Ok, I must say I broke with my usual routine and started with the second Habit first. Why? Well, I thought I already knew what being proactive means and that I have been a particularly good practitioner of it (and I'll write about how I was wrong later)! I also had this vague feeling that I was not very purposeful about my activities every day, and that I was not working towards achieving the big goals I wanted at the end of the year (like how during my Dept retreat early this year, when I had to present work done last year, how mine seemed so haphazard and piecemeal compared to my peer's illustrious list of solid achievements)...
The book actually asks the reader to do a very cheesy exercise - one which if someone I was speaking to told me to do it, I would say "Oh please!" or roll my eyes internally. It was to visualise that I was at my own funeral wake, and that a family member, a friend, a co-worker and a member from church were going up and make an eulogy about me. What would I want them to say? But since I had picked the book myself and this was one of the first exercises the author was asking me to make, I obligingly did. So, standing on a crowded train in the morning (yay for long commutes!), with my morning caffeine circulating around my system, I scribbled down my answers into my handphone (I love the Notes function!). What my answers were astounded me, in their similarity for almost all the groups. They are all slightly different, but the underlying thread was that I wanted to have modelled Christ-likeness to them, and pointed them to know Christ. Err... how much time does this thought cross my mind each day? Almost zilch (except perhaps on Sundays and during cell group time). How conscious was I of this goal of mine? Yes, at a superficial level, I might say it if asked, without any real conviction or feeling, but doing the visualisation exercise, I knew it in my heart to be true (gulp).
And then the author talks a lot about how we each have a centre in our life, and it could be family, spouse, work, money, pleasure, self (I think I actually belonged to the last one), and how everything we evaluate, all our reactions to events, our thoughts, our decisions, stem from that centre (e.g. does it make me more money? Does it make my spouse happy? Is it good for me?). Then the author went on the show how making any of these our centres was destructive and setting ourselves up for vulnerabilities and instability in life. As I was reading through all the possible centres and laughing my way through them (when described most of them do sound silly), my sense of anticipation for the right answer was heightening, and finally, he proposed that what we should be, is principle-centred, cos principles don't change. He states there are timeless principles in this world, like fairness, and excellence, and the dignity of human life, and they don't change, and living by them is sort of like living by truths.
I did a double take when I read that. The answer didn't sit well with my stomach (you know, deep in your gut). For me, that wasn't a satisfactory centre - making principles our centre is kind of half-baked in my view. It's neither here nor there. The bigger question is, where did those principles come from in the first place? How come all humans have a sense of fairness (even little kids will attest to that), want to excel (for more on this, read my post on A Virtuous Cycle of Work) or get outraged when a human is debased and abused?
I believe it is because these are characteristics of God, which man inherited because we were created in His image (except the omnipotence and omniscient bit, and yeah, we aren't wholly good either). So it makes more sense for me to be God-centred, since He will be the one I face in the end, and not principle-centred. So the lens from which I see everything, the overriding concern in my life should be - does this please God?
Ok, so except for that bit, I totally agree with what he wrote in this second habit. And in fact, from that day on, I started to meditate a bit more on my end goal (which is so simple!), and to remind myself of it, and I started to realise, because my centre is now not another person, or my work, or my money, or my possessions, or even my children, I am less affected by them, and by things that affect them (and there are many). In the past, I used to be extremely concerned whenever my children acted up, when I didn't think I was doing well at work, about money issues, whether I would have enough - but now, yes I am still concerned, and I still want to apply my mind to solve them, but they no longer strike at the heart of me, and that makes all the difference. It takes a lot of emotion out of the equation, and I can think more clearly and logically about it, and be a lot calmer about it. And if we know about how our minds work - emotions actually rule us more than we think, and when we are emotional, our mental capacity shuts down (ever tried to spot an error in an excel worksheet under time pressure?). This is like achieving this end state I read about in a devotion and was so impressed I wrote it down - being completely involved in life, but having an inner detachment to things and an attachment to God.
So, discovering what my desired "end" was, has been really enlightening for me! I hope you embark on this exercise too, and be similarly enlightened!
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