Your Mental Wealth

I received a phone message from a friend the other day. He was preparing a talk and he asked me how I would define the word “AGENT”? Agent? Define Agent? That seemed to be a strange request, but knowing my friend, Dave (always expect the unexpected) it didn’t seem too farfetched. He has been known to ask stranger things.

I thought about my answer. Looking it up in the dictionary seemed like cheating, and I figured he could have done that for himself. I understood that he was asking for my opinion. So, following the old adage, “Seldom right, but never in doubt”, I plunged in to the process.

My thoughts? A good reputable agent is:

• Someone who knows you and who chooses to represent you (albeit for a fee).
• Someone who has access to resources, people and places you don’t.
• Someone who tries to make you look good to anyone to whom it is important that you look good.
• Someone who carries messages back from those same people, telling you what they want and need from you.
• Someone who has your back.
• Someone who ‘sells’ you, because they believe in you.
• Someone who inspires you, picking you up when you want to give up.
• Someone who can take the jumbled up parts of your life experiences and make sense of it to other people.

So, feeling quite good about how I just rattled those things off the top of my head, I left a message listing the above. I got a call back from him a bit later. He sounded a bit perplexed. My answers, he said, didn’t make a lot of sense. He wondered if I had misheard the question. He said “I asked you for your definition of an “ANGEL”. Whoops. Not the first time I have spent a lot of time answering a question that wasn’t asked.

I am not sure if it was my defensiveness or insight or a bit of both, but I thought to myself “You know, I am not sure that there is much difference”. Wouldn’t an Angel be an entity who knows and represents me, who has access to resources, people and places I don’t, tries to make me look good, carrying messages from a power greater than myself telling me what I need to know, who has my back, who believes in me, who is protective of me, inspires me, gives me courage to go on, and can take the ‘stuff‘ of my life and make sense of it…… Sounds like the same thing to me.

I was once told that Angels are those people, those moments, those places, those situations that at strategic times, when we most need it, come in to our lives and deliver a message, a gift, a teaching, or a lesson. Some stay a long time, perhaps forever, until we get it. Others, stay just for a far too brief moment in time (too brief, we think at the time). Some of the most profound “Angelic” moments I have experienced have not involved words. They have involved someone reaching out and taking hold of my hand when there were no words that could ease the pain of the moment, or a kiss on my forehead as they were leaving me in a place of great anguish and unremitting pain. Then, there are what I call dark angels. Those people who have been a part of my life, whose method of delivering the ‘lesson’ were through incredibly painful lesions. They were Angels, too, if I look back and see how they helped me grow.

I was reflecting the other day on the number of friends I have ‘lost’ over my life time. About the same time I found an article on some research that had been done that suggested that the average length of a friendship, from beginning to end, is about 7 years. It helped me put in to perspective that perhaps these ‘losses’ were merely the coming and going of ‘Angels”. I also wondered if the pain that I have felt in losing these friends was the cost of trying to hold on to that “Angel”, (taking hostages?) rather than accepting with grace and appreciation the gift of their presence for that finite period of time and then letting them go. They have others to teach. I have to make room for new teachers.

Angels and Agents. Not that much of a difference to me, Dave.