With Purpose Success, part 18

The first to speak was Herb, who was eighty-one. Herb was a lively sort. He had been married for many years and was successful in his line of work. He seemed content; certainly he was not unhappy. To our spectacular surprise, though, his chart was mostly below the center line and rose above it only sporadically. By his own judgment, he had lived vast parts of his life below what I'll now call the success line. Sure, there were great moments, he told us. Those generally centered on his career and children-having them and then watching them do well. But overall he felt his life had been a colossal disappointment. He hadn't loved his job, though he'd stayed with it for decades. His long marriage was
OK, but he felt he had let his true love get away when he was a young man.
Until this exercise, Herb had never faced the critical decisions he'd made in his life. But here they were summarized, clear as day, in a chart that he had produced using his own criteria for what it meant to lead a successful life. Needless to say, Herb was not pleased. His life had been wasted in many ways, he realized, and it was too late to do anything about it. He wished the insights he had gleaned from the mapping exercise were visible to him when he was younger. He would have taken more risks and focused on more meaningful pursuits, he told us, rather than have led his safe, largely routine, and relatively unsatisfying life.
This was a supremely poignant moment. Herb wasn't in tears. At some level, he knew he had played it safe and done mostly what was expected of him-not what he might have preferred to do. Herb was OK. But I was fast becoming a mess. This wasn't fiction. Herb was a real person and here he was owning up to a lifetime of insignificance and regret.
Herb said that if he had it to do over he would have focused far more on the people who mattered to him. He would have switched careers at an early age. He would have taken more risks and pursued his passions. He would have spent more time helping others. Our discussion was a cathartic moment for Herb, and it reminds me of the Argentinean poet Jorge
Luis Borges, who in his classic Instants laments a lifetime of safe choices."If I were able to live my life anew," Borges wrote, "I would try to commit more errors . . . not try to be so perfect . . . relax more . . . I would run more risks, take more vacations . . . I was one of those who never went anywhere without a thermometer, a hot-water bottle, an umbrella, and a parachute; If I could live again . . . I would contemplate more dawns, and play more with children . . . But already you see, I am 85, and I know that I am dying."
One by one, each of the elders in the Sage Project shared their life chart and their deepest thoughts, and like Herb, expressed tremendous remorse over time wasted on things that did not bring joy and purpose to their life.
One sage, Vivian, displayed a largely flat line across the page. She said there were entire decades in her life that she barely remembered because nothing special had taken place. Among the last to speak was a man named Worden