Let's Talk About ... the passage of time and passing time

I taught myself how to read when I was very young and from that moment on I was a voracious reader. I loved reading and being absorbed in stories and meeting all kinds of people through books and having a window into their lives. It was an escape I needed from constant bullying and abuse at school and at home and it kept me going, it gave me something beyond myself and my world.

I don’t remember most of the books I read in my childhood but a few are permanently imprinted on me. One is “A Lantern in Her Hand” by Bess Streeter Aldrich. It was published in 1928 and I read it in the 1960’s so it was already dated by then. The book is about Abbie, a character that the author based on her mother, and describes her life starting after the Civil War when she settles and lives in the Nebraska plains with her new husband. She leaves behind a possible life devoted to her main passion of singing, and her voice was good enough that she could have had a singing career.

The novel has a Little House on the Prairie path in that it describes their struggles working the land and surviving through farming. It emphasizes how Abbie devoted herself to raising their children. The children grow up and they all move away as none of them want to be farmers like their father and they see a world full of opportunities. At the end of the book, Abbie looks back at her life and finally realizes how she gave up her passion and identity for her children. She tries to sing but finds she has lost her beautiful, perfect voice; it is permanently gone.

What affected me as a child was understanding that that Abbie had lost herself. She had a passion that was her identity and she chose to walk away from that. The book ends with the message that Abbie’s contribution to the world was her children and she can live vicariously through her children (after all, this was written by the daughter about her mother). I rejected that message even though I wasn’t even a teenager yet. That’s why I remember reading the book and my strong reaction to it. I became very emotional reading how Abbie stood outside, alone on the farm, and realized her voice was literally gone. I had read about all her challenges through poverty and struggles through decades. Then at the end of her life I felt her sense of emptiness and loss at who she was after enduring all of that. Even though I was a child, I felt the passage of time through Abbie’s life. It was hard for me to accept that all that time could pass, decades of life, an entire life, and it would end with only emptiness.

I realize now that reading novels like “A Lantern in Her Hand” shaped me in ways I never before understood. I decided at the end of my 20’s that I did not want to be a mother. Maybe that’s because I could see Abbie’s sacrifice in the lives of the women I knew at that time who became mothers. Every 10 years I would switch my life onto a different path, first through making different career choices and then through exploring all kinds of new things once I retired. It was really all one path that I forged to find myself and become someone who I wanted to be and to be myself without limits.

Of course, in the corporate world being defined by others is inescapable. Unfortunately too many feel threatened by someone striving to go beyond the baseline and reaching their full potential. That’s one of the reasons I retired so young. It was the only way I could find out what I could accomplish on my own terms.

And now I am 65 years old and I feel the passage of time. I think about those I knew over the course of my life and become curious what paths they chose. I wonder what time has done to them, has it been kind or cruel. There are those who are exactly what they were when I knew them back in the 1980’s or 90’s or 2000’s. One of the main lessons from looking back is that people stay the same. As the saying goes, people don’t change, they reveal themselves.

Most people are joyful having lives raising children and having domesticity and living a life that I decided was not for me. They haven’t had the need to create an independent path to find themselves like I have had. Maybe that’s because I was unable for many reasons to truly explore what I could do and be during my childhood. I was withdrawn within myself to protect myself and was never encouraged to do more than that or be more than that. It takes a shitload of time to shed that protective skin and to heal from the inside out. It takes an effort that can go on for decades, sometimes a lifetime.

And so I have spent time over the decades working towards this goal of knowing myself and being myself with full confidence. But there comes a point when it becomes unavoidably clear that this journey has an end. Mortality becomes palpable. I think I felt this in my reaction as a child to “A Lantern in Her Hand” even if I didn’t understand it. Time is limited and, to paraphrase Mary Oliver, what have you done with your one precious life?

Time passes and we have to decide for ourselves what we want our lives to be, what for each of us is experiencing life through that time. I feel right now that I am ready, for the first time, to simply pass the time. I have never done that before or chosen that before but now it feels right. Part of this is finally accepting that being in the moment without the pressure to achieve is also experiencing life.

I keep thinking that maybe it’s time to come full circle. Maybe right now I need to withdraw into myself like when I was a child. Perhaps what I need is to read books and contemplate and observe the world rather than push myself to take action and engage to try to change or save it. I have no idea how much longer my journey will be. I have good genes; my grandparents and father lived until their late 80’s and even 90, and my mother died in her early 80’s. So maybe I can give myself a break from the pressure to feel responsible to engage and achieve for now. I don’t have to feel that somehow I am breaking a rule. I won’t spend each day being focused on accomplishing as much as possible so that I can feel like I am living to my potential. I can be content with simply passing time in the company of my dogs, reading and watching movies and sipping tea and just being. Let’s see how that goes.

 

Let’s Talk About … paranoia and conspiracies

Mar 7, 2023

I was an English Literature major in college because I love to read. My favorite authors to study were the 20th Century authors (of course when I went to college it was still the 20th Century).

There were lots of writers whose works I studied and found amazing and challenging but none more than Thomas Pynchon. He is considered a unique writer in how he combines complex plots and themes about American society combined with over-the-top humor. My favorite of his novels is The Crying of Lot 49.

The plot is about a woman named Oedipa Maas whose life is turned upside down when she is named as the executor of her ex-boyfriend’s estate. She discovers mysteries, conspiracies, and secret organizations similar to the Illuminati but instead run as private postal services. It all seems ridiculous and entertaining in the light of 1966 when it was written and in the late 70’s when I read it.

But in many ways, it is not so ridiculous, especially now in 2023. We have millions of people who look for secret clues in the most mundane things and swear that hidden sources can reveal a diabolical evil. As a student, I was told to question whether Oedipa was seeing what was really there or if she had lost her sanity. It is almost as if the Q followers of today long to be Oedipa on her quest to reveal the trail of hidden countercultural societies and conspiracies to control all of us.

But this theme of “reveal the truth about those in power” permeates our culture. Back in the 70’s we had lots of novels and movies about conspiracies – perhaps the real-life conspiracy of Watergate made the pretend more real. Now we have the fantasy movies about Kingsman: The Secret Service, the secret assassin world of John Wick and so on. These are worlds with societies that seem to exist on the same plane as us but that we cannot see, cannot experience, cannot be a part of. But we know these are fantasy worlds. The problem is that there is a growing number of people who are convinced that real secret worlds exist just like these fantasy ones. And those secret worlds are not populated by secret agents or super assassins but people who are threats to them personally. Because those who hold secret power must be the reason their lives are not what they feel they deserve.

We have many systemic problems that are based on hate, racism, greed and very real economic and social victimization such as the school to prison pipeline. But what excuses do you use when you are taught that you are supposed to benefit from our social and economic systems and you feel you have not? There must be a reason why others have what you don’t have, there must be someone or something to blame for why your life is not what you want it to be. There must be someone to hate so you can avoid being responsible for your own life. Or maybe you are just bored and think these delusions will make your life exciting.

The blame mutates into paranoia and turns into fearing those who are different from you.

For all our history, we have been taught that the other is the enemy and must be “eradicated”, even when they are our neighbors and do us no harm. This paranoia and hatred have now gone into overdrive. With the flimsy excuse of “protecting children”, lives are being destroyed while these manipulators especially target the destruction of the lives of children. Those who profit from harvesting and reaping hate and fear keep changing their narratives to find more and more groups to blame for some evil universe that doesn’t exist. At least Oedipa Maas wasn’t ranting about pedophiles.

And then we keep finding that those who do the most blaming and hating are the ones most often committing the crimes they accuse others of doing. Google “youth pastors molesting”.

Are there powerful conspiracies out there that want to harm us? Sure, the Federalist Society comes to mind. These conspiring groups are the ones who have the power and want to ensure they keep the power and the money that comes with it. The harm and danger are not coming from the powerless. Remember, the motto of Google was “don’t be evil” until, well, that didn’t fit their agenda.

I see the pain of my dear friends who are being targeted with their existence being demonized. They agonize and try to process their fear and anger and my heart breaks. Then I remember that as a Jew I am also a target in today’s United States.

How do we stop this downward spiral? I heard today that 39 states now have anti-trans legislation pending. This has now evolved beyond paranoia into full blown fascism.

Don’t look away. Don’t pretend this doesn’t involve you. Don’t deny what is clearly happening. The call is coming from inside the house. It is only when we all accept that this darkness is here and doing battle that we can fight it. Because we can only defeat the paranoia and hate if we unite as one.

3/7/23