Day 307: Steve Jenkinson

August 3, 2010 at 12:01 am, Category: Inspiration

“I’ve said many times that people die more or less the way they lived, and that sounds like a very neutral statement, a descriptive thing, until you begin to realize that dying actually asks things of you that the rest of your life may never have prepared you for, and certainly has never asked of you.  Like no job, for example, and very few relationships in your life ask you what dying asks you.”

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Toni Reece: Thank you so much, Steve, for agreeing to be part of this Project today.

Steve Jenkinson: You’re welcome.  Thanks for calling.

Toni: Before we begin, can you please introduce yourself?

Steve: Well, surely.  My name is Steve Jenkinson, and I live on a farm in the Ottawa Valley in Eastern Ontario, Canada.  I’m self-unemployed out here, which means we do a lot of 10,000 things, a little bit at a time.  Prior to that, I worked a long time in the death trade, so-called palliative care, and most of the teaching I do comes from mostly what I learned at the deathbed.

I’ve been out on the road probably for a dozen years trying to give, some feel … that some other way of living and dying is possible other than the one we’ve been dealt up and the one we settled for.  So I guess you could say that what I’ve been teaching is that a good death is everybody’s right and everybody’s responsibility and trying to proceed accordingly.

Toni: There’s a lot there in that introduction, Steve.  I can’t imagine … the work that you do must be incredibly fascinating.  Let’s talk about inspiration.  When you think about the word inspiration, who do you think you inspire, and how does that happen?

Steve: Who do I inspire?

Toni: Yes.

Steve: You know, I don’t know … if you’re doing the work deeply and well, I don’t know that you get to know who you inspire.  Somehow that’s like a second order of consequence of maybe doing what you were born to do.

I always said that if you awakened to the idea that you were actually born to do something, I mean, it’s a gift in itself, and you’re lucky and you’re an uncommon sort of person.  And then if you actually find out what that thing is, man, you have nobody to tell because that’s how rare that is.  And if you get paid to do it, well, you’re off the chart now.  But I don’t know that getting paid to do it includes finding out who you inspire.

I mean, sometimes people are generous enough to let you know, but mostly I guess the inspiration is of a certain, let’s say, magnitude or consequence.  It’s not always true that people are glad of that, you know?  That being inspired by you is something that they necessarily welcome or that is comforting to them.  Oftentimes, it can be really alarming and can also … I mean, learning is very tough, and inspiration and learning for me, they’re very close together, and learning is very hard on knowing.  They generally are very poor bedfellows at the best of times.

In a culture like ours that’s so addicted to competence and looking good and not letting them see you sweat, it’s very hard to learn anything, and I guess that’s what I’m appealing to us to do is to learn something that’s sort of counterintuitive.  And if people find that inspirational, I think they do so, let’s say, down the line, not at first blush.

Toni: Can I ask you to clarify something for me?

Steve: Yes.

Toni: When you said that sometimes inspiration isn’t welcome, can you give me an example of that?

Steve: Sure.  Okay, I’ve said many times that people die more or less the way they lived, and that sounds like a very neutral statement, a descriptive thing, until you begin to realize that dying actually asks things of you that the rest of your life may never have prepared you for, and certainly has never asked of you.  Like no job, for example, and very few relationships in your life ask you what dying asks you.

So, you come to the end of your life, be you 40 or 70 or 17 or whatever it might be, and here comes dying — partly in the form of a diagnosis, but hopefully also in the form of somebody who is skilled in helping you do just that — and your project is to not die at all during the course of your dying.  If you’re willing to hear the consequences then you realize, my God, here’s your dying time, and you’re doing everything you can not to do it.

I mean, compare that to, say, a loving time.  Imagine getting married and doing everything you could in the early days of the marriage not to be in love because somehow you’re too … or whatever … I mean, it sounds nonsensical.  It’s just as nonsensical to try not to die when it’s your turn to die.  So if my job is to try to inspire people with the truth and the justice of their death, and their project is to not die at all, well, we’re not talking the same language, at least starting out, are we?

Toni: No, you’re not, and I’m wondering how … by listening to you, by what you teach, okay, around this, how can that help me explore my potential or others explore their potential so that we don’t get to that place when that time comes?

Steve: Oh, well, that’s a great thought, you know, but it’s a kind of preemptive, redemptive instinct in your question there.  The truth is that the fix is in our culture and our time for a kind of a death-phobic way of living.  The fix is in.  We don’t decide to live that way.  Nobody comes to us and says “Okay, death phobia, yes or no?  You in or you out?”  It’s part of the milk.  It’s part of the breast milk of you coming into your life and of your adolescence and “be all you can be” and limitless possibility, and if you want to be President, knock yourself out and those kinds of things.

I mean, dying and limitation just don’t fit into that way of life.  So how do you sell the idea that dying is not an injustice?  It’s not a rupture in the natural order of things, and it’s not an insult to your life, but it might be an insult to your plans, though, in which case it’s your plans that need revision, not whether you should be dying or not, you see?

So hopefully, the end of your life is included in your vision of your life.  And people do pay lip service to the idea that “Oh, dying is part of life,” but they don’t actually mean it.  If you listen carefully to how it gets said, they usually mean dying is an annihilation of your life, not the proper and fitting end part of it, you see?

Toni: So how does one then make sure that that thinking evolves along those lines?

Steve: Well, George Harrison, before he died apparently … you know, he knew he was dying for four or five years, and he was a lifelong, more or less, meditation practitioner.  He said something to his wife that was very, I guess, un-George like at the time.  He looked at her — and he was withered and frail at that point — and he said to her “You know, if you wait until the end of your life to find God, there is such a thing as too late.”  And you know what?  That’s my experience.  There is such a thing as too late.

So a terminal diagnosis can be, in a romantic sort of way, a wakeup call, but it leaves you very short on energy, time, and the capacity to work this through with the people that you love and the people around you, and most emphatically with your community.  And there’s the great sorrow of the whole thing for me is that it’s the community that needs you to die well.  Your need to die well may be up for grabs, let’s say, because you don’t feel it as a need, right?  But the community utterly needs you to be able to die well, because they need a living example of what that might look like, that they can draw upon when it’s their turn.

Toni: Okay, okay.

Steve: So what that means is, everybody’s death is your rehearsal.  Everyone you learn about prior to your own, everyone you read about in the paper, everyone you hear about down the road, or the guy that never shows up for work again – that’s what those all are.  And I don’t say that in a self-interest way, you know?  That’s true.  That is how you learn these things.

A culture like ours that privatizes dying – you know what I mean by that – and squirrels it away and it’s like it’s not in keeping with the pulse of life that we are so addicted to.  Well, the first casualty or the first poverty of that is none of us get to learn, and then we come to our own death as a rank amateur, you see.  We’re using the word inspire here in this conversation – well, how do you inspire people towards the merit of their dying, not as a damage control exercise, right?

Toni: Okay.

Steve: Not as risk management, but as a real spiritual project.

Toni: So Steve, what inspires you?

Steve: I guess everything I’ve been saying probably.  Strange as this might sound, the poverty of the times I’ve been born into inspires me.

Toni: Okay, can you tell me what that means?

Steve: Yeah.  I guess I’ve been called many times a kind of a spiritual activist, and a … adjutant, which is almost the same thing, probably.  And my idea of trying to maybe live up to that notion is that the human soul has longings that are part of its inherent language, and it’s our entitlement, it’s our birthright, but it’s also our obligation to learn the language of our soul in a culture which believes that the equivalent of the human soul is skillfulness, right, is doing well at everything.  This is where we have a tremendous shortfall, because our poverty, our imprecisions, our human frailty is as true about us as anything we’re good at, and those things really burst into flower in your dying time, you see?

So when I say poverty inspires me, I don’t mean I get a thrill out of it.  Of course I don’t, because it’s my own I’m talking about, too.  What I mean is that I proceed without anyone’s permission as if I’m a needed person.  And that can sound really arrogant to a lot of people, but it’s not, because the alternative is to proceed as a needy person, and we’ve tried that, haven’t we?

The age of therapy has made sure that most of us walk around as needy people, and then we come to relationships as if they’re need-gratification machines, right?  That’s not what they are, though.  They’re life-generating machines.  I don’t like the word machine, but events, let’s say.

Our job, it seems to me, is to respond to the poverty of the moment by recognizing that there could be something that we know that we’ve learned, that we’ve seen, that is vital to this moment.  Maybe somebody else needs it, but maybe we need it just as truly … maybe the world itself needs it, the nonhuman world as well.

I guess the most daunting thing I’ve seen in my years in the death trade is represented by the way we bury people.  You know, there’s talk at the graveside.  How many times have you heard it?  “Ashes to ashes” and all that.  But if you look at the interment process, nobody is going anywhere near the earth when they’re put in the ground, are they?  It’s concrete, it’s steel, it’s bronze, it’s whatever it is, but it’s not earth, because you’re not allowed to go back to the earth the way we do it now.

So I can tell you, there’s a revolution afoot, because I get called all the time for people who want to know the inside poop on how to steal their loved one away from the coroner’s office or from the hospital and bury them somewhere secretly, or put them up in a tree someplace, you see?  The instinct is still there.  Even in really domesticated people in the suburbs.  It’s still there.

Toni: You are going to generate a lot of thought with this interview with the Get Inspired! Project to just … absolutely you flipped these questions on their head here by answering not only who you inspire but how that inspiration can be a challenge and can be difficult, but also …

Steve: It has to be.  Really, in a time like ours, it actually has to be difficult.

Toni: Why does it have to be difficult, though?

Steve: It is difficult, but the reason it’s difficult is that it’s a given now.  There’s the dilemma.  You see, in my line of work, the people who are allegedly my allies, let’s say – well, I don’t have many of those … coworkers, let’s call it – their vision is of a supportive function that they’re supposed to have.  But the thing that’s always missing in their orientation is they come to it either medically or religiously or psychologically.  So is there anything missing from that tripod?  And the answer is “You bet there is!”

What about the cultural layer to things?  Where do you think we learn all the things that we bring to our dying time?  We learn it culturally.  That’s where it comes from.  Most all of our attitudes and opinions about dying are culturally derived.  Like I said earlier, we don’t just decide them.  You see, they’re kind of received, and you pick and choose between a very narrow range of possibilities about how you’re going to feel about your death.

So that kind of poverty masquerades as enlightenment, you see?  So when I say that is has to be difficult, this is what I’m alluding to.  Given the cultural milieu that we are trying to live and love and die in, it can’t be otherwise if you’re alert to the situation.  If you’re alert to what passes for common sense and for compassion, you see?

I’ve had to deal with misapprehended compassion the likes of which you would never believe.  The things that people do to their loved ones in the name of making sure they don’t die is unspeakable.  And we have the technology now that would absolutely curl your hair to know what’s possible, and I’ve seen it.  They do it to young babies; they do it to everybody.

So knowing all of this, you could either be really unhinged by it, which … I’ve had my days, let me tell you.  Or you can decide, are you going to at some point dig in your heels with the time and the energy that you have left?

I’m on the other side of 50, so I’m not looking at another 40 good years probably, and with the time and with the things that I’ve seen, you know,  plant my flag in the idea of a better day, not waiting for a better day to show up so then my best part of me can show up.  No, I have to do it now.  And in so doing, I don’t have much faith that I’m going to see the time that I dream of.  Really, I don’t.  But it doesn’t defeat me, you see?

That’s the angel, that realization that I’m not going to live long enough to see what I’m yearning for doesn’t actually defeat me.  If I was a younger man, it would have.  Fortunately, I’ve lived long enough that I realize that it’s not a taunt or a tease, it’s an angel.  And this angel is … I’m wresting this angel, you see?  And the nature of wrestling angels is that you’ll always lose, but your loss, let’s say, strengthens you, because you can brag about who defeated you.

And in this case, my job is to try to live as if it’s possible for things to be better than they are, hoping that somewhere in there that example that I was able to incarnate somehow takes root in a time beyond the one I’m likely to see, and that’s who I’m doing it for.

Toni: The final question of the Project, and we only have a minute here or so – but no, I mean, it’s been a fascinating interview – but based on what you’ve just spoken about, that you’ve come to peace with the idea that you will not live long enough to see this come to fruition for you, right, that’s what you’re saying?

Steve: Yeah.

Toni: What are you doing now that is exploring your own potential to continue to do the work that you’re doing?

Steve: Can you restate the question?  What am I doing …

Toni: What are you doing that’s exploring your potential so that you can continue to do this type of work?

Steve: I think what you’re asking me is how do I cultivate being able to keep on going?  Is that what you mean?

Toni: Sure, that’s a great way to put it, yes.

Steve: Okay, yes.  Well, I mean, I’m a farmer; that’s one way.  You know, so sometimes … let’s put it another way.  In order to grow something in a field in a growing season that’s not 250 days long, which mine isn’t, what do you have to do?  People on the outside think that growing things is some love affair with the earth, and that’s involved.

But I promise you, it’s as much warfare with the climate, with the bugs, with the soil, with everything, as it is a kind of an uncritical, limp sort of love affair with it.  Oh, it is.  It’s very much a struggle, and that struggle … it builds muscle in places that you’re not looking for.

And you realize … I’m not saying that everything in life is a struggle.  I’m saying that the most worthy things, the things that are given us to do now in our time, probably have more struggle in them than perhaps at other times.  At the end of the day, I don’t think … I mean, the news has washed up on our shores, has it not finally?  And these oil spills are not happening elsewhere now, are they?  This is a sign of the times, isn’t it, that there’s nowhere to go anymore, and we’re not talking about those guys.

And by the same token, the spiritual challenge that I’m talking about it not personal anymore.  We have to proceed as if the world needs us, not as if we need us.  That’s my, I guess my plea.  That’s why I’m not big on self anything.  Self-enhancement, self-actualization, or any self stuff.  Like I say, we’ve tried that already – how’s it working so far?  Let’s say that the world itself is bleeding in the Gulf coast, which it is.  The world itself is bleeding, and given that, what use is your self development?  It isn’t, you see?

You’ve got to come to it as a needed person first.  And in the process of trying to serve, then yeah, of course then your capacity to do so is enhanced, but it’s a secondary consequence.  So it’s like, you don’t get married to be happy, you get married to work at trying to be married, and the consequence of the work can be happiness, and other things too.

And that’s where I think your capacity to do the job that I’m pleading for comes from.  It comes from doing the job.  It doesn’t come from getting ready to do the job, you see what I mean?  And waiting until somebody asks you or you’re given permission, or you’re given a real paying job where this is legitimate.

I teach a school, right?  I have a school here, and many people have written me and said “I don’t think I’m qualified to come to this school because I don’t work in the death trade and I’ve never done that, but I feel this calling.”  I will write back to them and I’ll say “What makes you think you’re not qualified?” or “What makes you think the people who do have the straight jobs are qualified?”

Come on now, you’ve got to think bigger than that.  You’ve got to imagine that you’re needed now, instead of somebody saying to you, you are.  Proceed as if you are, let’s see if it’s true.

Toni: It’s a fantastic way to close the interview with that thought, Steve, and you have really in this span of time given so much to think about.  Honestly, and it’s really … everybody will come at this interview with a different perspective, obviously.

And I can tell you from my perspective what I normally do, those who follow the Project, is there are certain words that come out for me, and you know, “needed” is the word that comes out for me with you, and it’s really been truly fascinating.  I cannot thank you enough for being part of this Project, Steve.

Steve: I appreciate it too.  As I said to you earlier … and I’m glad we got a chance to get a couple of things said out there, you know?  I know the way I’ve talked about it sounds a little dire, yeah?  And it doesn’t sound enormously uplifting and “It’ll be okay!” but this is not a circus, you know?

And we only have so much time, and if you learn anything at sitting at about 1,000 deathbeds, which is what I’ve done, one of things you learn is you don’t take your life for granted, you don’t take time with people for granted, and you try to stand and deliver as best as you can and bear faithful witness to the way it is.

Toni: Thank you for that.  Thank you so much.

Steve: Listen, let’s see you in Pennsylvania maybe in the fall, okay?

Toni: Okay.

Steve: If you can make it, it would be good to see you, and if you’re there, please let me know you’re there.

Toni: I will.  Thank you so much for being part of the Project.

Steve: Okay.

Toni: Take care.

Steve: You too.

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For more information about Steve Jenkinson:  orphanwisdom.com

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