How to look back on life and gain wisdom now…
Wednesday, June 6th, 2007If you have read my book, 360 Degree Success, or the home page of this website, you already know the story about the revelations I had when I was in high school, while doing community service at a hospital. I’ll tell it quickly here. My job back then was to visit people who were near the end of their lives and talk to them. And as I talked with person after person, I began to notice an alarming pattern—each and every person expressed deep regret about the way they had lived (or, rather, not lived) their lives.
Each one admitted to me that they had given up their true life’s passion somewhere along the way for the trappings of a “normal” life, in the myriad forms of jobs, spouses, children, etc. Each one felt that they had lost themselves somewhere along the way amidst all of their external responsibilities—and now, at the end of their lives, they deeply regretted the paths they had chosen.
Now, at 17 years old, this was a most profound revelation. I vowed at that time that I would NOT feel that way on my death bed, and much of the searching in my life has come from that early decision.
I had that same experience again when I watched The Up Series, directed by Michael Apted. The premise of the film was taken from the Jesuit motto “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.”
If you haven’t seen it yet, Michael Apted interviewed a group of children when they were seven years old, and he has returned to interview the group every seven years since. The latest interviews were recorded when the group was 49 years old.
You really have to see it to believe it—and I highly recommend watching the entire series, from 7 to 49, over a few days. It’s like watching human lives in time-lapse photography.
Now I don’t want to spoil the experience for you, but I have to say that it really proved to me how conditioned most of us really are. What unfolds over the course of those films is truly remarkable. We see that each of their lives is inexorably molded by the expectations they had of themselves at 7 years old.
The children who thought they would go on to Oxford and pursue professional careers as lawyers did exactly that.
The children who grew up in an orphanage and had low expectations of themselves basically lived up to those lower expectations, getting stuck in low skilled jobs.
Each child basically grew up to live up to his or her own expectations of themselves when they were 7. But this begs the question—“Where did they get those expectations?” They couldn’t have come from themselves. We don’t really have any real ability to make our own decisions before we are 7—we pretty much believe whatever we are told by external sources, like parents, siblings, teachers, and television.
So, who is really in the driver’s seat in defining who each of these people become, and what they do with their lives? If we really think about this, it’s really scary.
In fact, every seven years, we watch our protagonists ease themselves into their determined fates one by one. Many of them struggle a bit—they may take a long trip across the Australian outback or throughout Europe—but almost all of them settle into the destinies you could easily see had been set for them by the time they were all seven years old. One of them even gets so frustrated by the bounds of his destiny that he literally drops out of society and becomes homeless.
What’s most heartbreaking is the level of justification that each one seems to make for not being able to escape their fates. For example, one of the men said about his job when he was 21, “I can’t stay in this job long. My brain will go dead.” And later, when he’s 28, and still in the same job, he says, “Well, the job is still okay. There are lots of interesting people here. Better the devil you know…” Maybe so, maybe not.
Eventually, many of the people get upset with the interviewer, explaining that it is hard to see themselves in these films—but why is it so hard? Is it the interviewer’s fault? What must be really hard is the knowledge that they are stuck within the very small confines of their programming. Most people can go through life blissfully unaware of this fact—but these people cannot. The evidence is staring them all in the face.
So, what can we do? How can we use this knowledge? We can take a serious look at our lives and see where we may be limited by our own conditioning. Our only chance to escape the bounds is to accept that they are there in the first place.
Otherwise, we may find ourselves at the end of our lives, with the same regrets that all those people in that old New England hospital told me about when I was 17. Because, at the end of our lives, we are all forced to look back. When we have no more time left, the obvious question to ask is…”What did I do with my time when I was here?” And we will all see the progression of our lives in exactly the way that the subjects of this documentary have to see their lives every time a new film in this series comes out.
The only choice we have is whether we are pleased or displeased with the story.
With this, we return to the Jesuit saying, “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man,” and it seems to take on a whole new meaning. Basically, they knew that you can program a person to be whatever you want him to be up until the age of seven, and most certainly, that person will turn out exactly the way you want him to. Wow. Wierd.
Carl Jung expressed this same concept from another perspective. He said, “When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate.”
So basically, the subconscious conditioning we receive before we are seven shows up in our lives as our “fate”. Sounds more like a program executing itself on a computer according to the programmer’s design.
And the human drama (so wonderfully expressed in The Up Series) is each of us, struggling to have an individual life of meaning instead of simply accepting this pre-destined “fate”.
And that’s what 360 Degree Success is all about.
