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 … the perspective of getting older

Jul 10, 2023

Last month as I turned 62 I decided it is time for some reflection. My life has always drastically changed every 10 years, sometimes by choice and sometimes not. Since I feel another major life change coming around the corner, it’s time to take a look around.

In the past 30+ years I experienced several career changes, and while I loved my work, all my employers were crappy in how they treated me and others. I traveled, I stopped traveling to take care of my elderly parents, I witnessed both of my parents’ deaths. I retired after they died and just wanted to be able to 1) stop being forced to accept horrible people having power over me (and that applied to my family and personal relationships as well) and 2) stop having to force myself, for the first time in my life, to be someone other than who I am in order to deal with all of that.

As I went through my 50’s I set goals and got a master’s degree and joined several nonprofit boards. I became an activist and realized that most people who joined “the resistance” were like those they condemned and all had agendas beyond what they stated. It was kind of like the end of the Hunger Games when Katniss realizes the new regime’s goal is to only take the place of the old regime. I still fight for change but not as part of any the numerous organizations that email me constantly claiming they alone will save democracy if only I send them money.

Over the past twenty years I worked out with a personal trainer and did Pilates, cardio, weights, spin, kick boxing, regular boxing, yoga, ran 5Ks and did all kinds of things to deal with stress and stay in shape. This exercise did not allow me to overcome two major challenges to my health, both of which took years to figure out and diagnose. One was addressed successfully with medicine, the other with surgery. Now I walk and hike with my dogs and do some low impact You Tube videos to exercise. I actually have less pain and less stress on my body now that I am listening more and pushing less.

I am being a lot gentler with myself these days in many ways. For the first time in my life, I am allowing myself to be lazy. I always enjoyed being productive and getting shit done. But now I feel the finite nature of time and interestingly, rather than feeling panicked about that, I understand I need to sit back now and feel the quiet. I want to sit in my backyard with a cool drink and watch my dogs sleep and look at the flowers and feel the breeze.

I am disengaging from situations that do not allow me to feel the quiet and joy and satisfaction of what life can bring. For the first time, my calendar is not chock full and I get to pick and choose how I spend my time. So if you don’t see me around as much in the busy “Burbank” world, know that this is my choice and why that is.

I will still be on the nonprofit Boards and run my nonprofit and care passionately about what happens in my city and to others and will speak out about all of that. I will always care because that is simply who I am and how I am wired. I have always been the pot stirrer. The same pattern always happens – the powers that be like my outspokenness because they can pretend that change happens because of me and they don’t have to take responsibility if it goes wrong. But then when things don’t go wrong and actually get better and they look bad, well, they don’t like the pot stirrer anymore.

Does this mean I don’t want to keep giving back and making good things happen? Absolutely not, that is my passion and reason to be. But if you see me less around town, if I decline invites to events, it is because I want to enjoy the quiet, at least for a while. Because, as usual, I have no idea what is coming next.

7/10/23