Feb
12
(This blog post is rated PG-Geezer. If you’re under 55, come back next week.)
First, Aunt Nancy sold the big house she and her husband had lived in. Keeping it was too expensive and too much work. So she sold a lot of stuff and gave away a lot of stuff and compressed the essentials of her life — a console TV, a cabinet sewing machine, a sprawling sofa, a mega recliner — into a one-bedroom apartment in a senior citizens community. The apartment bulged at the seams with oversized furnishings.
A decade or so later, Aunt Nancy broke her shoulder and her wrist and everyone realized it was time for her to pare down her life again. Her mind was sharp, but arthritis and diabetes and obesity had taken their toll. She moved into a nursing home.
She told us how to dispose of everything, and we did. She knew the move was permanent.
But even knowing it was permanent, she shielded a part of her soul from the truth that her world had shrunk forevermore to those four green walls, that bed with buttons to raise her head or lower her feet, that tiny built-in closet full of pull-on knit pants (no buttons, no zippers) and pull-over knit tops (no buttons, no zippers).
One day, six months or so after she moved into the nursing home, Aunt Nancy asked me about three pleated skirts that had been in her closet before the move. When I told her they had been donated to a charity, she was so disappointed. They were like new. She might wear them someday. Someday, when she got through this rough patch.
This particular rough patch, of course, was not one she would be getting through. She would never again wear panty hose or dress-up shoes or pleated skirts that made her think of earlier years, better times. This further shrinking of her life was the beginning of the 10-year decline that would eventually end in her death. But for quite a while, no matter how clear her thinking, Aunt Nancy kept a lady-like hold on the notion that she would one day sashay back out into the world in one of those pleated skirts and a pair of two-toned pumps, not too high, just enough to give her calves a little boost.
I look at the ways my life is shrinking and wonder if I have begun the long decline that will end wherever it ends for me.
I turn 60 this year. My finances are unreliable and retirement looms. So I look at my car and I’m grateful its life-expectancy is nearly as long as my own. Other things give me more concern. My computer has been with me for seven years, my Nikes for six, my heavy winter coat that just popped a snap has also been around half-a-decade or more. That’s like 40 in coat years — not really old, but beginning to look a little tired and fashion-challenged.
Sixty may be the new 45, but even so I feel a shrinking of my potential to reinvent or reinvigorate. I wonder if someone has already begun to roll up my sidewalk – the sidewalk that could lead anywhere — leaving me stranded here in my incredible shrinking life, the only one who still believes that the best truly is yet to be.
Jan
16
Who is our prophet today?
Who is leading us out of this wilderness in which we find ourselves today? Who is pointing the way to a promised land that seems at least as far away today as it was 40 years ago?
When I was growing into young adulthood in the 1960s, the world was a frightening and dangerous place. A place of war and violence in the streets and hatred based on fear of the unknown and the different. In other words, it was a lot like today. The biggest difference may have been that we had prophets who were pointing the way out of the wilderness.
We had Bob Dylan, who sang to us about a different way to live in that dangerous world. We had Bobby Kennedy, who vowed to help us build a different kind of world.
And, of course, we had Martin Luther King, Jr., who reminded us that God had a different plan from the plan we were living out.
On this day of celebrating the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., I scroll down my Facebook news feed, read the messages King left us and I teeter between hope and despair. Hope because he spoke with the authority and the authenticity of one who had inded been to the mountaintop, had seen the promised land. And if it was true then, if there was a promised land then, surely there must still be one today.
And despair, because in these 40-plus years since his death, so much of the progress we had made seems to be eroding. It is eroding at least in part, I believe, because the voices that dominate today’s conversation are the voices of self-interest and antagonism and sarcasm.
Where are the voices of hope and reconciliation? Where are the voices that lift us out of our small lives and onto the mountaintop? Who is urging us to act with courage, to live from that place inside us where we are kinder and braver and more compassionate than our fear or complacency or pettiness? In 50 years, who will we remember as the voice we followed out of this wilderness?
Are we without prophets today? Or do we choose not to listen when they speak?
Jun
22
On nights when I just want to be a mental slug, I watch a fairly innocuous TV series on Netflix called “Eli Stone.” It’s about an attorney who starts having visions and at first everybody thinks he’s a nutcase or a royal screw-up, take your pick. But by the end of the first season, what has gradually happened is that every person around him has begun to change for the better because this one ordinary guy has become a force for good in the world.
Started me thinking about how we all change the world in small ways every day with the simple choices we make about whether to be a force for good or not-so-good.
And that started me thinking about what I can do today — every day — to change the world. Here goes:
- Look every check-out clerk in the eyes and hold their gaze long enough to smile at them and let them know I’ve really seen them.
- Let one vehicle pull out of a parking lot in front of me just in case it eases somebody’s stress a tiny bit.
- Roll down my car window and give the homeless person at the freeway entrance a $10 bill, looking them in the eyes and smiling to let them know I’ve really seen them.
- Tell the people who are part of my life something I admire or respect about them.
- Ask people questions about their lives, their beliefs, their hopes, their dreams, without giving in to that urge to tell them what I think is wrong with ther lives, their beliefs, their hopes, their dreams.
- For every dollar I spend on something I don’t need (that would be a new pair of shoes to match a new outfit or a bottle of OPI nail polish or a grande whatever at Starbucks, for example), donate a dollar to help somebody else.
- Make a point of speaking more softly and more kindly.
- Tell somebody a truth they don’t want to hear because I love them more than I need them to like me.
- Read to a child.
- Drive like the highway patrol is in the next lane.
- Stop myself the next time I start to disagree with someone and make sure there’s a good reason to disagree (other than the need to be right).
- Allow my face to light up when someone I love enters the room.
- If it’s negative, just don’t say it. Especially if it’s about a person. Any person. Whether it’s true or not. If it’s negative, just don’t say it.
Some of these I try to do on a good day. Some of them I’ve done for a while at various times. Some of them are things I admire or respect in other people. Maybe I’ll start by telling them so.
Sep
21
Dreams of transformation started every August with a visit to the neighborhod department stores to select five new outfits and a new pair of shoes for the school year ahead. Skin golden, limbs lithe, long hair as nearly blond as it would ever be without the help of foil and chemicals, I combed the racks for the clothes that would change my life.
The year I remember best, I brought home, among other things, a red pleated skirt and softly-striped red and white blouse, along with a large red bow for the back of the hair that grazed my shoulders. I was weeks away from being 12 years old, a seventh grader.
More so even than most years, I thought, “This is the year!” The year of popularity. The year of brilliant accomplishments and being beautiful (or at least cute). The year when I would peel back the cocoon and stun everyone with my unfurling wings.
Alas, every year my hair was still mousy brown; I was still too shy to raise my hand and venture out with a potentially wrong answer; and I never became the attention-magnet whose friends urged her to try out for cheerleader. In fact, the year of the red pleated skirt was the same year I couldn’t even get elected hall monitor. I marched in line like everyone else, never daring skip a step and aching to experience life with those wings I could almost imagine.
Every year was just another year of the caterpillar.
But as August melted into September, oh, didn’t I dream.
Apr
5
About 40 years ago, the song Alice’s Restaurant was an anthem for hippies who wanted the U.S. to get out of Vietnam. The end of the song (which is about 18 minutes long; youtube link below) talks about a handful of people walking into their draft boards and singing a few bars of the song. That, Arlo Guthrie said, could constitute a movement — the Alice’s Restaurant Anti-Massacre movement.
I thought of it today after watching the TED video (which, oddly enough is about 18 minutes long) of Seth Godin talking about his concept of Tribes . Godin suggests that each of us find something that matters to us and start a movement. All we have to do is connect with our tribe and lead.
Clue to finding your movement: Who are you upsetting? That’s where your potential to change the world lies.
If I were bold enough, what would my movement be? Godin gave his audience members 24 hours to decide on their movement, so I think I’ll take 24 and see where I land.
What about you? Godin believes any of us — all of us — have the power to start a movement. So ask yourself who you’re upsetting. If you were going to change the status quo and create a movement, what would it be?
