The Four Pillars of a Life Well-Lived
Words can’t describe how honored I am to have access to the wisdom and knowledge of the Dead.
I have found, over time, that I am indeed a spokesperson of the Dead and that they are indeed a people unto themselves. In this modern age of ours, most of us concern ourselves with, rightly so, the plight of the marginalized and disenfranchised people around us, whether it be members of our own community or whether it be with an entire group of people.
Collectively, we don’t concern ourselves with the well-being of our Dead, though we absolutely should. It is a very real relationship, what we have with our loved ones on the Other Side. I remind people often that if we’re hurting in life, our loved ones are hurting in death. The best way I can describe that which separates our world from theirs is with the analogy of a one-way mirror, like the kind we see in cop shows or detective movies. We sit here, on the side of the suspects, largely oblivious to what’s going on on the other side of the mirror, while our Dearly Departed are on the side of the cops, able to see and feel us, and know our heart.
Ultimately, if we’re in pain, those on the Other Side of that Great Mirror are in pain also.
Ultimately, if we want our Dearly Departed to rest in peace, we must live in peace.
I do my best to convey this to as many people as I can, and I’m grateful for this perspective, as, without the help of the Dead I wouldn’t have been made aware of such a simple truth. The wisdom we can receive from our Dead, and not just in direct communication with them like a medium, but in just being aware of their lives and their struggles, is immeasurable. For example, if you wanted advice on parenting, wouldn’t you ask someone who has been a parent, and not someone who had never been through raising children?
The same applies to life; the ones who offer the most wisdom are the ones who have been through it and are now on the Other Side of that Great Mirror.
Through my work with Spirit, they’ve shown me what I have come to call “The Four Pillars of a Life Well-Lived.” These pillars are Love, Joy, Peace, and Togetherness (or Family, Tribe, Community.) I can’t tell you what the meaning of life is, but I can tell you that when we move to the Other Side of the Great Mirror, we know regret around our lives, no matter what. This regret is known by all of us, and at that point, it’s all a matter of degree. Some people know large amounts of regret, some are lucky enough to live a life where they know little regret when they get to the end of the line.
Just like John Lennon said, we are not here to live in pain or fear. And the opposite of pain and fear? The Four Pillars of a Life Well-Lived. Let’s go over each pillar…
Love
This is at the top of the list, and while it may seem redundant to some, the love we have for each other in this world, the love we have for this world itself, and the love we have for ourselves, is the most potent power we know, the most potent source of energy and magic we have access to.
Love is a peculiar emotion, in that it’s perhaps the emotion we’ve philosophically tried to dissect as long as we’ve had the ability to do so. Romantic love, platonic love, familial love, love for your fellow man, and love for our fellow creatures upon this Earth - these are all valid forms of love and yet everyone experiences them differently.
We could go on and on about what love is, yet I hope most of us know the answer to that question. Love is the gift of knowing another, wanting the best for that person, and doing whatever you can to bring it to them. Love is fierce. Love is wild. And love can be messy.
And for all that, love is what we strive for in this life. From the very beginning of our lives, we know what love is, whether we have it or not. If we had parents who gave us that love, we would cherish it - and yet, if we had parents who weren’t able to give us love for whatever reason, we know love by its absence.
We can yearn for love of all kinds, and yet in my opinion, there is no love that will see us through like the love we have - or don’t have - for ourselves. When I speak of loving yourself, I do not mean being in love with yourself. I speak of loving ourselves in the way we love our children, our parents, our spouse, our best friends. We use love of self to rid ourselves of the default lenses of fear, worry, and self-loathing our society gives us and replace them with the love, compassion, and wisdom we have for others.
Want to know if you’re in the right romantic relationship? Here’s an easy litmus test: ask yourself, would you be happy if your son or daughter, sister or brother or best friend, were in the same relationship you’re in right now, with the person with whom you’re in it?
If the answer is no, then please love yourself enough to at least calibrate that relationship. If we apply even a small amount of the love we have for others to ourselves, there’s not much that would stand in our way.
Love is the First Pillar of a Life Well-Lived.
Joy
At the risk of sounding like a Christmas song, Joy is the Second Pillar of a Life Well-Lived.
I don’t speak of happiness here. Fast food purchased through a drive-through can make someone happy - what I speak of here is Joy.
Bliss.
It’s amazing how many spirits on the Other Side of the Great Mirror participate in games. I had a reading once where a woman’s husband came through, and get this: showed me where he was spending time and it was something that I’d never seen before. Imagine being on a boat in the middle of the water, and it was perfectly round like a table. This man was sitting at this boat/table, playing cards with lots of people around him. At any particular moment, he could spin right around in his seat and fish. Fishing itself is very much a game, especially where you don’t know the outcome. This woman confirmed that indeed, her husband was a people person, loved chatting people up, loved cards, and especially loved fishing.
He had all that he loved around him on the Other Side.
As spirits love their living on this side of the Great Mirror, spirits also really love games, and I believe I understand why.
Nature, in all its glory, is very predictable. Left to its own devices, nature knows balance and will balance itself. The sun will come up, Winter and Summer will happen, plants will grow and die. Nature, again, is very predictable. Know what’s not predictable?People. And the games they play.
Spirits spend an incredible amount of time playing games, along with watching through the Great Mirror at the games we play. And games, especially the ones that bring us Joy, are so important to our lives.
The example I use, from my own life, are the local Escape Rooms we have locally. If you’re not familiar, an Escape Room is a game of sorts, where you enter into a room with friends and family, and participate in a mystery, trying to “escape.” With friends and family, you’re trying to solve puzzles, unlock clues, and escape! For the amount of time you’re in there, you are completely immersed in the experience and all of the stresses and hassles of your life fall away, if only for that hour.
Yet, those hours we find, the ones that give us Joy, are so, so helpful in getting through life.
Life, for all its beauty and loveliness, can be incredibly dark and hurtful at times. This is a truth and one that no one escapes from. We must do our best to bring Joy into our lives, as best we can, to help combat that which doesn’t bring us Joy.
And if you’ve ever worked in health care, or hospice especially, you know the regrets people have at the end of their lives. It’s not the number of gold coins you can stack up in a bank account - life is about the number of memories you hold dear in your heart. No one, I can guarantee you, at the end of their lives wishes they worked more.
No, they wish they worked less and took more time to spend with the ones they Love. Joy, as it were, in its truest form, is built upon that very First Pillar, Love.
Joy is the Second Pillar of a Life Well-Lived.
Peace
This one may seem an easy go, as well. Seems like everyone knows what Peace is, yet very few of us can claim to have it in our lives.‘Peace, as best I can describe it, is the lack of conflict in our lives. When I say lack of conflict, I mean lack of conflict on every level of our lives: physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional. While there may be people in this world who seek to bring conflict and pain to the lives of others, I believe a majority of humanity just wants to be left alone. They desire peace in their lives and I believe the ultimate freedom is Peace itself.
I feel very strongly that we should focus on bringing these Four Pillars to our own lives, and by doing so, I believe they will ripple outward in the collective pond of humanity so that others may enjoy those Four Pillars as well. Yet, life is not as ideal as I’d like it to be at times. There are times in our lives that we should seek to bring peace to the lives of others. I first think of my Grandfather, who fought in WWII, and his father who fought in both WWI and WWII. I also think of my other ancestors who fought in the Civil War, and any of my other ancestors who fought for causes that brought peace to the lives of others, especially in a selfless way.
In Peace, we find that yes, we should cultivate these Four Pillars, yet there’s an inherent responsibility in being human where we should bring these Pillars to the lives of others. And in that responsibility, we discover compassion. While compassion could be a Pillar unto itself, we see compassion in Love, Joy, Peace, and Togetherness. In Peace, we hold compassion for others, as well as the world. We may not agree with what others do, but knowing compassion for why they may do those things helps to bring us peace.
Peace is lack of conflict on all levels that matter as humans, and as we create that in our lives we focus on the lives of others.
Peace is the Third Pillar of a Life Well-Lived.
Togetherness
All we have is each other.
We can focus in this imbalanced, modern world on Earthly concerns...money, homes, clothing, food...yes, we can focus on them, and should focus on them, if we want to survive. We find an imbalance in our lives when these become our primary focus. This modern world dictates that we must focus on these Earthly concerns of resources and comfort, though I think it’s safe to say that most people, again, regret focusing so tirelessly on them.
Most folks, when they get to the end of their lives and focus on the regrets they had before they cross through the Great Mirror, regret not spending more time with those they loved.
Community, in all its vast forms, strengthens us. From the very beginning of time we were strengthened by a family unit, and those family units were strengthened by the communities of which they’re a part. While some may be called to live the life of a hermit, that’s not a common calling in the lives of humans.
Humanity, essentially, is the grouping of our lives together in such a way that we benefit from the presence of others. We find strength in each other and in community. Community is when we come together for the common good of all involved, essentially, and it’s when we rally together to help those who are less fortunate than us.
Togetherness can be seen in the simple act of eating at a restaurant with loved ones and friends, to coming together to protest for a cause you deem worthy. Creating community, whether it’s in the short term like your Senior Year in highschool or in the long term like starting a country or state, is where we lift one another up with our own individual traits and skills.
Again, when we get to the end of our lives, it’s not the amount of work we hold important, generally speaking. It’s the time we spent with our family, our children, our parents, our spouses, our friends, and our community that we hold dear. And we are part of so many communities, so many webs and ecosystems, from the community of people of which we’re a part to the ecosystem in the area where we live.
Togetherness, in its best sense, helps us to understand that all of our actions affect those around us. Understanding that we exist in a reality that’s interconnected with every person, animal, and natural element around us is so important to how we make it through this world. Treating ourselves like we treat others, and treating others like we treat ourselves, is especially important to help us get through life.
Togetherness is the Fourth Pillar of a Life Well-Lived.
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With all of these Pillars, I want to acknowledge that I don’t speak from a place of toxic positivity or spiritual bypassing. Toxic Positivity is the attitude that we should just “keep a positive attitude” and that we shouldn’t feel anger or other negative emotions. Spiritual Bypassing is using spirituality and “feel good” energies to work around the darkness that lives within us all.
All emotions are part of a genuine human experience, even the negative ones. I believe we experience emotions like anger, pain, jealousy, rage to help us through a situation, to help us learn what we need to, so we can pass through to the other side.
I offer up these Four Pillars as a way to not ignore those negative emotions and human experiences, but as a guidepost to help us get through them. Life is a mixed bag of good and bad, and while we must focus on the good for us and those around us, we can’t deny the bad. We concentrate on these Four Pillars to help us through whatever negativity we find ourselves facing.
And one more note about these Four Pillars: I encourage everyone to embrace these all, yet do so with balance in mind. Balance, in all areas of our life, is so important. I don’t want anyone to read this and say to themselves, “Well, alcohol brings me Joy so I’m going to go buy a bottle of booze.” In this case, I believe a person who abuses alcohol is confusing Joy for Pleasure, and while pleasure can bring us joy, pleasure can be so very detrimental to folks with an addictive personality. There are things in this world that we can have too much of, and then because of the lack of balance, bring us to a place that’s the opposite of Joy and Peace.
We should be aware that, just like vitamins, there are things that can hurt us if we have too much of them. A couple scratch tickets every once in a while? Sure. $20 or $30 in scratch tickets every day? Not great for us, and the same can be said for anything that brings us pleasure.
Please know, as far as I can tell, that Hell doesn’t exist. There’s no lake of fire that we burn in for all eternity, again, as far as I can tell. What is Hell, in its purest form, is regret. Regret that we didn’t live a life that we should have, or could have. Regret that we didn’t spend more time with those we love, being Together. Regret that we didn’t focus so much on money but more on Joy. Regret that we didn’t apologize and forgive when we should have. Regret that we didn’t love more.
Regret that we didn’t concentrate on those Four Pillars more than we did.
Please, for the love of all you hold dear in this world, embrace the Four Pillars of a Life Well-Lived.
You deserve them as much as anyone else in this world.