We all have our own life to pursue, our own kind of dream to be weaving. And we all have some power to make wishes come true, as long as we keep believing. — Louisa May Alcott
This is a question I’ve become kind of obsessed by. For the last year, there has been a simmering background potential that my life might change dramatically, and I’ve been spending a lot of hours thinking about how that might look. And I’ve been extremely specific about it, too — no vague handwaving about it. In the process, I’ve been thinking about moving ahead and doing what I want with my life, making it the way I want it. Not the way it is, necessarily, the way things just kind of develop, and you’re stuck with that table because there’s nothing really wrong with it so you can’t justify getting a new one. Instead, what if I could have what I wanted? Exactly what I wanted? What would that look like?
I actually started thinking about this several months ago, during my monthly writing group. We take turns bringing one-word prompts and each month we spend several minutes doing spontaneous freewriting on each prompt. So this one time, the prompt was different than usual, it was simple: write what you’d do if you had a whole weekend all to yourself, to do whatever you wanted.
Our faces lit up (we’re all women, this “time all to yourself” idea is so novel!), and our heads went down and the pens were scratching feverishly over the paper. Usually one of us finishes in a couple minutes, and the others wind up shortly after that. This time, we just kept writing. Pages were being flipped quickly, and the pens just kept moving. The thing that was so surprising, when we finished and we each read our little piece aloud, the others listened with wide eyes to what were essentially simple things…..but the writer always seemed to think it was some kind of crazy, impractical, impossible dream.
So for the last several months I’ve been thinking about this. Given where I am in my life, what is my big dream, now? At this point, so many of my big dreams have been achieved: my children are here, in my life, and they’re also out in the world living big lives of their own, and they’re wonderful people; I not only went to college, I finished graduate school and earned a PhD, which I never even knew to dream about; I’ve traveled a lot and seen places I’d never even heard of, plus so many places I never dreamed I’d see, and learned that there are other places in the world that feel like home; I earn money by reading and writing.
So it’s not at all about “gee, what’s left?” but more like ok: now, given this stage of my life, what is my big dream? And again, my thinking is focused, not some vague handwaving. Focused. What is my big dream now, given where I am in my life?
Before I tell you mine, I wonder about yours. What is your big dream? Specifically.
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p.s. Giving a shout out to women in my broad age group. We’re gorgeous! Check out this post on A Femme d’un Certain Age, see if you can find me among the beautiful others!
just sitting in the quiet, feeling happy and grateful this morning for more things than i can say
I don’t quite understand this, but adjusting to the 12-hour time difference when I arrive on the other side of the world isn’t that big a deal, really. For the first few days, I crash h-a-r-d in the late afternoon and take little skipping naps before dinner and go to sleep relatively early but that’s it. Then I’m adjusted and that’s that. Coming home, though, is another story. If you’ve been here long, you know this is what I talk about after every other-side-of-the-world vacation. First, I don’t seem to need very much sleep, which is bizarre. And second, no matter when I go to sleep I’m wide awake just after midnight. I crash h-a-r-d in the late afternoon and take little skipping naps before dinner and go to sleep around 9pm, and then I’m wide awake at 1:30 or 2am, and that’s that.
Boring. Real boring. What I realize this time is that resistance is indeed futile. I have these precious mid-night hours, all to myself. I’ve come to really love and appreciate this and will be kind of disappointed when my regular sleeping pattern returns in several weeks (that’s another thing, why does it take so long on this end!). I’ve been up since 1:30, reading and knitting, and feeling a lot of pleasure for these things:
The delicious humor of John Prine, especially in Dear Abby:
The wistful gorgeous beauty of Judy Collins singing Sons Of:
The color red, in all its punch and power and vivid life. I especially loved it this morning in the work of Catherine Ryan:
I just love the quality of color in that piece, but it’s characteristic of her work and the colors all make me feel grateful to be alive this morning.
Stick with me on this one: death. I’m grateful for death. I don’t want my life ever to end, but the fact that it will makes everything matter. Is this what I would be doing, right at this moment, if I knew I had 3 months to live? Maybe, it’s only 3am and I’m enjoying this moment, but keeping the question in mind makes life vivid. I’m thinking about it this morning especially because one of my dearest friend’s mother died on Sunday. She’d been lost to Alzheimer’s for years, and my friend was lucky enough to spend an hour with her mother Sunday, telling her stories of how much she’d been loved, and then other family members arrived and her mother slipped away, gently. Her mother had introduced her to Mary Oliver’s work, and my friend is the one who introduced me to Mary Oliver’s work, so this morning I remember her mother with this poem:
When death comes — Mary Oliver
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
I’m also grateful this morning for metaphor and the artistic articulation of meaning. My daughter Marnie just got the first part of her new gorgeous tattoo done:
that's Pallas Athena
See this blog post she wrote about the levels of meaning behind her artistic choices, what these images mean for and about her. Since the image and story are on her public blog, I assume she won’t mind my putting them here.
There’s a lot more — I seem to be feeling extremely grateful this morning! — but this is getting long and I want to get back to my knitting. Speaking of: I’ll be finished with my Wintry Mix sweater in about an hour, and the yarn for my Vodka Gimlet arrived while I was gone and ohmygod it’s a gorgeous color. Another post on knitting-related things to come soon!
[and p.s., posted here for myself, so I don't forget: two nights ago I dreamed I was being held in the back room by the Chinese. That's it. There were no images with it, I just woke up and knew I'd dreamed that. WTF!! It's kinda funny.]
no pictures today, just a LOT of words.
Meaning
I get so irritated with people who just moan about the meaninglessness of life and say they’re “existentialists.” I love those big-picture questions and can think about them until the cows come home, but existentialism doesn’t mean stopping at the claim that there is no meaning. That’s just the foyer. You have to keep going, walk through the next door which is “the meaning is up to you.” I’m very comfortable with the idea that the meaning is up to me.
Joseph Campbell said, “People say that what we are all seeking is meaning for life. I think that what we’re really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive.” I tend to agree with that. I think that’s why I love this Vonnegut passage from Cat’s Cradle, the last rites for a Bokononist:
“God made mud. God got lonesome. So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up! See all I’ve made,” said God, “the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.” And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud. I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done. Nice going, God. Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn’t have. I feel very unimportant compared to You. The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and look around. I got so much, and most mud got so little. Thank you for the honor! Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep. What memories for mud to have! What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met! I loved everything I saw! Good night.”
Those moments when we really get to experience our lives, when we’re not mindlessly passing hours, when we are connected/connecting to someone else, some other mud, that’s the meaning of life. Leo Buscaglia said, “I still get wildly enthusiastic about little things… I play with leaves. I skip down the street and run against the wind.” ME TOO, LEO. Me too. We’re here! We get to be here, in this glorious and terrifying and maddening and disheartening and discouraging and beautiful and profound world.
I have a long relationship with Christianity, beginning with my growing up in the Church of Christ (only ones going to heaven, you know), then losing my faith, then finding it again when I had kids, then a few years as a Quaker, and then a profound uncertainty about it all, leaving me agnostic. I sample from the buffet of Big-Picture ideas, like many 21st century Americans — a bit of resonance to aspects of Buddhism, Taoism, Native American beliefs, some aspects of Christianity (though I wish I could be more comfortable with the love part and less focused on the wrath and vengeance part, thanks Church of Christ upbringing). But I don’t understand why believing there is a specific God provides meaning, or why the fact that we die means there is no meaning. None of that makes a lot of sense to me. I don’t understand why believing that when we die, that’s it, means life has no meaning. I just don’t get it.
Other stuff: Fitness
I’m still involved with my new strength training regimen, and my progress has been surprising to me! It really helps that I have such an amazing trainer (who writes things like this, which every woman should read); she encourages me and is just the kind of trainer you’d dream of. So I’ve been thinking a lot about bodies, and my body, and the woman-specific cultural “problems” with women’s bodies, and developing a personal style, and feeling good about exactly how I am, today. IT IS HARD. Just getting dressed this morning, I had these thoughts [more or less]:
- ugh, my stomach is too big
- my legs are so white, ugh I can’t even look
- saddlebags, gross
- I’d look a lot better if I lost some weight
Instead, I could honestly think these things [but I didn't]:
- I love that white streak in my hair that frames my face — I feel so lucky that it’s all clumped up like that, so striking!
- I’m so glad I have such pretty skin, and I always have. Lucky me!
- Pretty good! 52, pretty happy, pretty smile, getting stronger every day. Pretty good!
- Good job.
I’m thinking and trying.
Other stuff: Knitting
I don’t really know why, but I’m in a big knitting lull. I took knitting with me to Turkey but didn’t knit a single stitch. In fact, except for being forced to pull the needles out at the airport, I didn’t even open the knitting bag. The last time this happened, just as Janna suggested I just needed to finish something to get it kick-started again, so maybe I can finish my giant byzantine Traveling Woman shawl in the next few days. I’m down to fewer than 10 rows (but of course the rows are very long now). But Friday is my son’s birthday; he’ll be 24, and this is the first birthday I’ll get to celebrate with him since he was 18. Saturday we’re doing our one-week-delayed Mother’s Day, and I have some stuff to do. So I may not get to do much knitting for a few days. Unhappily(?) that doesn’t bother me.
Finally, I’m not getting far in recovering from this jetlag. Reliably, I wake up at 2:12a.m., which kind of cracks me up how specific it is. When I woke up this morning and glanced at the clock and saw yep, 2:12, I stifled a laugh. I start dragging hard around 5pm and crash by 9:30. I hope this passes soon!
Don’t know how to end this overly-long, overly-wordy post. 
two of the thoughtful people who mean a lot to me
the sweetest baby
She’s here! Marnie arrived very late last night after a nearly-disastrous trip from Chicago — lots of people trying to leave Chicago had nearly-disastrous trips yesterday thanks to fog. Or so I hear. Anyway, Marnie’s here for the weekend and I am so glad to see her.
Marnie in India, in college
I’m not quite sure what we’ll do during her visit, but I know it’ll involve a lot of talking and sharing (our specialty) and probably some art-looking (her specialty) and eating good food (our family specialty). She’s also going to show me how to do some cute things with my currently uncute and extremely long (for me) hair. And maybe we’ll play Scrabble and watch movies. Lots of choices.
Depth, in the post title, refers both to Marnie, who swims in it, and The Pale King, the book that’s just come out by David Foster Wallace. Actually, his editor assembled the unfinished book, but it’s classic DFW, from the sound of it. I can’t wait to read it. The NYTimes book review made me want to cry, from missing DFW’s writing and spirit in the world. Infinite Jest was about our obsessive need for all-consuming entertainment, and The Pale King is about our boredom. From the NYTimes piece:
Perhaps, he writes, “dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there,” namely the existential knowledge “that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we’ve lost one more day that will never come back.”
Happiness, Wallace suggests in a Kierkegaardian note at the end of this deeply sad, deeply philosophical book, is the ability to pay attention, to live in the present moment, to find “second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive.”
Sigh. There aren’t that many people who talk like that, and people you can talk with about those concerns. Marnie sent me this link to a wonderful article about DFW’s papers, which are now collected at UT Austin. Of course I love seeing the notes people leave in books (as I wrote in this post), so reading his notes is a great experience.
It’s a gorgeous sunny spring day here in Manhattan — I hope you’re facing as wonderful a Saturday as I am! Pictures will be taken, that’s for sure.
three things that choke me up, here on a bitter cold Friday morning
The newest:
How’d they do that without being corny? I was watching it all alone this morning at 6am, kind of steeled against being moved because I’d read that it was moving (like, ‘oh yeah? not me buddy…’) and then there I was with big tears in my eyes.
Next: I know I put this on the Laos blog on Thanksgiving, but I find myself unable to stop thinking about it. When I was a little kid, I was dark. I read too much Kafka and Camus at too young an age, wondered about the meaning of life, blah blah blah, loved to call myself an “existentialist” by which I meant what people usually mean, which seems to be an assumption that it’s all meaningLESS. But of course that’s not what it really means; at least, that’s not the end of it. Existentialism really means that we endow the meaning ourselves, more or less. I once heard Leo Buscaglia say that people who wonder about the meaning of life are really just talking about the experience of life, that the point is to experience life. I’ve become very impatient with people who mope around and say there’s no meaning. FUCK THAT, yes there is. You’re here, we’re here, we get to be here. And here’s the bit I can’t stop thinking about, that I put on my Laos blog, from Cat’s Cradle, The Books of Bokonon (Kurt Vonnegut, of course):
God made mud. God got lonesome. So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up!” “See all I’ve made,” said God, “the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.” And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud. I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done. Nice going, God. Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn’t have. I feel very unimportant compared to You. The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and look around. I got so much, and most mud got so little. Thank you for the honor! Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep. What memories for mud to have! What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met! I loved everything I saw! Good night.”
Yeah. Every day that we get to be here – even for the real shitty stuff – it’s an honor. Lucky us, and I mean that in the most honest, least ironic way.
And finally (since this is just the $200 category), this one always makes me cry and fits well with the Vonnegut passage, for me:
Happy Friday y’all.
o how i love annie lennox. i really do.
I had a long conversation with Katie, my older daughter, this morning, which was essentially a conversation about what gives a life meaning and value. Like me, her desire is for close-to-home things – meaningful work, a family, being a mom. Like her, I am often intimidated by people whose lives are more dramatic, or whose work is more “exciting,” or whose lives are more something than ours.
And then, while I was uploading my new sock photo to ravelry, my iTunes randomly played a song from Annie Lennox‘s album Songs of Mass Destruction. (If you click the album cover to the left, it’ll take you to the Amazon page where you can buy the music; I very highly recommend it!) I became fixated on the first song released from the album, Dark Road. Sony took down the video, so I can’t show it here. Bastards. It’s a beautiful video, and the song is heartbreakingly beautiful, as many of her songs are.
55? isn't she gorgeous?!
I’ve been in fan love with Annie since I first heard Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) back in 1983, I think. As a matter of fact, that song always makes me think of Katie; she was a tiny toddler at the time and she was crazy for the song. It could be playing at the other end of the house and she’d squeal, come running, and then stand there, bopping and grinning to the beat. Adorable. Annie’s music has been the soundtrack for much of my adult life; the Diva and Medusa albums truly are the soundtrack to the end of my first marriage, and my devastating divorce. The Peace album is the soundtrack of a year of my life in graduate school, when everything — everything — came together and I was absolutely happy in myself. The Bare album is the soundtrack to one of the biggest changes of my adult life.
So anyway, I’m sitting at my desk, doing my little small life thing, documenting a little sock I knit, for heaven’s sake, and the next song from the album came on – Sing. Sing my sister sing, let your voice be heard, what won’t kill you will make you strong, sing my sister sing. It could be trite, but it isn’t. Annie sings it with urgency – sing, my sisters. Sing. The song is the focus of her Sing campaign to prevent HIV transmission from mother to child.
So there she is (just a couple of years older than me, by the way) making beautiful music and trying desperately to help save lives in Africa, and to help women, and here I am taking too many pictures of a sock.
Of course in light of this morning’s conversation with Katie it struck me. I could say the cliched thing, something trite about “all lives have meaning” blah blah blah (note, it’s not trite because it’s not true! it is true that all lives have meaning. But it’s trite because it’s a too-simple answer to a deeper concern). I don’t know how to resolve it. I feel it, I understand it.
Maybe it’s something like understanding that age 51 I’m probably not going to be an astronaut and should cross that one off my list.
Anyway – here’s Sing, if you haven’t heard it:
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