The Constellation Learning Newsletter
November 2005

I spoke with an acquaintance last month who was unaware of my springtime dance with death. Having grown weary of the back story I shared only the briefest of salient details before surprising myself with a succinct summary: I remarked that perhaps one of the best things to come out of the incident and subsequent road to recovery was to have come face to face with my own character. Later, reflecting on my own words, I wondered how they had escaped my lips so quickly, so easily. Was it even true? Had I confronted my own character? If so, what does that really mean?

We say things like, “Oh, she’s quite a character,” indicating a person of colourful personality, while “He’s a man of character” means something quite different. We refer to the character of concepts, wine, artwork and many other inanimate objects. Bill Clinton’s presidency was littered with the remains of carnivorous conversations concerning character and cigars. Character changes with context – or does it?

It has been shown that at the moment of death a person loses 21 grams of body weight. Some have posited that this is the “weight” of the soul. Is that soul, or essence, the well-spring from which character pours forth? While integrity, honesty, generosity, compassion, perseverance or forthrightness are component pieces of any character puzzle on a physical plane, I think it comes down to this: character is that part of the individual which knows its own potential. It is that part which urges us onward and invites us to dig deeper and reach higher than we did yesterday. It is the part of us at peace with itself - without being complacent.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of my favourite writers, said that character “is that which can do without success.” From a friend: “Success doesn’t mean how much money you make or spend and it sure doesn’t define your character. If it did I’d be a bag of sh*t.” (That’s a different topic, and I wrote on it in August.)

Charles de Gaulle, Former president of France, said “A man of character finds a special attractiveness in difficulty, since it is only by coming to grips with difficulty that he can realize his potentialities.” Perhaps he and Emerson are both saying the same thing in different ways. Perhaps character is forged in the fires of life’s furnace in much the same way as iron becomes steel. Perhaps in our willingness to confront those fires head on we tap into the eternal power inherent in our essence (or whatever it is that weighs 21 grams): our character, the steel backbone of our strength. Everyone has character. The question becomes, of what quality is it? It’s an interesting thought to consider in the face of the materialistic mind-set of our modern world. A few years ago another friend of mine decided to begin living her life by her obituary instead of her resume. She wrote herself one and then set out to live it into being. It’s working.

I sat down to do the same thing not long ago. It is an interesting exercise to view oneself dispassionately, without the usual self-recrimination for perceived failures or human mistakes. I’ve been to enough funerals to know that even if the person wasn’t as well-loved as some, generally only nice things are said. Too bad we find it so difficult to do that for ourselves.

Over time, for the most part, it’s the good that’s recalled in a life lived. I think that’s what character is: the essence that will be remembered most when it fades from physical view. My father could be one son of a gun (she says politely) and sixteen years after his death it is the good messages, the best of him, that I remember most, not the catalogued resentments I collected over the years. He died sixteen years ago today and what still lingers is his 21grams.

Coming face to face with one’s character requires peeking inside that miniscule measurement and finding out what lives there. I’m not sure what others will say about me when I’m gone, but I’m getting clearer on what I want to be able to say about myself.

I have a feeling that’s the whole point.

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