The Universal Connection to Keeping Your Word

An excerpt from a book I'm reading called "Five Wishes" by Gay Hendricks.  In this portion of the book, the author is discussing what he calls "completions".  Closing old wounds with people, repaying debts long forgotten, saying something important that needs to be said, apologizing to someone, that kind of thing.  It doesn't have to be just you apologizing for something you did.  It could be you returning to someone who did you harm and telling them how angry/hurt/disappointed you felt/feel about it - thereby creating an opportunity for them to complete with you.

There's a power to completion that goes beyond good feeling into the whole of life.  What I've come to see is that the act of completing something, no matter how large or how small, puts you into harmony with the Universe.  If I say to you, "I'll call you today." I've created a new force in the Universe - a new agreement about how things will be.  If I then make good on my agreement and call you today, I line myself up in harmony with those forces.  If I don't call you today, I leave a loose end, an open circuit, an unresolved story line. By not calling you, I communicate something that affects my life and our relationship.  It says, "My word is no good and you are not worth my effort to keep my word."

My experience has been that each incompletion saps my energy and clouds my relationship with the people on the other end.  The act of completion restores my energy and clears the air that circulates through my relationships.  Further though, each act of completion celebrates our connection to the universe around us.  The universe becomes a friendlier place, because we're being friendlier to it.

As I got better and better at completing things, I found a happy surprise and an unexpected reward.  My path through the Universe became smoother and easier.  Daily life became blessed with positive coincidences both large and small.  A long forgotten loan to a friend was repaid, parking places started to appear, Oprah read one of our books and invited us on her show.  Things like these happened with greater and greater frequency as I honed the art of completion.

Now, even though I've lived for many, many years on a steady diet of spontaneous positive events, I celebrate them every day and try not to take them for granted.  I think of them as little winks from the Universe.  When they occur, I give thanks for them and wink back.

I believe that when we have lots of these incompletions, the 'sapping' of energy stacks up.  It can result in depression and even suicide.  I'm sure this is why groups like Alcoholics Anonymous have, as one of their steps, to return to those who you've hurt, betrayed, or negatively affected and apologize or make things right.  This is "completion" and regardless of whether it is received the way you hoped on the other end, it rejuvenates and removes the negative power in your life by closing the circuit through which that energy flows.

The people I know with "dark cloud syndrome" (where nothing ever seems to go right) -without exception - live a life outside of integrity.  They create a dozen incompletions a week, if not a day.  No thread of behavior is more clearly sewn through all of these people than that.

It gets a bit more challenging - but no less important - when the person you need to complete something with has passed away.  I know two people who have issues with the way their parents died (left them).  It is difficult to resolve this type of pain because the completion involves you coming to completion without the cooperation of the other.  Doing this may mean screaming angrily into a pillow, seeing the situation in a new light or from a different perspective, etc.  But this brings up the bigger point which is that completion isn't about them at all anyway.  It's about you.  Forgiveness is about you and your life, not about them and theirs.  They don't even have to know you forgave them.  Forgiving is for-giving you peace of mind.

Don't wait to become an alcoholic to practice this.  Keep your word and go back to others who you've hurt, disappointed, or left hanging and make an effort to make things right.  Do it today.  Do it for the rest of your life.  If they're still here, it will benefit you both.  If not, the positive affect of removing the negative from your life will feel like an adrenaline shot propelling you to the next incompletion to resolve.