This is the last book read in 2023 and by change in the same subject as the first one of the year: Death. Actually, it is more about living than dying, because when we learn more about dying, we value and savor our lives and live better. As the author beautifully points out: “Death is not waiting for us at the end of a long road. Death is always with us, in the marrow of every passing moment. She is the secret teacher hiding in plain sight. She helps us to discover what matters most. And the good news is we don’t have to wait until the end of our lives to realize the wisdom that death has to offer.”

Let’s now see more about the book The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully.

This post is part of the series Learnings from books where my goal is to share what I learned from the book that I read. It is a mixture of review and summary with a bit of my opinion and point of view. But, as reviews, these learnings can say more about me than the book itself, so I trust that you the smart reader will take it with a grain of salt.

Learnings from The Five Invitations

The goal of the book with the invitations is to invite the reader to participate actively in their event of life, invite the reader to really be present in every aspect of their own life. As the author mentions, it can help you live a life of integrity and cope with death.

The book is full of learnings, but to not be a too-long post, I will share the 5 most important learnings from the book.

avoid the hope that is disguised as expectation

Hope is an essential resource for our lives. Hope acts as the driving force that propels us out of bed each morning, ready to embrace the potentialities of a fresh day. It helps us believe in a future that is good despite all the challenges and setbacks.

This is a good kind of hope, the belief that things will get better.

But as the author points out, this is not the kind of hope we usually have, our hope is more similar to wishful thinking, a rejection of the current situation, and a belief in a specific outcome.

As said by the author: “Ordinary hope disguised as expectation is fixated on a specific outcome. This hope gets conflated with the desire for a certain future result. It becomes object-focused. It takes us outside of ourselves. The quandary is that when the outcome isn’t achieved, the object isn’t grasped, then our hopes are dashed. Attaching our happiness to a specific outcome causes us all sorts of suffering. To manage that distress, we attempt to control everything that is happening around us. But we have no control over the weather on our wedding day, the moods of others, winning the lottery, or even receiving a cancer diagnosis. As we have seen, the law of impermanence trumps our best-laid plans. In the ever-changing landscape of our lives, attachment to outcome posing as hope only generates anxiety and interferes with our ability to be present to our experience of life as it is unfolding in this very moment.”

dying is messy / there’s no “good death”

We often like to believe in the idea that something like a “good death” exists. We hold onto the optimistic hope that when people die, everything will be neatly resolved, and they will be completely at peace.

But as the book points out, that rarely happens and the sort of expectation even puts the dying in the family under pressure.

As the book mentions: “Dying is messy. People who are dying often leave skid marks, dragging their heels as they go. Some people turn away from others and never look back. For many, the habits of a lifetime go unquestioned, and they fight fearfully to keep those habits in place. For others, their fight is like a badge of honor; they want to go down swinging. Very few people walk toward the immense challenge of dying and find peace and beauty there. But who are we to say how another should die?”

forgiveness is for the forgiver

We usually think that when we forgive someone, we are doing it for them, but that is not actually the case for most of us. When we forgive, we set down old pain, and it helps open us to love.

Forgiveness does not mean forgetting, that everything is back to normal, or even that we should welcome people back into our lives, it just means that that old thing does not have a hold on us anymore.

As this piece from the book beautifully says: “All forgiveness is self-forgiveness. It is a remarkable form of self-acceptance that allows us to release unbelievable pain. It’s about realizing that as long as you hold on to the hot coal of your anger, resentment, and sense of having been wronged, you are only hurting yourself. Unless you release that burden, you will carry it with you for the rest of your life. You will never be free. Don’t wait. Don’t wait until you find yourself on your deathbed to begin the process of forgiving those who have hurt you or those you have wronged. Allow the fragile nature of life to show you what’s most important… then take action. It hurts too much to keep others or ourselves out of our hearts.”

we are not our roles

Identity is also a very common subject in my recent books. When we attach our identity to our roles (“software engineer” for example) it defines us, confines us, limits us.

“We are not our roles, and we are not our conditions. You may have cancer or bipolar disorder, but you are not your disease. You may be born into wealth or poverty, but you are not rich or poor. You may find yourself happy or sad, old or young, in supportive conditions or in conditions of despair, but you are not these things. We are first and foremost human beings, with all of the complexity, fragility, and wonder that life encompasses. When we only look through the lens of a role, it narrows our vision of the world. We don’t see things and people as they actually are, but rather project our story onto them.”

suffering is part of life

Suffering is part of life. Instead of running away from the suffering, we should strive to face it and look deeper to see what is really there.

“When we allow the experience — creating space and acceptance for it — we find that our suffering is not a static, monolithic thing, but rather it is composed of many elements, including our attitudes toward it. Understanding this, we can work skillfully to alleviate the underlying reactions that exacerbate our problems so that we might ease our suffering.”

Favorite quotes

These are my 5 favorite quotes from the book.

  • “It is the impermanence of life that gives us perspective.”
  • “Listening without judgment is probably the simplest, most profound way to connect. It is an act of love.”
  • “We don’t get past our pain. We go through it and are transformed by it.”
  • “Clinging to the old makes it difficult for something new to emerge.”
  • “The willingness to sit with fear is an act of courage.”

Other resources

This section is extra and here I compliment the post with content from other sources that resonate with the book.

These are my learnings from the book The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully written by Frank Ostaseski. A special thanks to Vancouver Public Library (VPL) for allowing access to the book for free.

Happy reading!