The End Is Near… Or Is It?

Did you get the memo? The world was supposed to end on May 21, 2011! I may have been the only one on the planet to miss this big news story. (And I hate missing a good end-of-the-world party!) We were travelling in Italy and when I’m away, I don’t usually get a chance to listen to the news, let alone find a paper in English, so I didn’t know the end was near until I happened to catch a short news story on CNN, the only English channel I could find. I had seen some references to it in friends’ posts on Facebook, but now it all made sense. A preacher in California (naturally) was predicting the end of the world and many of his followers spent their life savings on billboards announcing May 21 as the big day. A small percentage would apparently go to heaven and the rest of us… Oh, well.

Besides the obvious fun we could have with this would-be prophet, the question of creating our own reality is what comes to mind for me. Along the lines of the Zen koan, “If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” I wonder “If the world were to end, but I wasn’t there to get worked up about it, would it really end?” Not being a real koan, the answer for me is a resounding “No!” It’s not part of my reality.

This prompted further contemplation on how many things we can worry about in the course of a day or a life. In fact, I believe that the pain and the real “end-of-life” is when we torture ourselves in the time that we do have on this planet. It’s part of not living in the present moment. We can obsess over the past and the mistakes we’ve made or how we have been victimized. We can dwell on the future, the maybes and the possibilities. But very little of our focus is spent on the here and the now of this moment. How many sunsets do we miss, rushing through our day? How many opportunities to give love or support to ourselves and others do we skip over, on our way to meeting deadlines, driving carpools or just trying to get to the next item on our to-do lists?

My mother used to tell a story about two brothers. One was a drunk, and one was a successful CEO of a multi-national corporation. The successful brother was interviewed and asked about his childhood. He said that his father was an alcoholic and with a father like that, how could he be anything but the success that he was? The reporter, in search of a good story found his drunken brother and asked him about his childhood. He said his father was an alcoholic and with a father like that, how could he be anything but the drunk that he was? This story illustrates the fact that it doesn’t matter what happens to us. What matters is the meaning we give to the events that happened to us. How do you define your own life? What meaning have you given to the challenging events as well as the happy events in your life?

So this brings me back to the end of the world. I didn’t give any meaning whatsoever to this event, neither picking up on the comments made about it, believing it or obsessing over it. Neither did I have a chance to joke about it, as it wasn’t on my radar screen at all. (And joking about what some would call a ridiculous prediction would have created an energetic charge of another sort.) In other words, I gave this event no meaning at all and so it didn’t matter in any way. Although this is an extreme example, we all have the power to pronounce meaning on the events in our lives. We can choose to be anxious, to worry, or to denounce the people or things that have happened to us, or we can choose to find meaning and lessons in the events of our lives. And endings, as we know, are really new beginnings. Choose positive meanings that will move you closer to your soul’s truth, and begin to live your life well.