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 … History kicking our asses

Oct 23, 2023

My grandfather was born before the end of the 19th century.

I was born less than 20 years after the end of World War II and 6 years after the murder of Emmett Till.

History is not the past. History is part of the present in who we are and how we live. It is there in every aspect of the lives we lead. History affects our lives in countless ways and we are in denial about it. And as a result, History is kicking our ass.

My father was born in Brooklyn and was the son of a hat maker (a profession that barely exists today). Dad served in the Army (there was a draft, remember) and went to UCLA on the GI Bill so he went to college for free. He majored in Accounting, became a CPA and had a tremendously successful career.

He grew up in a time where our country was determined to be prosperous (for white people, of course). As a result of the economic collapse that had happened in the 1920’s (which was his present, your History), there were strict banking and other regulations in place to ensure stability. There was a nationwide housing boom resulting in plentiful and inexpensive housing. There were massive investments in infrastructure such as highways, schools, and community growth. And, of course, free or very inexpensive college tuition

A family could do well on one income – have a house, a car, and a permanent place in a community. My father was a brilliant man; he began his adult life at a time when this country created conditions for prosperity and stability that offered opportunities for him to excel and succeed.

I grew up in a time, like him, where the conditions were there to enable my path. There was political turbulence – the Cold War, Vietnam War, Watergate, etc. But I was still able, right out of college, to find a cheap apartment in Tarzana that, with a roommate, I could afford while making a barely above minimum wage salary. I could fill my Datsun 210 with gas and not worry about making rent or affording food. Eventually I obtained a secretarial position (in those days they were not called assistants) and made enough as a secretary to afford my own apartment in Van Nuys.

Not only was I always able to find a job, I was able to sort through all kinds of options. Most important, the economy offered me a way to eventually find a job that I was passionate about and would pay enough for me to buy a house here in Burbank.

I did work my ass off to earn what I gained. But now, looking through the eyes of History, I realize how much my success was due to the economic and social circumstances that allowed my hard work to result in economic success. And I also see that this path no longer exists for those younger than me. These changed conditions mean a lack of opportunity for those who work just as hard, who are just as brilliant and want stability and prosperity as well.

That void is at the heart of what is tearing this country apart.

So many willfully ignore how History benefited them; the fact that during the time that they started and lived their lives, there were certain conditions and benefits that created opportunities and cleared paths. But they purposely work to eliminate and keep eliminating those same benefits for others. They insist these benefits and conditions are no longer necessary and, even worse, think that if these previous conditions that benefitted them are given to others, this will mean they lose. And they will fight to the death to keep those benefits from returning. They willfully ignore how History warns them how those battles always turn out. History will kick their asses but also the asses of millions more before the inevitable conclusion arrives.

There is another very important way that we are ignoring History.

I look around and it all seems so overwhelming. That’s on purpose. Did you learn in History Class about Yellow Journalism? It was created by William Randolph Hearst and his arch-rival, Joseph Pulitzer in the late 19th Century – around the time my grandfather was born.

There is a horrific war in the Middle East right now. The powers that control this conflict want you to be on their side and not the other. They are in a battle for your heart and mind. Does that phrase sound familiar? It was said during the Vietnam War by President Lyndon Johnson about the people of Vietnam:

“The ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who actually live out there”.

(Hearts and Minds was also the name of an Academy Award winning documentary about the Vietnam War made in 1974. More History.)

So when devastating and massive violence occurs – like the massacre of Israelis or the destruction of a hospital in Gaza – the sides on this war fight furiously to control the information you and I receive. Sometimes it is hard to know what is true and accurate. Sometimes we just have to wait for History to tell us what is true. (That’s why right now there is a massive assault on education and how and what History is taught. That battle is actually a battle to determine for us what we see as truth.)

There is so much corruption, so many lies, all with the intent to damage and destroy our sense of stability and reality and connection. The horror, the inhumanity, the insanity, and the way it is being unleashed is not just meant as physical violence. It is intended to crush our spirits. Because if they can’t win our hearts and minds then they want to destroy them. That way these people can retain or gain power because they have taken away our ability to think and choose and resist.

One way to keep from being crushed is to keep learning and remembering History. There were reasons for the French Revolution. Dictators and their regimes fall. All of this insanity is familiar to History. The violence, disinformation, corruption. It seems like it is on a more massive scale than ever before and it is. We as a world are deeply interconnected in ways my grandfather would not live to see and could not have ever imagined. But none of this actually is new.

Want a sign to give you hope? We as a country have embraced one simple phrase right now. I see it come up as part of everything we witness and shows our need to know that there is justice and consequences and meaning. And our satisfaction when the consequences occur.

Fuck Around and Find Out.

History will always tell you the Find Out part ahead of time. You can depend on that.

10/23/23