions. I only have so much time, so I must decide whether to go here or there, to do this or that, and to become this sort of person or that sort of person. I must get about living…now…or when the end comes my last thoughts will be filled with regrets…thoughts filled with would-have, could-have, and should-haves.

You wish—at least, I wish—I had lived my life with my mind concentrated on my inevitable death. Instead, the temptation is always to think that there is plenty of time to do what I want or must, to become the man I wish to be. Instead, “One day” becomes the mantra that lulls and pacifies and, consequently, robs us of all that could have been.

(By the way, this is why I encourage young-people to adopt-an-older-person as a friend and mentor. Young people—no matter how wise they have become—are, nevertheless, limited by their life experiences. They haven’t walked through a bankruptcy, a failed marriage, wayward children, a church-split or the death of a vision and so have yet to discover—at least to some degree—what is Important in the overall scheme of things.)

God willing, I still have plenty of years ahead of me, as do you. But what if you are over halfway-to-heaven and see that your life has not turned out as you had hoped? Do you give up?

In the movie Mr. And Mrs. Smith, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie play John and Jane Smith. After six years of marriage they discover that each is a covert assassin. After their first confrontation with reality, John goes to his friend Eddie’s house (played by Vince Vaughn), telling him that his wife had just tried to kill him. John is in shock, feeling like a fool. At one point Eddie tells him,

“It’s like 150 pages of a book that has been written. The first 150 pages, Johnny has been a clown. But you can write the last 10 pages. You’ve been smoked, but you can write the last 10 pages.”

No matter how poorly your book reads up to this point of your biography, you can change the entire book by how the last pages are written. The story will remain the same, however, if you still behave as if “Tiiiime is on my side…”

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2007