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 … what’s next

Nov 22, 2024

Photo by arochman on Freeimages.com

This is my first post since May 2024 and there are reasons for that. After I had finished everything involved in the CEO search that I ran this spring, I wanted to relax. But more than anything, I wanted to mentally and emotionally prepare for Trump to be reelected. Yes, I was one of those people who had no confidence that Biden would be reelected. I decided to spend my time focused on simple things like listening to music, doing needlepoint and learning Spanish on an app. It was my way to deal with the stress of the incoming disaster that I could see heading our way. I gave thanks for being retired and having the space to try to deal with this stress.

When Biden stepped aside and Harris stepped in, it was like a jolt of adrenaline for me. I felt excited for the future. I looked for volunteer opportunities with the campaign and was recruited to be a moderator on the campaign Discord channel for volunteers. The job was greeting people who joined the channel and helping them find their way around and telling them how to get involved. There were 25,000 people already on the channel and I viewed this as a great way to help others and meet people. I became a “Mod” and it was fun. At least at first.

A few weeks into it, the campaign leader for the channel told us all that we now had to push people into phone banking, that we ourselves had to run phone banks and we had to spend hours each week doing this. Every week the pressure placed on us grew and we were told to be to be aggressive in our tactics towards new volunteers. We kept being told “people like being told what to do” which raised the hair on the back of my neck. I also worked a phone bank and we were not warned that we would be calling Republicans in Georgia. The extreme abuse from those we spoke to was something the campaign should have prepared us for and to be thrown into that without any concern for the volunteers also alarmed me. We were pushed to call someone every minute and they kept track of our calls like we were on commission instead of being volunteers.

The stress grew and the atmosphere felt like a boiler room out of Glengarry Glen Ross. I ended up getting sick and then resigning as a volunteer as I barely able to deal with this situation when I was well. I thought, I guess this is politics, it gets ruthless. I guess this is what is needed to win. But as we know now, it wasn’t. I have worked as a volunteer on political campaigns going back decades and I was never treated like that before and I see now it was a sign of things to come.

The campaign was losing, they knew they were losing and they were desperate. Their desperation permeated their decisions, their interactions and then rippled to the farthest reaches and the most distant volunteers. It’s sad and perhaps in a different multiverse they would have been able to have a year or years, rather than 90 days, to run a campaign. But I know that I will never put myself in that situation again. As I said many years ago when I resigned a volunteer Board position, I would not allow myself to be treated this way as an employee, so I certainly won’t tolerate it as a volunteer.

And now here we are. A country where the ruling class is infested with extreme corruption with no guardrails. It does feel like we are back in 2016 but there are some important differences this time around.

In 2017 I wanted to be Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, I wanted to take on the machines and be a warrior and win. I learned the landscape of activism and eventually found out who the grifters were (and many of them are back in large numbers for this next round). Last time we felt so desperate and thought a hero would come and save the day. “Help us Mueller!” was all over Facebook. Nope, that never happened. Those who are part of the establishment will not dismantle the establishment and not even when the crimes are clear as day (Merritt Garland is a good example of this). The Democratic candidates I met and talked with and supported in 2018 to flip Republican seats in Congress were elected. I then learned that in politics the first thing that happens to supporters like me after a victory is that we are immediately and purposefully pushed away and forgotten.

But I did learn a lot from all that activism work and that helped me be confident enough to run for City Council in 2020. I learned a lot doing that as well (and no, not interested in ever doing that again). I learned more about the city I live in by running for office than I knew from the decades I had lived here.

The election of Trump last time jumpstarted my personal evolution into who I am today. It pushed me out of my comfort zone and into situations where I grew and found I had skills I didn’t realize I had. The confidence I have today is a direct result of making the decision to not sit back and accept the cruelty, inhumanity and insanity that those four years would consist of.

Here we are again. Again, we have an establishment that we cannot depend on to lessen the economic and social blows. That means we have to take care of each other. We have to be prepared in every way we can think of. It’s hard to imagine the worst-case scenarios but think of the ones we do know could happen: A pandemic without cure or end; crippling tariffs that raise the cost of basic goods; persecution of anyone who those in power decides is one of “them”. Think about how each of these will affect your ability to survive. This is what I am doing now, while we have time to prepare.

Timothy Snyder is a Historian and wrote a book in 2017 titled “On Tyranny”.

https://snyder.substack.com/p/on-tyranny

Here is his substack with a brief synopsis of the contents. He is being quoted by many at this time and the most common quote is in the first chapter in the book and I am this seeing over and over:

“Don’t obey in advance”

 

Don’t fall into line, don’t accept, don’t cooperate. Don’t make it easy.

This is different than what I saw during the prior years of Trump which was, in essence, “Stay Angry – Don’t Look Away – Stay Outraged”. No, don’t do that part any more. Anger and outrage are crippling and exhausting, they will distract your focus and energy and won’t accomplish anything. There is an old Buddhist saying, anger is an acid that destroys the vessel that contains it. Anger is easily manipulated, easily misdirected, and without focus or purpose it destroys and then burns out without any positive impact.

Stay focused and calm, don’t overload yourself. Don’t deplete your energy trying to take it all in. They want to overwhelm you because that will keep you from following rule no.1, don’t obey in advance.

I still plan to do my needlepoint and read books and pick up my Spanish lessons, things I put aside when I was trying to help Harris win. But I won’t check out and I hope you don’t either. My number one priority right now is to take care of myself and my friends and neighbors. People are scared and worried for good reasons and I want to help them get to the next phase of all this. And then after that, we will survive the next phase and so on. Step by step we will continue to take care of each other. And that is what I intend to do for a long time.

11/21/24