Tag: Writing a Book

What’s Your Happy Place?

I recently had cause to think back on some of the places in the world – my world – where I was most happy. Certainly, they were nearly all beautiful and peaceful. But not always. Some were surprisingly comfortable and comforting in unusual ways. I remember happy places where I felt most safe and most seen.

A box of lifejackets, for instance. Traveling as a teenager between Newfoundland and the mainland, I had barely been able to pay the fare for the trip let alone pay extra for sleeping accommodations.

Traveling “suiteless” meant you could end up sleeping on hard plastic theater seats on one end of the boat or the other. There was always the floor if my kit included a sleeping bag and a backpack I could fashion into a pillow. Sometimes I carried a pack but sometimes I didn’t.

To this day, I don’t remember how I discovered the box of life preservers. Natural curiosity I suppose. But I do remember looking into the sturdy grey-painted plywood box full of equally grey PFD’s (personal flotation devices) and having an Aha! moment. There were at least two feet of space between the cover and the lifejackets. I could fit in there. No sweat!

But I was civic-minded and afraid enough of the law to not open up and settle amongst the life preservers without “permission.” I took my idea to a kindly-looking purse nearby. I interpreted his first reaction to my request as not to fetch the law but maybe the whitecoats. Registering how young I was, he quickly softened and granted me “permission” to sleep in the life preserver box overnight.

He added – unnecessarily, I thought: “You’ll have to get out of the box right quick if da passengers need ’em.” The brogue was strong and to me, that meant he had that Newfoundlander born-in-the-bone sensibility about helping your fellow human beings. I slept the sleep of the just on the ferry crossing that night.

Other happy places were further afield in the world. In India, somewhere near New Delhi, I believe it was, a nice young Indian Sikh in a red turban took me to a temple at dusk. The setting sun was that magnificent red and orange and purple that defies description even in pictures. You can only fully appreciate it if you see it for yourself.

At a point, the Sikh raised his hands and clapped. A cacophony of budgerigars came flying out and swooping down from the rafters. They were every imaginable color that “budgies” could be. And there were thousands of them. Living outside. Free and magnificent.

They flew several thousands of meters away from the temple. They were like a light show or living rainbow that cackled in unison as budgies in captivity sometimes do. But these beautiful birds were not on a perch in a sad, little pet shop. Their beauty took me aback as did the young man’s ability to cause them to fly on command. Or so it seemed.

There was a particular stop on a Himalayan trek that has stayed deep within me. On a gorgeous morning with a postcard-clear blue sky, I stopped on my trek to put down my pack at a stone cairn to rest. When I turned around, the full majesty of Mt. Everest rose before me. Its apex was covered in snow being blown by high mountain winds. The peak was framed on either side by clusters of multi-colored flowers from the rhododendron forests it sat behind in the distance.

“Rhododendrons?” I wondered aloud. My mind clung to an image of small tidy bushes planted by the front steps that many Canadian gardeners cultivated. But these were in no way that. These were tall, towering trees heavy with blooms in red, white, and pink. My trek through the canopy of Rhodos was more special when I realized I would not likely see such magnificent trees as these anywhere else on the planet.

Other happy places I’ve been to have been smaller and more private. Snuggling beneath a down comforter or featherbed, preferably with a hot cup of tea and milk. Sitting down in the middle of a forest propped up against a stately old moss-covered tree, absorbing the cool and the woodland fragrance. Sitting in snow, carefully shielded from the cold, and breathing in the ir that froze the hairs in my nose.

Occasionally I have also found a deep level of peace and happiness in someone’s arms. This unique comfort generic to lovers is but one of a million reasons why coupling up is attractive. Just knowing there is another living, human being breathing beside you, ready to face the day with all of its potential joy and challenges is amazing.

So today I feel myself drifting off to another happy place. The ocean off Sri Lanka where schools of brightly colored aquatic fish and marine life swam before me in an endless pageant of color and shapes. Again, that vista offered the dual comforts of peace and beauty.

I never forget that I am beyond fortunate to have these happy places to revisit. I was very fortunate to have visited them in the first place.

And I am also very happy for the chance to go back into my memories whenever I want to relive them again when I want to. Like now, for example…

Second Chances

In the past and a little bit recently, I have sometimes wanted to flush my life down the wormhole and start over. That is not such an unusual thought. We all long for second chances.

When I think back on errors of judgment on my part, I try to imagine what my headspace was at the time. Me and my best bud Anxiety have been to a lot of dark places together. And I mean, a lot. There wasn’t a picture-perfect situation I couldn’t screw up with my negative self-talk. A lovely wedding? “Oh, I’ll never find a husband that will put up with me.”

It was madness, of course, and the lamentations of a girl with pitifully low self-esteem. But I also realized it was a type of control mechanism. If I controlled the narrative of negative self-talk, then I wouldn’t be blindsided or taken advantage of. How I connected the two I have yet to articulate but it went like that.

I took a certain perverse pride in the boards and committees I sat on when I was younger. I would take issue with an issue we were wrestling with. I would bring all of the negatives to the attention of my colleagues. I got off on their perplexed and concerned faces giving serious attention to my opinion.

(That was lame of me – very, very young – but I also think it is not an uncommon element of modern boards and committees. There’s always one whiny “that guy.”)

So as I face another anxiety-producing situation in the present, I weigh my options as I have trained myself to do. I am checking my self-talk. I am checking my emotions. They run from anger to sadness to anxiety (Hey, hi there, old buddy!) to shame. I am ashamed to have let someone pull something over on me.

It triggers all of those feelings of powerlessness that I had in childhood. I had no agency to make bad things stop happening or to make good things happen. It also didn’t stop me from trying.

I remember I made a lot of penuche fudge. That is a brown sugar fudge for the non-fudge inamorato out there. It is a diabetes delivery method in a one-inch square.

But when the caregivers were absent and dinner was hours or days away, I could make penuche. I pulled the ingredients out of the pantry. I pulled the pot out of the cupboard and put it on the stove. At nine years old, I was a fudge-making diva.

The negative self-talk became a total buzzkill as I got older. I came to read about or recognize the classic overthinking of an adult child. Having not been brought up in a stable home environment, overthinking was a form of self-protection. Somewhat akin to planning a number of escape routes in a house in the event of a fire. Forewarned is forearmed and all that.

Just now, we are about to learn whether someone made an honest mistake that they will make good on or we were deliberately misled and duped. For an adult child and trauma survivor, that is pretty much a worst-case scenario. It was the trust and vulnerability I had as a child that led to physical and emotional pain in the first place.

So today I am in self-observation mode. How I am going to handle it this time? Will my hurt and betrayal be addressed? Or will this be another loss I have to accept and grieve? I have done that before.

I do know that if I let enough time go by and fill the picture in with pleasantries and feel sorry for the transgressor, my mood will bounce back to normal.

So one of my responses to anxiety has been routinization to some degree. We all need some of that, too. Especially in times of change and upheaval – a state I am currently in.

So I will smush together all the accumulated wisdom for managing stress and negativity that I have learned in my life. Meditation, exercise, pranic breathing, and patience as I await the results of how the flagged issue will be handled.

As it turns out, there is not another blessed thing – beyond self-care – that I can do in aid of controlling the outcome. The ball, as they say, is in somebody else’s court.

The secret of navigating this difficult issue is to stop reacting to an outcome that has not yet been decided and is out of my hands anyway. That will have to do for now.

Desiderata

Latin for “things desired.” A friend gave me a copy of this poem when I was a teenager. It still hangs on my wall.

Written by attorney and poet Max Ehrmann in 1927, he copyrighted it and then dissolved his copyright claim by distributing copies of it for free. Which likely contributed to its wide use and celebrity.

The forty-six-line poem is a commentary on how to approach day-to-day life. This includes how to keep what’s important front of mind and balance one’s career, inner peace, and aspirations. While also striving to be a good person in a world that doesn’t always treat you fairly. 

“It reminds us to treat others kindly, to accept who they are, and to be gentle with ourselves. Ehrmann also motivates us to have faith in ourselves and to develop trust in the way things unfold. Doing so will help us to find peace in our souls and to discover meaning in our existence. http://www.planetofsuccess.com/blog/desiderata-poem/

What I love in particular about such thoughtful utterings is the universality of their message. They seem to come around in our lives again and again when we most need them. Like scripture maybe. Or writing on the subway walls.

Desiderata

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be.

And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

Max Ehrmann, Desiderata, 1927

Love Takes Time

A spiritual author and writer I follow reminded me today that things take time. I sometimes forget that. A counselor once said to me: “It took 25 years for you to get messed up. You can’t expect to undo that mess overnight.” Understatement of the century.

First, we have to recognize what is wrong. With us. With our environment. With how we were raised. That takes time to parse out. What is wrong with us usually manifests in unwelcome or uncomfortable feelings. Too anxious. Too scared. Too jumpy. Too intense. Some form of “too” that somehow doesn’t seem “normal.”

Dozens of jokes are made about “normalcy.” It is laughed at and derided. Unachievable say others. It is a definition that seeks to make us humans seem or be “all the same.” As if that were even possible. We all live life in our own way. We all learn how to love in our own unique way, too.

But when we feel too much inappropriately, it can hold us back from fully feeling the very emotions we want to express. Joy and love and peace. I remember a horrible feeling I had as a little girl. I would pick up a puppy and want to “love it” so much I was afraid I would crush it in my arms.

So I would look at it stupidly trying to mentally convey to it how much joy it brought me. I was paralyzed. That was weird but later I learned not so unusual when feeling big emotions. Remember the wild rush and uncontrollability of emotions around a “certain someone” when you first fell in love.

You stammered a little in trying to talk to them. If, in fact, you could even summon the courage to talk to them. You would blush like fury when they caught your gaze. Your stomach would turn over with butterflies so manic it would take you to the point of discomfort. If this was “love,” it felt like it was more trouble than it was worth.

And if that wasn’t enough distraction, in would wander unhelpful self-talk. “S/he is a dreamboat. I could never speak to her/him. S/he would never give me the time of day. S/he is much too good for me.” Talk about romance buzzkill.

Rockstar Tal Bachman – son of rock band BTO’s Randy Bachman – summed it up pretty well in his 1999 hit: She’s So High. Bachman’s lyrics play out entirely in his head as she idlizes the object of his affections with hyperbolic comparisons to Joan of Arc and Cleopatra and even, the Greek goddess of beauty, Aphrodite. When she wanders over to talk to him, he silently screams: “I freeze immediately.”

Roy Orbison’s Pretty Woman – arguably one of the best all-time country and western love songs ever written or performed – has a similar theme. He is convinced the gorgeous woman he sees walking by will have nothing to do with him. It turns out he is wrong.

Most of these love and acceptance and belonging neuroses are afflictions of the young. But not always. I remember a colleague of a certain age uttering breathlessly how much more he loved his wife and childhood sweetheart now than he did when they first met. That buckled me.

So I am reflecting on time as my awareness grows of how long it took me to learn to love in a mature and healthy way. I was given an inadequate deck of cards with which to play the game of love. It took hard lessons to finally make my way to a place where it feeds my soul daily.

Not in a noisy, “take out an ad,” “plaster his name on a billboard” kind of way. It is quieter and deeper. I long to be where he is. I touch him at night just to feel his heat and energy. I am awash in tenderness whenever I look in and see the kindness and wisdom in those deep, blue eyes.

Then behold. I sense he is feeling the same for me. Changing from what was and who you were into something you want to be is not easy. It takes time. They say it is the journey that is most important, not necessarily the destination.

I would alter that only in this regard. When you arrive at the destination of your beloved, you can set off on another journey but together. That is the loveliest place of all to land.

A Man Called Otto

Tom Hanks as a crabby old man? Whoddathunkit?

We frequently register ourselves as getting older by watching others. It is both a kindness and a shock to see people you grew up watching suddenly inhabiting roles that you imagined only your parents’ peers could fill.

I remember Tom Hanks in Big. His big film debut was back in 1988. He played a goofy kid with a sweet manner and exposed a big talent.

Hanks has proved his mettle over the years in many delightful and provocative roles. Hanks has chosen his projects well. He has mostly played the good guy in the movie roles he has starred in.

He didn’t shy away from challenging roles either. As Captain Phillips, Hanks skilfully played the role of managing a pirate takeover of his craft and everyone was safely delivered.

The enduring genius of Forrest Gump comes to mind, too. He played the role of an intellectually challenged young man to perfection. The Academy agreed with me. Forrest Gump won eight Oscars including as the Best Actor in a Leading Role for Hanks.

Tom Hanks movies seem ubiquitous. In Castaway, he carried a whole film with only a soccer ball as a co-star. In Catch Me if You Can, he played a tenacious FBI agent in hot pursuit of young conman Frank Abagnale, memorably played by Leonardo Dicaprio.

Other roles Hanks played have stuck in my memory. Saving Private Ryan. The Green Mile. His performance with Mark Rylance in Bridge of Spies was pure onscreen alchemy.

Clint Eastwood is older now, too. Gone is the tough-talking police inspector of Dirty Harry fame. He now plays the crusty but caring curmudgeon to perfection in a slew of age-appropriate roles.

I watch them all aging. I realize that I am aging right along with them. Tom Hanks is the boyfriend/husband I never had. Clint Eastwood might have been a great-uncle had we lived in California and had anything at all to do with the film industry.

And then there is the recent “old Dad” phenomenon with icons Bob DeNiro and Al Pacino fathering children in their eighties. It seems they are as productive in their dotage as they were in their film careers. How did they get so old so fast?

There is one important throughline to see in watching these men from afar. They keep going. They have done and do good work. They have dignity and accomplishments. And, in a couple of cases, they have diaper duty.

Every role these giants take on is like seeing them anew and reflects the talent that landed them where they are in life. It is also a reminder that time is passing for them just like me and my peers.

A Man Called Otto tells the tale of a man determined to die by his own hand after his beloved wife dies. But new neighbors and the insistence of life keep hauling him back into the present and offer him new reasons for living.

The message in this bittersweet film seems to be that even though we may lose important things in our life – even our dearest loved ones – life still goes on and still calls to us. Love is always available out there in the world.

If we but look and listen…

Imploding

I both love and hate confrontation.

I love it because I am standing up for myself.

I hate it because it makes me feel uncomfortable things I don’t normally feel and don’t want to feel. It is an area of life in which I require considerably more finessing.

I am accustomed to deceit and trickery in social relations, and most frequently in family relations. Whether members of my family practiced deceit and trickery deliberately is almost beside the point. I remember the sickening sloshing about of unwelcome emotions in me as I stumbled upon one sad realization after another.

In many confrontations, I always hold out hope that I am about to discover someone made an “honest mistake.” For this mistake, they would rush in rapidly to own up and correct it. That’s funny, not funny.

If the transgressor’s intention was benign, they would have thought through and been aware of how their actions were going to hurt and undermine you. If their intentions were honorable and honest, they would not have let it happen in the first place.

When my father died, I repeatedly encountered this. My youngest sister was the sole executor. She had a “fiduciary” duty to treat her sisters – the two other beneficiaries – with an even hand. I knew what was going to happen from the minute I heard that Dad chose her as his representative.

She had treated me with disdain and disrespect for the previous 30 years. She hid this fact from my father. When he asked about our relationship, she lied to him and presented us as “best buds.” Her lying and deceit didn’t end there.

As the estate inexorably made its way through the legal system in a protracted start-stop process over the next 13 years, my sister made sure she profited handily from the arrangement. She loaned herself money from the estate while denying the same privilege to my sister and me.

She seconded all of my father’s personal effects without offering to share or allow access to select favored items for ourselves. Not even items that we had given Dad as gifts. She lied blithely to the estate attorney, the judges, and to me.

Any of my attempts at asking for parity or “fair dealing” were treated like so much dust and air. Even the most inconsequential of items – Dad’s old computer or special furnishings like a wooden coat rack – were withheld in the same manner as Aesop’s fable about the dog in the manger who hoarded hay he couldn’t eat.

In campaigning to become Dad’s executor in the years leading up to his death, she presented him with a special book as a Christmas gift: You Can’t Take It With You. It carefully detailed all of the horrors that could ensue without a proper estate plan and the “right” representative in place. Perhaps I see that more cynically than others might.

As it turned out, she disappeared on a Caribbean vacation in the days leading up to his death. She could not be reached by anyone for four days after he died. She swears she put her contact numbers on a Post-It note on her computer screen. It seems she forgot to tell anyone.

She left my father’s law books in a place where they went moldy and had to be trashed. She put all of his office furniture into a dumpster refusing all pleas from me to hold them. The buyers of the business building said they would happily have held on to those items for me “had they but known.” Having lost their parents themselves, they knew the sentimental value of the items my sister got rid of.

There were many confrontations in the aftermath of my father’s death. Mostly useless. The courts and society treat power with the same even hand. In spite of the evidence, no one would call out my sister for her shifty management of Dad’s funds and property.

I did learn one thing from that sad situation. In the end, Dad’s things didn’t really matter all that much. I grieved them and got over it. Less clutter to deal with.

It was the deeper wounds of treachery, deceit, and cruelty that hurt and caused the most longlasting damage. Mostly, the dissolution of any future facade of family. Permanent estrangement from both sisters was the final consequence. That is not said with bitterness but sadness. It was a preventable tragedy.

I had to walk away for my own self-protection and the preservation of my mental health. When I hear the stories of pettiness and fighting that still goes on among them, I sigh with relief. I no longer want to live or choose to live like that. Hurt people hurt people they say.

I also walked away with certainty about one thing. Whatever else underpinned the cruelty, deceitfulness, envy, and greed in the family situation, it was not solely my fault as my youngest sister was desperate to believe.

It is sad when families learn – like the stranded crew on Apollo 13 who struggled to maintain their cool in a life threatening situation – that after any degree of the fighting and conflict, we end up back in the same place. It is well to remember that in the aftermath of such conflict, our relationships might not make it intact.

Wells From Which We Spring, Pt. 2

When Grace and Scott realized their marriage would not be blessed with children, they had little choice but to muddle through. In those days, any magnitude of domestic betrayal would not deep-six a marriage. Not socially or legally at any rate. 

Happenstance would step up to deliver them a child. A blood relation but not of their mixed bloodlines, however.

In 1930, in the capital city of New Brunswick about an hour away from Grace and Scott’s country farmhouse, young Jacqueline was still reeling from the recent news of her father’s untimely death. 

Frank Webster had been a cook at sea. One night in a savage and malevolent storm, Jacqueline’s father and all hands on board drowned when their small fishing boat was overwhelmed by a rogue wave. Jacqueline was only eight years old.

Her mother, Lillian – now widowed – simply couldn’t cope with raising three young children in the aftermath of this tragedy. The famil breadwinner was gone and with him her social status as a respectable married lady. 

Lillian took to her bed in what we might now describe as nervous shock. In dire straits, she polled relations and the community for temporary housing and help with her three young children. Montclair James was a couple of years older than Jacqueline. Scott, her little brother, was a couple of years younger. 

Scott fared well. He was placed with a benevolent family who treated him as a part of the family and with love and kindness. Montclair James did not fare as well. He landed in a cruel and demanding family whose only real interest in the boy was the labor he contributed. The beatings and cruelty he endured in that home would play out across his life for the rest of his life. 

When young Jacqueline learned who had stepped up to take her in, she felt she had won the lottery. She was placed with Aunt Grace and Uncle Scott at their farm in Nashwaak Bridge. Into her nineties, she sang their praises as “perfect parents.” 

Returning to live with her natural mother at 13 to attend Normal School (what high school was called then) registered as another loss of beloved people to whom she was deeply attached.

Divorce would have been out of the question for Grace and Scott. Marriage was one of the few certain routes to respectability for young country women. Their worth was usually measured by their ability to create a family. So much so in a rural community that it was not unusual for pre-marital pregnancy to be covertly encouraged to ensure the prospective bride was fertile. 

Grace never had that option. What happened when in her particular tragedy is not at all clear, of course, and like most stories, we are only left with the consequences. 

Young Jacqueline believed she was steeped in Grace’s love and undying devotion as a young girl. It is more likely Jacqueline was doted upon with great urgency by a devastated young wife, devoid of options to extricate herself from a disappointing and unsatisfactory marriage. 

Grace developed a razor-sharp tongue. She exercised it indiscriminately in cutting stories about all the locals that fell out of her favor with her. Given her own losses and betrayal, her anger and bitterness weren’t surprising. An evening’s entertainment would consist of putting down all and sundry and laughing uproariously.

It imbued young Jacqueline with a rather lopsided view of herself and the world. She lauded the McPhersons as somehow superior and above all others in the community. It was an unfortunate perception that isolated young Jacqueline from her birth mother, herself, and some of her children for the rest of her life. 

Wells From Which We Spring, Pt. 1

Grace Smith came from a small Canadian town near the border between Canada and the US. The Canadian province of New Brunswick and the American state of Maine, to be clear. Grace was born in 1900. Her life and Canada’s were at the same starting gate of sweeping social change brought on by the industrial age.

As did most young girls of her era, young Grace anticipated entering a marriage and having a family of her own when she grew up. Several hours away in Nashwaak Bridge, NB, Scott McPherson was born somewhere in the middle of a passel of Scottish immigrant descendant kids – eight in total. He had older brothers and sisters. Younger ones, too.

The original McPherson clan were retired Scottish military who were given land grants along the Nashwaak River in the late 1700s as a pension for their service. By the early 1900s, most of the McPherson military cachet had worn off. The family mostly made its way through farming and supplemental seasonal work.

It was clear from early on in his life that young Scott would follow in the family logging tradition to earn his keep and make his way. When and where he met young Grace Smith is unclear. But it is pretty safe to assume it was at a church-related function.

For girls and boys in rural New Brunswick just after the turn of the twentieth century, opportunities for social intercourse were strictly contained and chaperoned. Young Grace and Scott probably met up at a Saturday night or Sunday afternoon social.

The girls would have brought baskets full of homemade baked goods as their offerings to the refreshments table. Each food offering was clearly marked so all and sundry would know who had prepared what and how well. The boys had likely washed their hands and hair and even put on a clean shirt for the occasion.

Whatever young Grace Smith was offering, young Scott McPherson took a liking to. Their courtship was focussed and brief. A wedding and casting off into married life ensued pretty quickly.

All and sundry waited patiently – as was the tradition – for news of a blessed event that would herald the start of this new branch of the McPherson family tree. For an unseemly number of years, everyone waited in vain.

Grace and Scott lived through the Great Depression in the early days of their marriage. Scott worked seasonally and with little enthusiasm. Country people generally fared better than city folk in those dark ten years. At least on a farm, there were cows for milk and meat, and chickens for eggs. The bread was homemade and a yeast cake cost four cents. Sweet baked goods were part of the daily fare.

It turned out the delay and eventual abandonment of hoping for that “blessed event” were based on a medical condition. The condition was not that Grace was barren.

Scott’s shiftlessness did not apply to what they called “the pretty ladies” where he was reportedly quite industrious. He was a great flirt and quick with a story and a laugh. Good-looking and well-built, he apparently had a stable of young farm wives and ladies of lesser social standing who were happy to share their baked and other homely goods.

The ultimate outcome, however, neither he nor Grace wanted nor could have they easily foreseen. Scott contracted a venereal disease. He passed it to Grace. Scott’s dalliances and the disease he had caught passed to Grace and rendered her sterile. It is hard to imagine that it was all hearts and flowers in the McPherson marriage.

It is hard to impossible in our modern era to imagine the obstacles young Grace was up against as a young married woman in a rural conservative community. First, she would only have had access to rudimentary medicine. Her life and Scott’s were spared by whatever treatment methods were available at the time. Their potential future progeny were not.

TO BE CONTINUED …

Enough Already

When is enough? I have asked the question before. When do we know we have done enough in aid of what we are trying to achieve in life?

Periodically in life, it is of value to do some stock-taking. An inventory, if you will, of what we have and don’t have. Materially, emotionally, and physically. What we still want and don’t have. What’s good about our life and what has to go.

Life can be marked by patches of plenty and want. The sages out there say that. we increase our chances of getting what we want by being grateful for what we have right now. I have found that this works. Or at the very least, it can relieve the negativity of a situation we’re struggling in.

I believe most of us can live comfortably on quite a bit less than advertisers and social expectations would have us believe. Envy and greed are all too human vulnerabilities that are easily exploited.

If every comfort we seek is outside of us, we have no time to just be alone and luxuriate in our own thoughts. I have found that times of external scarcity were my greatest teachers. I was often terrified as I could not imagine my external circumstances would ever change.

And yet they did. It was true that when one door closed, another opened. It finally became obvious that I was not totally in charge of my ultimate path or destination. We can pursue and wish deeply for what we want in our lives. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t.

It is what we do with the bare patches in life that shape us the most.

I was a world traveler who sought out the cheapest ways of getting around. I carried only a backpack and valuables in a fanny pack or neck wallet. I was a camping buff as a young adult.

Distilling life down to its barest elements of food, water, warmth, and shelter was clarifying, in a way. It was good to be reminded how little we needed when living like that. We learned – if worse came to worse – we could chuck city trappings and survive on little more than our wits, a canteen of fresh water, and a couple of cans of beans. Or the French equivalent was a baguette, cheese, and a cheap bottle of red wine.

By living poor, I also learned a lot about grace. I once trekked in the Himalayas in Nepal. One afternoon, I went to lie down and set up camp by a small building in a village. A young girl of about 14 years old and some friends came by to watch what I was doing.

When she realized I was planning to sleep there in the open that night, she panicked. “No sleeping, no sleeping,” she said frantically while motioning across her neck with her thumb. “Man come… killing.” That night, I was happy to crawl into my sleeping bag laid out on the dirt floor of her parents’ small village hut.

The next morning I was served the most delicious eggs I ever had that had been cooked in a black bottom pan over an open fire pit in the middle of the hut. That memory has stayed with me. It is a story of how my life may have been saved out of the blue by a caring little girl. The other lesson I came away with was how rich their life seemed to be in one of the poorest places on earth.

I am currently stock-taking. As we prepare to move to a new house, I look around this house to see what needs to go with us to the new one. There is so much that will be left behind. Deliberately.

It feels odd to be at the place where we are ready to offload the possessions we have spent a lifetime accumulating. It does seem that is the way it goes. A less cluttered house – we hope – will allow for more living and creating. Me with my words and my husband at his easel.

I admire and I’m a little envious of those sage souls who know from very early on what they want to be and how they will live their life. It is a special kind of blessing. My life has been more of a trial-and-error experience. It has led me down various side roads and byways. It took many years of experiments to arrive at a place where life works for us.

Perhaps, put differently, we learn to be at peace with what is and accept what we have with gratitude and grace. I don’t waste too much time these days unpacking the hows and whys of the journey I took to get here. I feel profoundly lucky that I did.

Artistic Long Game

“The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”​—Glenn Gould, Concert Pianist

This quote says so much about what I believe. An artistic path is not necessarily the most financially lucrative pursuit. There has to be something else in it that makes people pursue their art. Or else not many people would pursue art in spite of painfully thin paychecks.

People usually start out in life with vague hopes and dreams. Finding out what they are and manifesting those hopes and dreams is a major preoccupation of young people. Along with learning the basics of what it means to be good citizens, young people set out to fill up their quiver of basic marketable skills.

I silently smirk when I see misleading ads promising would-be writers how to acquire the required skills to make thousands and thousands of dollars a year as a freelance writer. The so-called skills they are touting are misleading, to say the least.

Writing success is an alchemy of talent, opportunity, luck, and mostly hard work. But mostly it is stick-to-it-ism. Writers write. Every aspiring writer knows the sober adage to “put their bum in the seat” and stare down the blank page.

I am bemused by scads of advice currently circulating about developing your voice, setting tone in stories, and developing characters and plots. I have been in the writing business my whole life. I had never seen it treated as much like a “business” as it is today.

Writing was historically generated by people with a basic talent for writing. Producing copy for stories or novels or articles was a type of alchemy. The story was the thing. With the right storyline in the right context with great quotes and color commentary on where the story was based, under the skilled attention of a gifted writer, voila! a decent story would be born.

There was a hierarchy in the newsroom I worked in. We knew who the steady and reliable producers were. They could be counted on to bang out stories on cue and as needed.

Along with those steady producers were writers of varying talents with varying dependability. But if they had won jobs in a newsroom, you could at least assume they knew how to write.

Writing as art evolves. In my experience, the art of writing emerges when an individual begins to develop and use their own voice. So much writing is formulaic. It isn’t hard to teach someone how to write according to the standard inverse triangle required for newspaper articles. Broadcasting copy whether for TV or radio was much the same. Learn the formula and you can do the job.

Creative writing is another avocation. There is something that develops inside an individual when they dig deep to manifest the stories and insights they harbor inside their hearts and minds. It requires insight and curiosity and the ability to ask questions that needed to be asked. This is harder to define but most people recognize superior writing when they see it.

This can take a lifetime of repeated practice by working at their craft. As time passes and the craft is further developed, good writers start to abandon hyperbole. Clear writing is a result of clear thinking. And clear thinking comes from refining and exposing the essence of the stories writers want to tell.

Ernest Hemingway nailed this. His writing was delivered in short, staccato-like sentences that could sum up the beauty or ugliness of a situation in a few concise words. Hemingway started as a journalist and that style ultimately defined his novel writing style.

I have often been bemused by my own writing journey. After a few short years in a newspaper newsroom, I went to university. My first year of university generated many comments from professors about my “choppy, journalistic” writing style.

So I learned about “padding” in university. I would add as many high-sounding, convoluted words as possible to make my academic essays sound profound and knowledgeable. Mostly my essays were simply full of “fat writing.” Why say in ten words – the academic attitude seemed to be – what you can just as easily say in forty-five? No wonder academia is recognized as a game.

Success in academia was mostly guaranteed by the degree to which you could parrot exactly what the professor had doled out in lectures. Original thought and ideas were not as encouraged as one might think in the hallowed halls of education. Conformity was the bigger goal, not originality. Who were we to question the geniuses we were studying?

So I was happy to be reminded by Glenn Gould’s quote that pursuing an artistic path is a path to cultivating peace and serenity and wonder. It is a lifelong pursuit. It is also a very individual one.