Living Expansively

It’s been a week since I heard the news of Lukas’ death in Alaska’s Atigun Gorge.  Since Olaf’s final post on the expedition’s Facebook page, the details surrounding the tragic event are now widely known.

As for me, I’ve been reflecting this week on why this story affected me the way it did.   Let me make a confession:  I barely knew Lukas.  My wife and I probably only met him 2 or 3 times and then only “shared” him in a larger crowd.  Though we were Facebook friends, the only contact I had with him in 3 years was to request his secret Lamb shank recipe a few Christmases back.  So why the preoccupation with his death this past week?

It could be that the story bore strong parallels with the movie “Into the Wild” – and a book of the same name written by John Krakauer.  In that poignant case however, the drama surrounded a young college student’s somewhat reckless sojourn in the wilds of Alaska.  But since Lukas was always meticulously prepared for his adventures and already highly experienced in extreme and hostile environments, this could not explain my sadness fully.

Another reason might be that I actually contacted Lukas via Facebook just three days before his death to wish him well for his birthday and to invite him on a trekking holiday in Nepal this September.  If anyone would accept such an invitation it would be he.  But in spite of the uncanny timing, this explanation falls short too. 

A third explanation seems to resonate more deeply.  Not since opening a Facebook account 6 years ago have I seen the medium serving a community more powerfully than it did last week.  It wasn’t just the innumerable and heartfelt condolences on his Facebook wall.  It was the fact that for a few very moving days, people from all over the world; regardless of race, language, gender or creed came together in a messy yet sincere effort to not only console one another but to genuinely assist each other in celebrating the life of a human being who had touched them in so many ways.  If ever there was a sincere and  spontaneous celebration of shared humanity this was it.

Moreover – and I admit I may be reading too much into things – it was as though each post bore the telltale signs of self-examination.  While none should aspire to become a carbon copy of this unique individual, his death served as a blunt yet timely interrogation:  what is stopping me from living as generously, urgently, courageously and expansively as he lived? 

Mindful of the persisting sense of loss I find myself wrestling with a question: Can a man achieve more through his death than he did through his life?  

I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.

John 15

Troubled as we remain over the fact that he is gone and haunted by the wasteful and potentially avoidable nature of his demise, this tragedy has produced “many seeds”.  Indeed, is not each Facebook update and tear shed a separate sowing?

Who knows what he would say to this from the vantage point of eternity?  For one thing, it is quite likely that he is laughing over what happened, his fall no more to him than it would be to us had we tripped over the cat.   As the Great World War I poet Wilfred Owen wrote in stirring “Spring Offensive”

Of them who running on that last high place

Leapt to swift unseen bullets, or went up

On the hot blast and fury of hell’s upsurge,

Or plunged and fell away past this world’s verge,

Some say God caught them even before they fell.

For another, he would almost certainly encourage us to reach higher.  As Paul wrote to the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 6: 12 - The Message Translation)

I can’t tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life.  We didn’t fence you in.  The smallness you feel comes from within you.  Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way.  I’m speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection. Open up your lives.  Live openly and expansively!

Or as C.S. Lewis wrote in “The Last Battle” – “Further up and further in!”

Post Script

A lot of the time we tend to define success in terms of how we'd like our epitaph to read.  The Bible is fairly clear that this is like putting the cart before the horse.  Psalm 37 clarifies that we only get the desires of our heart when we "delight in the Lord", when we "seek his face" - when we prioritise the Kingdom ahead of our earthly ambitions.  Viktor Frankl said:

"Don't aim at success - the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it.  For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.  Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success:  you have to let it happen by not caring about it.  I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge.  Then you will live to see that in the long run - in the long run, I say! - success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it"