The Tapestry of Life — What Do You Stand For Stand for something or you will Fall for anything

Grace Notes | Memory, Character & Legacy

The Tapestry of Life

What Do You Stand For?

By Grace Caroline Walker
Grace Notes in Context

Each part of the tapestry of life is the thread that weaves through the invisible. When the seams are knitted with love, all becomes manifest and whole in being.

— GCW, May 2013

The call came that late November from my sister, and there was an uncertainty and urgency in her voice. My brother Michael had been hospitalized. She suggested that I try to come back home to Maryland at the earliest time my schedule would allow.

Michael—a robust 5'10", 225-pound, brick-muscle gladiator, rugby player, Master Electrician, devoted father, and sometimes ornery brother—had never been sick or hospitalized for all the years I had known him. He was impenetrable about his positions and opinions, and it was Michael who taught me the meaning of indomitable will and courage as he fought to hold onto life after a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.

He survived for five months after that call. The night before he died, with his once-powerful body reduced to a frail 97 pounds, he bravely ushered in the finality of life with his signaling proclamation: “I’m outta here.”

In the words of his favorite song, My Way, Michael seemed to have found his own final refrain. He died as he lived—with purpose, self-discipline, conviction, and an insistence on remaining entirely himself.

Within the tapestry of life, we encounter the threads of experience that sew together the quality of the human being we ultimately clothe ourselves in as character.

When our family—and especially Michael’s children—remember him, etched into the fabric of his person are the intricate convictions of his values. Those impressions do not disappear with physical absence. They remain stitched into memory, inherited through example, repeated in stories, and carried quietly into the lives of those who knew and loved him.

We are all part of an ethereal tapestry woven through unknowns. To comprehend the magnificence of our personal brilliance, or even the reason for our presence, is to venture into the realm of infinite potentiality.

At birth we appear fragile and helpless, and nothing is more nurturing or life-giving than the security of a mother’s womb. Yet from the moment we arrive into our assumed identity, we begin building character and forming definitions of the image we eventually conceive as our own.

Family, traditions, rituals, education, society, adversity, faith, disappointment, achievement—all of these become part of the training ground of personality. Slowly, almost invisibly, we begin to demonstrate the values most deeply etched into our life experiences.

Stand for Something

One of Michael’s favorite ideologies, and one that came close to defining his entire persona, was: “Stand for something or you will fall for anything.”

He possessed a quality of noble conscience in the assertion of his own sense of manliness. When Michael took a stance, he could be inflexible, assertive, and immovable. You did not have to agree with him, but you always knew where he stood.

As we mature, the moments of challenge and disquiet often become the places where the deeper scripts of friendship, loyalty, integrity, honesty, fairness, justice, forgiveness, and compassion appear as counsel. These are not merely decorative words we place beneath inspirational photographs. They become the character definitions that guide and shepherd us through trial and tribulation, hope and despair, failure and personal redemption.

We are characters in the art of life, and we portray our roles through the personal scripts we write and inherit.

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.”

— William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII

Shakespeare’s observation characterizes something enduring about our mortal existence: the many stages of appearance, the roles we enter, the roles we leave, and the parts we perfect along the way.

Yet with all our entrances and exits, there is no illusion in memory.

The cloaks and garments that remain behind to warm hearts and wipe tears are stitched and threaded with reverenced emotions. The patches of each life’s tapestry are colored and fused with an invisible likeness of being. Character cannot be erased simply because a life has ended.

Our lives are stories of brilliance. From our unknown beginnings in the birthing passage to the fragility of our final exits, we remain carved into the gifts we give to others and the character we leave behind.

The Threads We Leave Behind

Integrity. Compassion. Humor. Empathy. Respect. Forgiveness. Sincerity. Courage. Fairness. Loyalty.

These are only some of the threads available to us. We choose them, practice them, abandon some, reclaim others, and eventually weave them into the character by which others come to know us.

Michael’s life left me with that question long after his voice had gone quiet. Perhaps it is one of the simplest questions we can ask ourselves, and yet one of the most demanding.

What do you stand for?

And when your part in this great tapestry is complete, what threads of character will remain woven into the lives of those who remember you?

— Grace Caroline Walker

Grace Notes in Context