A Round of Golf with My Father

That passage is from the Prologue, entitled: “A Call of Consequence.”

Imagine this...

You were born in 1945. Your young father married your mom right before returning to the front lines of World War II. You are born shortly after your father left and...

You never met him.

You grew up thinking he went “missing in World II.”

It wasn’t until college that you learned that your father didn’t actually *die* in World War II. He just decided not to come home to be with you and your mom.

Then...

Decades later, you get “A Call of Consequence” from your adult daughter who tells you that she did some research and discovered some fascinating facts about the grandfather she never met. As it turns out, your father led a fascinating life—playing an important role in international diplomacy while creating a new family abroad.

How would you respond?

Our wise Professor Damon shares the story of how HE responded—dedicating over a decade of his life to the process of learning more about and integrating his past into a coherent narrative while adding insights to the promising approach of doing what’s known as “a life review.”

The process has three primary aspects and benefits. In short,

1. We look back to the past to learn more about the circumstances and choices that to led where we are today so we can
2. Create a healthier, more integrated sense of who we are today so we can
3. Look forward to the future with more clarity and hope and joy

Damon walks us through his process of creating his Life Story while sharing the truly remarkable life of his father and his truly remarkable integration of the lessons learned in his process.

Reading the book helped me integrate my own autobiographical story with MY father (who, as I’ve discussed many times, struggled with alcohol which presented its own challenges) while also shining a light on how to use this approach to ALL the big and little “stories” of our lives.

As Damon says in the second chapter: “A thoughtful story can help us find meaning in events that otherwise may seem random or disconnected. It can weave our life events into a coherent narrative about who we’ve been and who we hope to become. It can help us connect the past with the present and prepare us for the future we’d like to have. In this way, stories about who we’ve been and who we are can help us deal with the inevitable challenges life throws at us. They give us agency in determining who we shall become. Storytelling is a fundamental human capacity, and life stories are a prime way that humans bring coherence and positivity to their life experiences. Any life story, whether lengthy or brief, offers us a chance to review some portion of our lives and, with that, a chance to reflect on who we are.”

P.S. Fun fact: If I had to pick just ONE line in this whole book that I found MOST striking it would be this one: “I was embarking on a serious quest, and I knew that I would not get very far if I approached it casually or haphazardly.”

Are you embarking on a serious quest in YOUR life?

Let’s remember that we are not going to get very far if we approach it casually or haphazardly.

(How can you step up your game and take your Heroic quest just a little more seriously? Seriously. What’s ONE thing you could do to show us just how committed you are? Today a good day to get on that? Awesome. Go get it, Hero.)

As you know if you’ve been following along, Victor Frankl is one of my heroes.

His Heroic portrait is gazing at my wall behind me in my office right now. He’s right between Aristotle and Abraham Maslow—two of my other favorite intellectual heroes representing the integration of ancient wisdom and modern science.

His tragic yet Heroic story of playing his role well (as a therapist in a concentration camp) is deeply inspiring. My Note on Man’s Search for Meaning was among the very first I created.

Yet...

I never knew the *actual* title of his book wasn’t Man’s Search for Meaning. It was Nevertheless Say Yes to Life.

This is one of the most important themes of the book. If we want to create an empowering, coherent narrative for our lives, we MUST (emphasis on MUST!) find a way to say YES to it all. Some of the horrific tragedies must be mourned and integrated while other mistakes must be learned from and integrated but... In all scenarios, we’d be wise to remember to say YES to it all.

When I read that passage, I thought of another Hero on my wall: Joseph Campbell.

In The Power of Myth, he tells us: “There is an important idea in Nietzsche, of Amor fati, the ‘love of your fate,’ which is in fact your life. As he says, if you say no to a single factor in your life, you have unraveled the whole thing. Furthermore, the more challenging or threatening the situation or context to be assimilated and affirmed, the greater the stature of the person who can achieve it. The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.”

I also thought of our Notes on What Doesn’t Kill Us, in which Stephen Joseph tells us about “The New Psychology of Posttraumatic Growth.” Check out those Notes for more on what science says about the power of alchemizing challenges into an empowering, coherent narrative.

For now: “Thus we each need to learn to lead our lives knowing that adversity is always around the corner. When trauma strikes, we must be ready and resilient, prepared to confront stark realities, open to change, and oriented toward using our suffering wisely.”

Stated differently: Nevertheless, say yes to life.

That’s from a chapter called “National Service and Moral Maturity,” sub-section “Character Development in Adulthood.”

Recall that Damon is one of the world’s leading scholars on moral development. Imagine how fascinating it would be as a professional with that specialty to study the moral development of your own father who abandoned you and your mom—then integrating that wisdom into your OWN moral development.

Again, Damon does a brilliant job of weaving this together while helping us do it for ourselves.

He assumed his father was a deadbeat. Yet... The same man who abandoned him found the moral courage to stand up for abused soldiers in a historically significant military trial.

Two points come to mind for me here.

First, the fact that creative actualizers are, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi puts it in Creativity: COMPLEX. They “contain contradictory extremes.”

Second, I thought of the fact that it often takes a significant challenge to elicit the best qualities within us. Orison Swett Marden puts it beautifully in He Can Who Thinks He Can.

He tells us (in early 20th century prose): “There is enough latent force in a Maximite torpedo shell to tear a warship to pieces. But the amount of force or explosive power in one of these terrific engines of destruction could never be ascertained by any ordinary concussion.

Children could play with it for years, pound it, roll it about, and do all sorts of things with it; the shell might be shot through the walls of an ordinary building, without arousing its terrible dynamic energy. It must be fired from a cannon, with terrific force, through a foot or so of steel plate armor, before it meets with resistance great enough to evoke its mighty explosive power.

Every man is a stranger to his greatest strength, his mightiest power, until the test of a great responsibility, a critical emergency, or a supreme crisis in his life, calls it out.”

He also tells us: “They are giants because they have been great conquerors of difficulties, supreme masters of difficult situations. They have acquired the strength of the obstacles which they have overcome.”

Marden’s exemplar was Abraham Lincoln. No Civil War, no Lincoln.

Here’s to acquiring the strength of the obstacles we overcome.

Remember: The demon we can swallow gives us its power.

Good news: People can change for the better. AND... It’s an uneven process.

George Leonard comes to mind. In Mastery he tells us: “Be willing to negotiate with your resistance to change... The fine art of playing the edge in this case involves a willingness to take one step back for every two forward, sometimes vice versa.”

Note: I always get a kick out of that “and sometimes vice versa.”

Buddha also comes to mind. In The Dhammapada, he tells us: “Little by little a person becomes good, as a water pot is filled by drops of water.”

Those are the final words of the book.

Ultimately, doing the hard work to integrate our past with our present as we look forward to a purpose-driven future leads to a more authentic, fully-integrated sense of self.

Here’s to doing that hard work and remembering that it’s best to not approach such important quests as striving to be the best, most Heroic version of ourselves casually or haphazardly.

I’m honored to be on the path with you and committed to doing my best as we show up and give the world all we’ve got.

Day 1. Let’s go, Hero.