” ‘If you’re not dead yet, you’re not done yet.’ This is a line my mother said to me the other day, while she was issuing a gentle warning not to fall into the trap of letting your life get smaller as you get older…No. She begs to differ. As you get older, there is no more time to be careful, and no more REASON to be careful…this is the time to seize as much life and joy and adventure and learning and novelty as you possibly can…”  — Elizabeth Gilbert

A couple of years ago, having just entered my 50s, I was speaking with a colleague at work about my plans to make a change in my life and career. She said, “We’re the same age, aren’t we? And you still have this desire to change? At this point in life, I just want to make it through the days without too much thought.”

I remember, in my hubris, feeling sorry for her. After all, 50 was the new 30 – everyone was saying it. And I was feeling…not young, exactly, but an internal urgency that masqueraded as youthful energy. So I went off on my quest to change my life, and a lot of things happened.

Did you learn the tale of Icarus when you were younger? Icarus and his father, Daedalus, attempted to escape captivity on the island of Crete by flying away on wings Daedalus had constructed of feathers and beeswax. He warned his son, Icarus, not to fly too high, or the heat of the sun would melt the wax holding his wings together. But Icarus, in his pride at his father’s invention and his new ability to fly, did not heed the warning. As he flew closer and closer to the sun, the wax on his wings melted, causing the feathers to drift away. Soon, Icarus realized he was flapping his bare arms, and plunged into the sea.

This tale was used to teach us about “hubris”, to the ancient Greeks meaning excessive pride toward or defiance of the gods. These days, without the gods to blame for everything, we think of it as the arrogant, self-confident pride that comes before a fall.

When I used the term “hubris” to describe my attitude toward my colleague, I wasn’t referring to the desire and urgency I felt to change my life. I was referring to my boastful attitude that I would never feel as uninspired as I thought she was; I would never be so complacent, so tired, so ready to lay down the reins.

A year ago this week, I started a new job in Woodbury, MN. I was in that job until the first of June – and it was the most hellish two months of my life. After two weeks in that crucible, I was hanging on by my fingernails. When my coworker, Jody, called me to quit without further notice, I told her in no uncertain terms that it was a really crappy thing to do. “I’m sorry,” she said. “My new job wants me to start right away.” The truth was, she had no new job. The following day, she killed herself. Jody’s death was not something I could truly take in at the time – there wasn’t room in the crazed hours of that life to feel anything other than exhausted.

In the year since, I have been truly graced with blessings – and I am grateful beyond the words to describe it. But I have also had difficulty shaking off the exhaustion; I find myself, at times, just wanting to get through the days without too much thought. Today, inexplicably, I am finally filled with grief over Jody’s lonely death. I understand, now, what I didn’t three years ago as I sat in my colleague’s office: sometimes, it is enough to get through the day.

Sometimes it is enough – but not forever, at least not for me. Tomorrow, or someday soon, an internal urgency will prompt me into forward motion. And if it doesn’t happen on its own I will seek it out, because I don’t believe in letting my life grow smaller as I grow older. But I’ve also learned the truth about hubris: it isn’t about flying too high, its about thinking everyone else is below you. We will all move forward in our own ways and at our own paces. I’ve been learning to be less judgmental about that, and more compassionate about the ebb and flow of people’s energy. As I extend that compassion to others, I’m also learning to let some of it flow back toward myself.

I’m not dead yet, which means I’m not done yet.

 

 

The Times once sent out an inquiry to famous authors, asking the question, “What’s wrong with the world today?” and Chesterton responded simply,

“Dear Sir,

I am.

Yours, G.K. Chesterton.”*

I know you’re worried about what’s happening in the world. We all are.  The politics of divisiveness. The epidemic of gun violence in our communities. The world refugee crisis. Growing economic inequality. The Zika virus. Regardless of your particular concern(s), the end result is the same: we are worried, frightened, perhaps angry. What are we to do?

In our increasingly polarized world climate, we are surrounded by voices haranguing us to engage in finger-pointing, telling us to shout down those with opposing views (or worse, “punch him in the face” as one presidential candidate indicated he’d prefer), insisting that we fall into lock-step with any one of a myriad absolute ultimatums promulgated by various “parties”. (My friend, Randy Greenwald, writes eloquently about his experience of this as a Christian pastor, here.)

In Drew Dellinger’s poem, Heiroglyphic Stairway, he says it’s 3:00 a.m. and he lies awake because his great-great-grandchildren ask him “What did you do?” when you knew the Earth was being plundered? As it happens, a lot of us are having difficulty sleeping. I mentioned my own recent insomnia to four acquaintances the other day and was stunned to discover that three of them take nightly sleep aids.

In the face of such overwhelming issues, what are we to do, other than medicate ourselves?

G. K. Chesterton’s famous response, above, may be a good place to start. I know: it is so much easier to focus on everyone else, to give in to the urge to fill our heads and ears with “news”, to focus our feelings on an ever-changing horizon outside of ourselves. It may be time, though, to focus inward, to look at our own internal battle lines. In what ways do my choices contribute to what’s wrong with the world? How is my thinking adding to the negative spin?

The first step, they say, is to admit there’s a problem. I recently read this quote that stuck with me, “We are the only author of our thoughts — the only thinker in our lives.” (Rev. June Kelly) Recent advances in science suggest, and are offering proof, that our thoughts have real consequences in the world. But even if we aren’t into the latest scientific studies, we know internally that what we dwell on in our thoughts has an impact on our own behavior and mood. And those two things definitely impact the world we move through in our daily lives.

If it is true that “I am” is the answer to what’s wrong with the world, it is also true that “I am” can be the answer to what is right with the world. Choosing to address your own thinking, and the actions you take as a result, can have huge positive consequences, too. Truthfully, we don’t have to engage in the mud-slinging, polarizing, visciously close-minded rhetoric – the interpersonal violence – we are being pushed toward.

As with so many key concepts in life, this is so much easier said than done. I know. I fight my own first reactions all the time – but gradually, we get better at it as we practice hitting the reset button. I’m trying to hit that button every time my immediate impulse is to dash off an angry retort, paint whole groups of people with dismissively colored adjectives, or raise an angry fist in the air. I’m not saying there is nothing we should be angry or concerned about – just that when we recognize that we, personally, contribute to the problem, we can begin to address how we do so. And when we start to correct that how, we move from making it worse to helping make it better. The same way anything gets better – one person, one thought, one action at a time.

Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.
— Etty Hilesum

 

The other night, I fell asleep early in the evening. After several hours of dozing in an armchair, I woke up enough to put myself to bed. I consciously didn’t turn on lights; I even kept my eyelids lowered to maintain the illusion that I was still sleeping. All of this effort was intended to keep me from waking up enough to have trouble getting back to sleep.

Unfortunately, force of habit caused me to tap the mail icon on my phone when I picked it up to set an alarm. And there, staring me in the face, was an email from work. I opened it and read it. Immediately, I regretted doing so: my heart rate rose rapidly, my breathing became shallow, and I was in the throes of a midnight anxiety attack before I even realized what was happening. Suddenly, everything I hadn’t done or hadn’t done perfectly came rushing into my brain. My miles-long to-do list landed with a crushing thud on my solar plexus.

I said farewell to sleep for the night.

One of the things I found myself doing in the course of the sleepless hours that followed, was randomly rereading posts from this blog. The longevity of nearly seven years offers the humbling discovery that, despite the myriad changes that have taken place both internally and externally in that time, I have certain perennial life issues – as evidenced by this post from February 2011:

When I start to feel pressure from the things I know are on the horizon, I have a tendency to give anxiety free-reign. And as I feel more anxious, I grow less patient, less able to take minor setbacks in stride. As anxiety reaches fever pitch, I begin to resent the conditions in which I find myself – as if I didn’t have a hand in creating them.

Because a lot, though not all, of what I will be doing in this busy period is work related, I will have a tendency to blame my job for the outcomes of my anxiety – if I snap at someone, if I drop the ball and let a friend down, if I miss an appointment. So my challenge is to remain centered and on task in my own life, and to not allow myself to abdicate responsibility for my actions.

Parker Palmer, my go-to guy, says this, in A Hidden Wholeness:

“The notion that we cannot have what we genuinely need is a culturally induced illusion that keeps us mired in the madness of business as usual. But illusions are made to be broken. Am I busy? Of course I am. Am I too busy to live my own life? Only if I value it so little that I am willing to surrender it…”

My challenge, now as it was then, is to remain centered and on task in my own life. This includes having the self-discipline to skip checking my email at midnight and to forego entering the spiral of anxiety in order to preserve any hope of sleep! I haven’t exactly been surrendering my life to busy-ness as much as allowing it to slip away, often in empty hours of wakefulness.

It’s an odd feeling when your past self speaks directly to your present quandary. But it is also kind of nice to be reminded of lessons you’ve already learned. Reapplying them is often easier than the initial learning curve.

And on that note, I believe it’s time for bed!

 

“Art, at its most potent, springs from the artist’s longing to bridge her private truth with the truth of the universe and transmute it into a public form that beckons forth the private truth of the viewer.”   — Maria Popova, Brainpickings

I trudged in the front door and dropped the two heavy bags I carry back and forth to work every day. I dragged myself up the stairs, where I changed out of my sweaty workout clothes into comfy fleece from head to toe. Downstairs once again, I put a serving of homemade soup in the microwave to warm up and turned on my computer.

It was just after 8:00 p.m. when the microwave dinged, letting me know my soup was ready. I sat at the table, dog-tired, eating soup and browsing through social media trying to decide whether I would do any of the things on my evening to-do list or give up and go to bed.

That’s when I came upon my friend C’s post announcing that she was about to do a radio show. At first, I assumed the show had something to do with her job, which was a fair assumption given C’s occupation. However, I soon realized the topic was poetry – not her line of work. I clicked on the link and started listening to the live community radio feed.

The show just coming to an end involved a woman reading a book, stopping to compare the current edition with the previous edition of the same volume. I wasn’t really listening, as I quickly made a cup of hot tea. I then ensconced myself on a chair with my feet up, a blanket over me, and a heating pad warming my back – I was in serious comfort mode and ready for some poetry. I didn’t know if my friend would be sharing her favorite poems by other poets, or whether C. would read some of her own poems. Either way, I expected it to be worth listening: many years ago, when we first met in graduate school, poetry was one of the things C. and I had bonded over.

The show began with the usual chit-chatty introductions. C.’s daughter, a senior in high school, was also in the studio and said hello. It was very sweet and a little awkward, the way on-air “spontenaiety” often comes across. And then C. began reading her first poem.

Suddenly, I was transported to a farm outside Kalona, Iowa: the fields and timber, a weathered old man, bees buzzing in and out of the story of a life – of a death – sweetened with a little wild honey.

The second poem had harder edges, but a softer core.  At its surfaces were a father, a husband, a doctor – their words, their actions, their betrayals. Inside, the pain and self-doubts and aching loneliness of surviving it all, unsure of anything other than that life goes on – and that is enough, somehow.

C.’s voice, as she read, was unwavering. Clear and strong. Her life experiences, lined up and revealed to anyone who happened to be listening, rolled from her tongue with just the right cadence and inflection. I don’t know how she did it – only listening, I was a puddle of emotions.

It’s funny: art has the power to touch us in unexpected ways at the oddest moments. What it takes, I think, is a shared agreement between the artist and the viewer (or listener) to bring their own vulnerability to the interaction. C. chose powerful, emotionally risky, poems to share. I had to be willing to open myself to those emotions, to the commonality of our human experience, in order to be moved by them. This is why art, in all its forms, is so important. It teaches us how to have moments of shared vulnerability – how to speak directly from what is deepest in one person to what is deepest in another. The vastness of this interaction, happening in many cases between souls separated by time, by geography, by lifetimes, is part of how we understand ourselves as members of the larger community of humanity.

To all the artists out there, known and unknown, striving to open yourselves to the power of creating, I want to offer a sincere thank you. Thank you for making yourselves vulnerable so I may better understand myself. Thank you for creating bridges that allow us to cross the chasms separating us from one another; for painstakingly crafting a way for us to meet outside our own cultures and times. Thank you for helping us all more deeply understand our shared humanity.

 

 

There are ways of thinking about the past that aren’t just nostalgia or regret. A kind of questioning that enriches an experience after the fact. To dwell on the past is to allow fresh context to trickle in over the years, and fill out the picture; to keep the memory alive, and not just as a caricature of itself. So you can look fairly at a painful experience, and call it by its name.

      — “Klexos: The Art of Dwelling on the Past” from Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig

There are things I regret.

For example, the many times I’ve felt lonely when people I love – and who love me – are only a phone call, text, or Facebook message away.

I regret the times I’ve felt someone’s sorrow or pain in my own heart, yet neglected to tell them, “I’m here. I care.” Neglected to just show up, casserole or kleenex or whiskey in hand.

I regret all of the minutes I allowed to slip past while I played mah jong online, or half-heartedly watched “Shark Tank”.

Most of all, I regret the times I neglected to bring my better self to difficult circumstances. The times I’ve let hurt, fear, panic or hopelessness rule the day. While I can rise to the occasion, it is humbling how often I do not.

Thinking about rising to the occasion (or failing to) I recall two arguments: decades apart, each had the potential to end a cherished friendship. In both instances, a friend accused me of acting from hurtful motives so far from what I felt or intended that the accusations seemed unrelated to me, completed unmerited. What I chose to do, how I chose to respond in the moment of hurt feelings and wounded pride, determined the course of those friendships.

In the first situation, I chose to cover my hurt with angry, proud, defensive pronouncements. A friendship built over the course of three years ended, forever, in three thoughtless minutes. In the second situation, I waited to respond, allowing myself to get centered in my own truth. That friendship continues to this day.

If I “look fairly” at these painful moments, what can I see? By applying klexos, the art of dwelling on the past, what can I learn?

First, if klexos is “a kind of questioning that enriches an experience after the fact”, I am discovering that it is important which past experiences I take the time to question deeply. Delving into those times when I failed to behave as I would have liked feels less instructive than mining the times I did choose to act as my best self.

With regard to the arguments in which two friendships hung in the balance, I think I learn more by questioning the second because that is the outcome I want to replicate. How did I convince myself to hold off from responding, to stay in the awful feeling place of the accusations leveled against me? What enabled me to review my own choices and actions with fairness, to allow that even some piece of my friends’ perspective could be merited? What were the characteristics of the communication that followed this internal “centering”, that allowed me to speak honestly but also with compassion – to hold the dynamic tension between our disparate perceptions in such a way that the thread between us didn’t snap in two?

These questions are worthy ones to ask of the past.

Looking back, it is true: I have regrets. But I also have successes, those shining moments in which I chose the right path. If such a thing as klexos actually exists, there is a reason it is described as an art (the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination). The artistry lies in selecting which memories serve as fertile ground for growth, as sound launch-pads for propelling us forward into a closer alignment with who we mean to be, rather than who we regret having been.