You Can Change Your Life After 50 | Part 2

They Ate My Hamburgers, pt. 2

After that $500 hour at McDonald’s and after I saw them eating my hamburgers, I couldn’t have cared less if someone had said to me “you can change your life after 50”. I was eighteen! It would be years later that their eating my hamburgers would start to eat away at me. At the time, I really didn’t dwell on it. It’s not that it didn’t bother me that my burgers were eaten right away, it’s just that I was preoccupied with girls, sports, college applications, and girls to really pay much attention. But after those years passed, something indeed, ate away at me. At first, I wasn’t sure if it was just the realization of the ephemeral nature of producing something that is immediately consumed, leaving no trace, or if was something more.

Over time, it became clear that there was something more. I wanted to do something that mattered, something (good) I could be remembered for, a legacy. Something with a purpose that would outlast me. Nobody wants to die and just be forgotten. I wanted to do something that was somehow recognized. I thought that was important thing to accomplish. What I didn’t know is that my thoughts were part of an ancient human need to be an individual–to be separate from everyone else. I wanted to count, I wanted to be important, I wanted to be special.

That is the thinking of this world, or at least on this level. Everybody is special and everyone should make his or her own mark on the world. Find your special place in the world. That’s what we have been told since birth. It is hard-wired in our brains. I am not here to bemoan or denigrate one of our basic human desires to celebrate our individuality and to recognize that we are all special in our own way. But… I am here to say, there is a different way of looking at this whole thing.

The reason we all want to be special and why I was upset over the eating of my hamburgers, is because we want our individuality to last. We want it to survive and endure for all time. We believe we are self-contained self-important individuals, separate from each other and from everything else in the universe. Now, I am not asking you to deceive yourself and not see yourself as a separate human being. I’m only asking you to consider for a second, what is our true nature? We already know the answer, we always have.

Our true nature is spirit. Oh yeah, I remember now. Spirit cannot harm and cannot be harmed. Spirit is all connected with itself and with every other living thing. It is not separate and neither are its interests. There is no conflict in spirit, because it is all the same, and that is our true nature. We are non-spatial beings (though for the moment) having a local experience.

The unending, unyielding and unrelenting desire to actualize our individuality has to result in conflict, and it does. It’s inevitable. When we think of ourselves as not being connected with others, there is just so much of the pie to go around. It’s us or them. But we can step back for second, and look at the pie from a different perspective. A perspective through the ‘eyes’ of our true nature, connected with each other and with the universe. From this perspective, we can see that the pie is unlimited. Some pie for some is some pie for all. You can change your life by changing your perspective, and it doesn’t matter at what age you decide to do so.

So it wasn’t so important to me that they ate my hamburgers so many years ago. In fact, I was glad people enjoyed my labor. I don’t feel like that every day, but when I see myself getting too carried away with angst and anxiety and disappointment that I’m not making my mark, I try to remember, just for a second, what my true nature is. It’s spirit. And when I remember, it doesn’t bother me that they ate my hamburgers. At least, not as much.