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O's Little Guide to Finding Your True Purpose
By The Oprah Magazine Flatiron Books
Copyright © 2015 Hearst Communications
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-06859-0
CHAPTER 1
"This Is It, My Pet Pachooch!"
Bonnie Friedman
I used to yearn for a wake-up call. I thought often about an acquaintance who took a skydiving class; when her parachute didn't open, she fell more than a mile, crashing into a field. Miraculously, she lived. And as soon as her bones healed, she changed her entire life: divorced her husband, moved with her children to a house down the road, and let herself pursue what she really wanted. Of course, I didn't want the mile-long fall (or the divorce), but I did want this woman's visceral understanding that life is short and mustn't be wasted.
Even after I was struck by a car and sent flying four feet through the air, though, I wasn't shocked into transformation. I picked myself up, limped home, and continued to ignore a certain unhappiness in my marriage. I doggedly did my work and didn't confront problems.
A few years later, when my sister, who had been ill for decades with multiple sclerosis, passed away, I felt surprisingly little: I'd been saying good-bye to her for a long, long time.
But at the funeral home something happened. "Come here," the rabbi said, drawing my family into a side room. My glance fell on a simple pine box. Naturally, there are coffins in funeral homes, I thought — then realized it must be Anita's. It was so small, considering the large woman she'd become. So bare. That's all there is, it seemed to say. My heart flew out of me — oh, Anita! I suddenly missed the girl she'd been, the energetic hiker who sang Girl Scout songs and sipped Tab, who folded newspapers into admirals' hats so we could pretend to be adventurers. I even missed the wheelchair-bound woman who loved chocolate cake although someone had to feed it to her.
At the cemetery, in accordance with Jewish tradition, my father and brothers threw spades full of dirt onto the coffin — I demurred — and then the workmen filled the grave. It struck me as barbaric and mind-boggling to stand there while they actually buried Anita.
In the car going home, I sat beside my mother. "Life is a dream," she said. "My mother used to tell me that."
A mourning candle marked with a Jewish star flickered on my stove. As the days passed, I wondered if it was possible to return to the way I'd lived: drifting. I recalled how once, when Anita was already housebound, I'd asked what she was up to. She told me she'd just ordered a box of pens with the inscription This is the day which the Lord has made. Rejoice and be glad in it.
At the end of seven days, Orthodox Jews blow the candle out. For me, it felt like blowing out Anita's own soul, like releasing her to her new world and being expelled back to the land of the living. I took a slow walk around my Brooklyn block, and saw for the first time that even the street of throbbing, filthy diesel trucks held something sacred.
Ordinary life subsumed me after that, but only up to a point. Soon I sat my husband down and told him about the hollow places in our marriage — and our relationship gained energy; the life force flowed back in. I became more nurturing of my writing students and made it a higher priority to spend time with my parents.
What a relief to hear a wake-up call at last! I only wish it hadn't taken the loss of my sister to rouse me. How much better to discover life's evanescence without the parachute failure or other calamity. Why wait for a near-death experience when life itself is a near-death experience? I wish someone had told me: You're allowed to hear the call even if the crisis happened to someone else. Life is always a risk, never a possession. Anita, who contemplated ultimate things, could have told me that. Baby, I can hear her say, when it's over, it's over. This is it, my pet pachooch! Better live in a way that inspires rejoicing.
CHAPTER 2
"Our Irrecoverable Time"
Edwidge Danticat
It was one of the longest trips of my life. On the first leg of the three-plane jaunt, the flight was delayed two hours, leaving me with a mere ten minutes to dash to the second plane. When I arrived at the third airport, two people ran through the security checkpoint, resulting in the airport's being shut down for hours. As I boarded the final plane, a noisy propper, I hit my forehead so hard that I nearly passed out, acquiring a fist-sized bump in the process. The worst part of the trip, however, was that I didn't want to be on it. An acquaintance had asked me to give a reading at her school during an extremely busy time of the year, and to make her happy, I had said yes.
A week before the trip, I called the school to check on the travel arrangements and was told that I was expected to make them myself and would be reimbursed later. I was tempted to book a first-class ticket on a first-rate airline, but because my acquaintance's school was low on funds, I got a discount ticket on the Internet, which sent me on that patchwork of flights.
When I finally reached her city, I was hungry and exhausted. Still, I proceeded to make small talk with my hostess on the hour-long car ride to my hotel. She was very cheerful, and between questions about everything from the color of my childhood house to my college English courses, she laid out the next day's heavy schedule of morning assemblies and afternoon classroom visits — which had not been part of our original agreement.
Not wanting to appear disagreeable, I bit my tongue and whispered, "Fine." Meanwhile I could feel the bump on my forehead growing bigger and bigger, like Pinocchio's nose rising after he told a lie.
When I arrived at the hotel, in order to bury my well-concealed frustration, I consumed a total of fifteen chocolate hearts, which had been decoratively placed around the room. The next day, however, the chocolate did nothing to sweeten my disposition or to make the bump on my forehead, which overnight had turned black and blue, go away. I did the best I could to conceal the swelling with makeup, but by the time I left the hotel room, what I often jokingly refer to as my wide and ample "four-head" was more like a "five-head." Nevertheless, I addressed the morning assemblies and then trudged through the back-to-back afternoon classes, praying I wouldn't faint from exhaustion or lose my voice.
The truth is, had I really wanted to be on this trip, I would have happily brushed off the consecutive presentations and my aching head as yet another series of challenges to be overcome in my constant book-related travels. However, since I was putting myself through this particular experience more out of obligation than desire, I felt doubly abused, by both this person and myself. There were so many other things I could have been doing. I could have been writing. I could have been sleeping. I could have been lunching with my beloved. I could have been playing with my niece and nephew. I could have been consoling a dear friend who had recently lost her mother.
On the plane back, I got a chance to open a book that a friend who knew my tendency to over-please had given me, The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, an eighteenth-century novelist and letter writer. My friend had highlighted several sections, and in a rare moment's respite from the stomach- churning turbulence, I spotted these lines: "This perpetual round of constrained civilities to persons quite indifferent to us, is the most provoking and tiresome thing in the world ... 'Tis a most shocking and unworthy way of spending our precious and irrecoverable time."
I now have that passage and the memory of the bump on my forehead to remind me. The next time I do any favor, large or small, I will have to be almost thrilled to death about it. Otherwise I will stay home and eat my own chocolates.
CHAPTER 3
Illuminations
Marianne Williamson
Every woman's life is different, but there are fundamental ways in which we are all the same. For all our different dramas, we each struggle to give birth to our higher selves. Whether we are young or old, whether our dramas are public or private, we are always evolving toward either a smaller and more fearful self or a larger and more loving self. The effort to be rooted in love is the effort to grow.
CHAPTER 4
The Beginning
Lorene Cary
The week after my first daughter was born I took her to visit my grandparents. When I was a girl, I spent weekends with them; now a married woman, I still drove over the Delaware River from Philadelphia to New Jersey to have an afternoon and evening with them and my father once a week. Like phone calls in the morning to my mother and twice or thrice yearly trips to see my in-laws, these visits gave rhythm and ballast to the year.
And I needed grounding. Our months-overdue house renovation lagged as if the contractor had been paid not to build but to mess with our minds. The baby and I stayed a few days with my mother and then in a makeshift bedroom on our third floor to escape the construction dust. I tried nursing on demand, but the baby and I were miserable. In desperation I reverted to an old-time nursing schedule from my mom's copy of Dr. Spock — the first parent power move, my husband called it. And soon enough, we were ready to roll.
At my grandparents' house, we ran through our repertoire: nurse, burp, diaper, sporadic eye contact. She nursed fast and spit up regularly, as I had done with my mother. We praised her gusto and commended her natural overflow valve. Her staccato ah-ah-ah charged the air in the quiet pink-and-green house. What a fine baby. I swaddled her in a new blue, too-big baby zip-bag sleeper, fastened it with a diaper pin — and put her down for her final trick, milk-induced oblivion. Excellent sleeper. Nana directed me to the end of the couch where my sister had dozed, in the same relative position in which I'd been put down to nap. We propped pillows and stood staring.
"Just think, honey," Nana said, "last week you were still pregnant."
For a moment I couldn't take it in. Now a baby girl lay sleeping among us. Last week there had been no such person making grown-ups prop pillows and move furniture. Just a few days before, I had been gravid, unable to bend, swollen with fluid, moving, eating, breathing, eliminating for two. Now I was alone again, but with less illusion of control, in a shrinking, lactating body: mother-morph, supple.
I had learned long ago that death inhered in life, silent but active. As an asthmatic child, I knew that life could be squeezed out of my narrow chest as a car sped me to the hospital. Death could take you in a breath.
But I had not known with the same certainty that life itself lay imbedded in each shiny moment. I had not known the mystery of how lightning changed amino acids into cells or of spontaneous healing. I had sung Handel's Messiah and loved the music, but had not dared hope that in my own flesh I would see the divine. A recovered asthmatic, I could breathe, but not yet deeply, not into each cell. I was, I am, we are all destined to die — but just as surely to participate in this moment, in creation.
The week before, I'd been pregnant. Now someone new and beautiful lay on the couch, dreaming new dreams all her own. It gave me hope where I hadn't known I was hopeless.
CHAPTER 5
The Girl I Was
Kathryn Harrison
December 9, 1984. I'm in a hospital morgue, kneeling beside the body of my grandfather. He's draped in a white sheet, and like an angel, he's barefoot, dressed for annunciation. His eyes are the palest blue.
The girl who hasn't seen them yet, the girl I was before the drawer slid out, believes she and everyone she loves will live forever. She has time on her hands — enough to window-shop and to see bad movies, to smoke another joint and defer another decision, enough to stay out late and waste time kissing the wrong people. How can one night matter when she has so many?
But I'm looking into my grandfather's eyes, and I'm not that person anymore. The violence of his eyes' emptiness, their nothingness, has shaken me so my teeth chatter. I put my head down on his silent chest.
In a minute an orderly will come to close the drawer. In an hour I'll be on the phone, long distance, to a graduate school admissions director. In a week I'll have mailed my application.
In a year I'll be at school, friends with a girl like the one I was. Lighten up, she'll say, slow down, relax. You act like someone who's been given a fatal diagnosis. There's no such thing as wasting a kiss, she'll insist, and I'll try — really I will — but it won't do any good. I won't remember how to feel that way.
CHAPTER 6
Questions?
Jennifer Krause
"I'm stalled," the young woman said, sitting mannequin-still in the bustle of the café where we met. Although she was grateful for a wonderful husband, beautiful children, and the valuable work she did each day, something was making her engine falter, and nothing could give it a jump. She called it a crisis of faith. Yet for her, as with many people I encounter in my work as a rabbi, it did not involve God or religion. It had to do with a broken trust in the meaning of her life — a struggle that transcends church, mosque, yarmulkes, and yoga mats; age, geography, and tax bracket. It's a trust that can break not only when you end up in a place you hoped you'd never be but also when you have everything you ever dreamed of.
"What's the point?" she asked.
"I know you want an answer," I said, "but what you need is a new question."
When you get stranded, the way to start moving again is not to search for an answer but to find a new question to which your life can be the answer. Whether you're celebrating the birth of your firstborn or marveling at her graduating in cap and gown; whether you've landed a dream job or hit retirement, are getting married or mourning the loss of a longtime love — every one of these moments is a starting point. Feeling stuck doesn't mean the meaning has gone from your life. You've just outlived one question and need to find the next — and the possibilities are endless.
True, it takes some searching to find your new question, but everyone has what I call an SPS — a Spiritual Positioning System — to guide them. This SPS is the instinct that makes you stop multitasking and lean in closer to hear what someone's saying because a sentence suddenly gives you the chills. It's the headline that stays in your mind long after you read it, prompting you to think, Do I have a talent or an idea that could turn this problem into yesterday's news? It's the photo of you as a girl, writing a story on your grandfather's typewriter that turns up in a drawer and makes you consider, Is there someone I forgot I wanted to be? As long as you keep letting life ask you another question — and reveal that there is always more for you to be and do — you are unstoppable.
The stalled woman who came to me for "the answer" didn't receive one that day, but she did get the jump start she needed with a new question. While we sipped our coffee, her SPS engaged as the conversation turned to an organization she had created. I was marveling at how she'd grown it from a staff of one to an entire devoted team. The organization had become what she'd worked for so tirelessly, but it no longer needed her in the same way — and although she certainly hadn't stopped caring about it, she suddenly realized that the passion that had driven her was gone. "I've been trying to find what's missing, figure out what I need," she said. "But the question is, what else really needs me now?"
It was only a beginning, but just sensing that there was a new answer for her to live out was the start of finding her faith — and her fuel — again.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from O's Little Guide to Finding Your True Purpose by The Oprah Magazine. Copyright © 2015 Hearst Communications. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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