In our Free Store conversation on Tuesday morning we talked about the importance of beginning with the end in mind. This is actually the second principle in Stephen Covey's book The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. The idea here is that we need to understand our core values so that we can begin to build the kind of life that we want to be remembered for when we get to the end of life.
We started our conversation with a little visualization exericise in which we imagined attending the funeral of someone that we loved very much. We imagined going to the funeral home and entering the room where the service would be held and hearing the soft music and feeling the collective love of those gathered. We visualized ourselves seeing the crowd of family, friends, and co-workers as we moved toward the casket to pay our final respects. As we looked down into the coffin we imagined what it would be like to see ourselves laying there.
George said this was kind of spooky like something out of a Stephen King horror movie which made us laugh. We then reflected on what we would want people to say about us at our funeral. We talked about how we would want to be remembered by those we leave behind. Our friend Terrence said that he would like someone to say, "He was a good man." He also told us that he would like to be remembered as someone that gave people something. He also said he wanted to be known as a christian and that he would want his life to give the hope of salvation.
Sheila said that she would like to be remembered as a caring and loving person that had helped homeless people and taken them into her home. George said that he wanted to be remembered as a good artist. He also wanted someone to talk about how although he had a hard time and went to prison that he had changed and done something with his life. We talked about how in order to be remembered in the ways that we wanted would require that we live according to our deepest values.
If we want people to remember us as a good man or a loving woman then we need to practice goodness and demonstrate love in our lives. I shared with the group that if I wanted people to talk about me as a great athlete I'd better start seriously training. George said I'd better get started right away which made us laugh. Sheila said, "I want to get back to the gym." George also said that you just can't jump on your art. He said that it takes time and practice to do a good drawing. So we were realizing that by knowing how we wanted to be remembered we were identifying the core values that we wanted to put into practice every day of our lives.
At this point we switched gears a bit and talked about negative role models. George said, "I don' wanna be like my daddy. He was lazy." Sheila said she did not want to be like her father either because he was a twenty-four hour drunk that would beat them up. It was very sobering to realize that we could leave very negative and painful memories as the mark of our lives. George then told us about his brother who died at twenty-one years old when he was hit over the head, robbed of $3,000, and thrown on the train tracks and run over by a train.
As the conversation moved to a conclusion someone said that when he died he wanted people to say that he had inspired them in some way. George said that he had recently seen his neice's son and that the boy was working out and drawing because of his positive influence.
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