Mother's Day

(m)Other's Da(y): family component and conundrum: the mother is the original other, the One broken away from or merged into, that gives birth and devours. Herakles wrestles Antaios one of the sons of Gaia, the earth, defeating him by lifting him off the ground, the mother, from where his strength originated. Hence we are enjoined by our mothers to be grounded, as if that would ward off our Herculean defeats. We are eventually defeated by time and death subsumes us back into our earth mother. Heidegger points out (which I'm getting from reading Placher's book, Narratives of a Vulnerable God - a wonderful exposition of where things now stand theologically, with a wonderful chapter on Heidegger) that To Be authentic we have to come to terms with the limits on our time, that we always have less, and live in such a way that we claim our decisions as our own.
And here I quote from Placher, p 34.
"To exist authentically (with respect to the future) means facing the fact that you are going to die, not in the sense of worrying about the pain of dying, but acknowledging the finitude of life. Every moment means that much less time left; temporal finitude is a basic fact of human existence. With respect to the past it means acknowledging however much I may have been "thrown" into it, the past that lies behind me is my past, and taking responsibility for it. Therefore with respect to the present authentic existence means among other things knowing that decisions really matter, because they are irreversible and always involve further limits on a finite future, and accepting one's responsibility for those decisions. To go to law school is [for example] for many an undergraduate to decide not[sic] to go to graduate school straight out of college--returning to graduate school at the age of thirty being a very different option -- and thereby to end up having become a very different person. So it is with all our decisions and their consequences.
"To exist inauthentically is to hide from all this. The inevitable human reality of death recedes from the mind. One accepts the roles proposed by others. "My parents said to go to law school. My adviser said I'd do well there. I even won a scholarship. Lots of my friends are going to law school." Somehow the decision never gets claimed as one's own, one never faces the momentous consequences of such a choice in a finite existence, and one's existence results in a kind of blending in with one's social surroundings. One gets dragged along, one loses oneself, one flees in the face of oneself. "

I'm finding all this very stimulating and very helpful as I begin therapy with a new counselor here in Durham. I am trying to read and understand Heidegger, and I appreciate Placher's chapter helping me gain insight into him.
The problem with reality is just this. It is not so simple to "live" it, taking action. Action must be informed, and the success of actions are not always a good marker to the authenticity of those actions. The person in the above paragraph who went to law school - dragged along half conscious, might turn out quite successful - still having lived inauthentically.
The question is. What have we done with our lives? How conscious were we that we lived our lives? And we can never get time back. I look back on my 20s and 30s only too aware where I wasted time and suffered damage to my soul. Or where I moved along almost asleep.
Now I can only attempt to be more conscious of my life as I am 2 years away from 50 this July. What is it to be authentic with my wife, my friends, my church, my family? What is it to be authentic in my art? I've struggled with this my whole life.
And I understand "authentic" not as something tied to my emotional state, but as I think Heidegger employs it, to describe the process of acting and being in my decisions as I make them in time, making them while realizing that those decisions have limits.
50 is a big year for me, as it is the limit of my mom's life. Standing where I am now, at 47 and 10 months, I can't believe that that was all she had. Make the argument about Mozart and Keats having 35 and 20, but they would have preferred to have more. In the billions of years of our universe's existence, what are we? And yet we spend our time wasting time on war, on vengeance, on acquisition, on burying ourselves in work, on hoarding, on worry and anxiety. In the blink of an eye, humanity could exist no more, and the silence of the universe would swallow up our remaining sound, the artifacts of our presence. All we have in our power to be is to be ourselves as authentically as possible. We cannot please others or live as others would suppose us to live - or as we might suppose they would be pleased with us living. What has value for the remaining years of life? Insurance companies and brokerages all want to sell us something, some simulacrum of security, but such things are rendered doubtful in the state of the current market. Even if the false god of "market forces" could provide some secured income, the question of authenticity is still out there.
In 1 Peter 3:14, the writer says in the NRSV "do not fear what they [the nations] fear." This resonates with Paul's admonition to the Thessalonnians that we do not mourn as those who have no hope. What kind of church would model this? What would such a model look like?
The message of the Church is that we move toward a goal, following a messiah who has conquered death and paved a way through it, so that we may be authentic people; and that we don't reach this in our individual strength or apart from our fellow believers, but that we are connected in love.