Little Old Lady … in Waiting

Tag: meaning of life

  • A Parting Glass

    “It takes two years to learn to speak and sixty years to learn to keep quiet.” – Ernest Hemingway

    “It is a kind of love, is it not? How the cup holds the tea…I’ve been thinking about the patience of ordinary things. How clothes wait respectfully in closets, and soap dries quietly in the dish, and towels drink the wet…and what is more generous than a window.” – Pat Scheider

    “A low inward thrum seemed to pass through the garden, as though the place itself had drawn breadth and held it. The roses knew first. A faint tremor went through their stems; their leaves turned ever so slightly as if in listening…The roses said nothing. They had long ago mastered patience. But in the folded centres of their blooms they kept their knowledge.” – Thackray of England

    We don’t always get to say a proper goodbye, to intentionally take our leave of one another, to say the words that will hold meaning and then pass into memory. As my 60th birthday looms and my year of writing as a little old lady… in waiting draws to a close, I raise a “parting glass” in gratitude for your readership and your always thoughtful and thought-provoking feedback. A special thank you to the “12” wise women who gave me their trust, and opened their homes and there histories to share their earned wisdom. A curated circle, chosen for their considerable and varied life experience, they dug deep for their gold and held out their best bits so I could take a closer look, reviewing over 600 years of collective learning. These conversations proved a deeply nourishing, uniquely rich, and stimulating experience.

    The Little old Lady …in waiting blog which began as a bid to slow down time as I transitioned to a life beyond the corseted years of paid employment and the heavy-lifting decades of parenting, was developed as a space to inventory and explore the bittersweet privilege of growing older; the good, the bad and the not so pretty.

    As a writing workshop the blog proved a perfect tool for exploring and consolidating my thoughts on topics like retirement and the mother choice, death and diet, loss and heartache, the importance of rest and transformative power of travel, creative engagement, the beauty and majesty of the Crone, the everyday therapy of walking, the art of happiness, the meaning of life, and even the possibility of an afterlife. I smile a slow inscrutable smile imagining my children, one day opening these essays, perhaps in their 50’s, and hopefully wearing similar smiles, reading my thoughts on subjects they are only now beginning to consider. I will have my say!

    I have learned a great deal in this last year of writing. I learned, most importantly, that when we distill our life stories down to the essentials: education, work, love of place and people, it is always a story of family, the backbone of our lives, that sustains us, those who came before us and those who will still be here after we are gone.

    Often the quality heralded as the “best thing” about getting older is a certain imperviousness to the opinions of others, while the “worst thing” about getting older, referenced most frequently, is pain, the emotional pain of losing those we love, as well as physical pain, or the breaking down of the body. It seems while our inner women may still feel twenty-something, the body keeps its own count of the passing years.

    Important life lessons that resonated with me include the deceptively simple truth that “happiness is an inside job,” the importance of “being in the moment,” the gift of “forgiveness… of ourselves and others, the profoundly freeing understanding “that control is an illusion” and the everyday magic of “leading with kindness.”

    Favourite quotes …an impossible task to be sure, but a few stand-outs for me include:

    “Well behaved women seldom make history.”

    “Would it help?” (a question to ask when tempted to plummet into a worry spiral)

    “If this isn’t nice, then I don’t know what is.” (An intentional acknowledgement of everyday moments that bring joy)

    “Life is not difficult for those who prefer everything” (Excellent advice to accept the universe as it unfolds)

    I loved the experience of collecting favourite words, arguably my most telling interview question. Honorable mention must go to the expletives and the made-up words. “Kretzimah (soft or enjoyable, a gentle person…it describes everything delightful” and “Snigg,” an accidental emoticon. (Originally a typo denoting an emotional reaction, passed down in family correspondence, evolving to an intergenerational sentiment inspiring familial love and affection).

    Components of perfect days recounted invariably involve agendaless afternoons and time with family. Chapter headings chosen to reflect this part of our life stories were most often some variation of living intentionally, in wisdom and in grace or a kind of renaissance, or revival. Experiences that spark joy include meaningful conversation, time with close friends and family and engaging work. Guilty pleasures were for the most part verboten, discarded vestiges of younger versions of ourselves. Most everyone interviewed was open to the notion of an afterlife but most were unsure what it might look like. Some hoped we might fly, many wished to spend time with lost loved ones, but ultimately the afterlife proved impossible to imagine in any tangible way, one friend insistent on “a place of perdition if you’ve been just an absolute arsehole.” Never mess with a little old lady…in waiting.

    As to tea with real or imagined guests, many chose to invite personal heroes, and family members no longer living, with one thoughtful LOLIW choosing to come back some years hence and have tea with her grown grandchildren. What a great privilege that would be.

    As for eulogy, most women I spoke to wished to be remembered as kind, passionately engaged with their lives, a good friend, or as someone who leaves the world a bit better than when they arrived. My favourite eulogies were the succinct ones, “….and curtain“, ” I came, I was…I went, and the brilliantly comic, “That ass though…”

    I answered these questions for myself in a journal entry dated almost one calendar year ago to the day, and will attach them below as a gesture of respect and gratitude for the 12 extraordinary women who agreed to embrace social media and go public with their answers (I can be brave too), and as a legacy letter for my own children who may one day wish to know my answers. I encourage all my fellow cronies to do the same as a legacy project, as a writing exercise to distill personal meaning, and as a love letter to yourself, a guide to light your way in these last and hopefully most meaningful years of your journey.

    It was a great privilege to engage with you, my readers, in this year of writing as a Little old lady…in waiting and a real surprise to discover readers in places as far away as South Africa and Switzerland, Japan and Ireland, Greece and Australia, over 40 countries in total. I am deeply grateful for your readership and correspondence. My wish for little old ladies in waiting everywhere, is that we savour these last, unpromised chapters of our story, and if, as I have suggested many times, that “the end is where we start from,” it seems right to close where I began this journey, with Homer’s insightful invitation to mind your life in these last, most precious years.

    “Any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.“

    I raise a parting glass to you, in gratitude,

    A Little Old Lady…in Waiting

    In Conversation with Sylvie Fitzgerald

    Tell me your life story in seven sentences or less.

    I was born on the first day of Summer and was originally to be called “Summer”. My dad decided on Sylvie instead, a French name that he found in a novel by Louis Lamour. I had the great good fortune to be born into a family where I grew up feeling deeply loved, with two older brothers, one a protector, the other a soulmate…I was the only girl, and the baby so I grew up feeling like a princess.

    I’m a very high functioning introvert, happiest at home, reading, writing and, to a lesser extent, discussing, so I spent half of my 20s at university, managing to come out without any working papers, so I decided on a teaching degree first, and much later a nursing degree. No work has ever made me as happy as the work of reading, researching, ruminating, and writing. Along the way I met a lovely man named Jeff and we’ve been together now for more than 30 years… he’s probably the best decision I ever made, he and our two beautiful twenty-something children.

    Closing in on 60, I have a growing awareness that my time is finite and I would like to spend it well, cultivating, to the exclusion of all else, engagement, joy, and kindness. I’m trying to live well so that I can reconnect with people I’ve lost, people who have gone ahead of me and that I miss very much.

    What is the best thing about getting older?

    The best thing about getting older is laying down the mantle of responsibilities we assume over the course of our lives … work …, parenting, what to make for dinner, worrying about all the things beyond our control. I love the quote. “Don’t worry, nothing is in our control.” I guess for me the best thing is reclaiming my freedom, deciding how best to spend my life every day, every moment.

    What is the worst thing about getting older?

    The worst thing about getting older is losing the people you love, the people who matter most to you, people so much a part of you, you’re really not sure what’s left of you after they leave….and the aftermath of that experience…learning to live with that kind of profound loss.

    What would you title this chapter of your life?

    Beauty Everywhere.

    If you could retain or retrieve one quality from your youth, what would it be?

    I’ve let go of many things that no longer serve me…a certain arrogance that my answers are the right answers, an analytic way of thinking that is quick to classify and critique and judge, an egocentricism that casts me as the star of the story instead of a single small light on a tree set with millions of twinkling stars, or the idea that we must set goals and achieve them, that the mountain is there to be climbed instead of simply seen. I’ve let go of a lot from my youth, none of which I would wish to reclaim… maybe taut skin and a waist.

    What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned so far?

    That kindness trumps cleverness, every time. I used to think that the pursuit of knowledge was the most laudable goal and now I know that kindness is, unequivocally, and that the best training in kindness begins with kindness to yourself.

    Do you have a favourite quote?

    “With our thoughts we make the world.” (Buddha) It was the first big secret I discovered and it remains a central tenet of my philosophy that I return to again and again. That we, each of us, have our own unique lens on the world, a filter that colours our perceptions. Two people can read the same book or watch the same play or experience the same family dinner and one can come away, marvelling at a moment of great beauty while another is conflicted about the experience, a witness to discord or even tragedy. We create our own reality; we see what we expect to see. Physicists even claim that when we observe a thing, we actually change its composition on a molecular level. We give form to things. If we cultivate beauty within, then we see beauty in others. If we are hard on ourselves then we have a tendency to be hard on others, if we are ourselves injured, we will sometimes choose to injure others in anger. Anais Nin says it beautifully as well, “ We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.” Closely related is a quote by Rumi, “Out there beyond the idea of wrong doing and right doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” In reality there is nothing that is good or ill, its only our thoughts that colour in context and assign meaning.

    Do you have a favourite word?

    I love words so it’s almost impossible to choose only one. I’ll curtail myself to a few. I’ll start with “Sonder” a recent acquisition and new favourite, discovered in a book by Joe Koenig “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.” It’s the realization that everyone you pass by is living a life as intricate and complex and real as your own, complete with their own dreams, troubles and foibles, a similar hero’s journey that evolves, unknown around you, like an anthill sprawling deep underground with passages to countless other lives that you will never truly know, but may still appear in for a moment, like a photobomber, perhaps only once, sipping a latte in the background, or a blurry passerby in a dimly lit window at dusk. I love the notion of interconnectedness “sonder” conjures.

    “Copacetic” is another favourite. I like to say the word, the sound of it, and I like it’s meaning, that all is well. It also invites a posture of “equanimity” for me, a quality I have been in pursuit of most of my adult life, and another favourite word inspired in part by its illusiveness. Lastly, I must include, “Egad“ an old-fashioned exclamation that my father was fond of using. It helps me remember everything I hold dear about him, his humor and his love of language.

    Describe your perfect day.

    My perfect day starts early, maybe 6 AM, a quiet morning …coffee… it’s raining outside. I can hear the tapping of the rain on the window. panes. I love the rain because I don’t have to feel guilty about staying in on rainy days. I take my time, I write some morning pages and enjoy a second coffee with my husband, perhaps a fire, a lazy morning. Afterwards there is some physical component to the day maybe a long walk with my dog by the sea, or a swim in summer. After lunch I fall in to the pages of a perfect story, perhaps a woman in her 60’s, maybe a sonnet writer, surrounded by colourful characters that distract and delight. Later in the day my family gathers, there is slow atmospheric music playing, possibly jazz…maybe The Mercury Songbook. The lighting is orangey gold, Rembrandt tinted, I can smell seafood being prepared for dinner. Someone else is cooking, hopefully my husband, a glass of wine appears, as if by magic, just one. My kids are there and we sit down to a dinner together. We talk about our day, things that made us think or wonder, little beauties our eyes captured. There is dessert of course, because life can always be a little sweeter. Later another good story, for there can never be enough, perhaps a British mystery and then a blissful sleep.

    If you could have tea with anyone, real or fictional, dead or alive, who would it be and what would you talk about?

    I would want to sit down with my mum and dad and brother, all of whom have passed away. I would also invite my living brother, so I guess my origin family. I’d have questions, but mostly I would just want to sit in their presence, to feel their embrace in a physical way, to hold hands, to hug them and be held by them in turn for as long as I could. I’d ask where they are. I’d ask how I might find them when it was my turn to follow them, and I’d ask how we might talk sometimes now, how I might best listen for them.

    Tell me three things that bring you joy.

    My family, reading, and meaningful discussion, the kind that changes you in small important ways, that butts against your confirmation bias, the kind where you can feel your heart beating and know for sure that you’ve discovered something true.

    Name a guilty pleasure.

    I love a good period romance, think Downton Abbey, Jane Eyre, The Austen novels. You know the story, always a dark, brooding hero. Just a little healthy escapism but never before dinner. Every little old lady in waiting knows that we rescue ourselves, that we are the architects of our own fortunes, that we craft our own happy endings, but sometimes it’s fun to make believe.

    Do you believe in life after death? What does it look like?

    Yes, I do. I choose to believe in life after death, in the absence of any definitive proof one way or another. I am not so arrogant as to discount what I cannot conceptualize or understand. I don’t believe that there is an end to what we truly are, our essence. I know that our physical bodies die, but not our true or higher selves, the part of ourselves that has no name, that listens deep within us. Death, I believe is only a small speed bump between this world and the next, a door opening and closing. Blake wrote ” If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

    What does it look like? I hope it’s like a book I once read, What Dreams May Come. I hope it’s a place where we flow in a stream of consciousness with our thoughts and desires. If I think of my mother, then I am suddenly there with her in her kitchen watching her make molasses cookies, or I float down to the seaside for a stroll with my dad and a long overdue chat. Later a trip to the library, where I find my way to the poetry section for a cuppa with my brother where we cast away with our latest literary finds. In the afterlife of my imagining there is no fear, no scarcity, no expiration, no worry…only engagement, adventure and love.

    What would you like your eulogy to say?

    I hope it will say that she was kind, that she loved well, that she honoured her gifts, and that she left this world a slightly better place for having been here. I’d like someone I have loved well to read the poem, “Kindness.” by Naomi Shihab Nai and perhaps Ulysses by Tennyson or maybe the Desiderata or almost anything by Rilke or Rumi. I hope I get to hear your words, and carry them home with me, carefully, to keep until I see you again.

    Kindness

    Naomi Shihab Nye

    1952 – 

    Before you know what kindness really is
    you must lose things,
    feel the future dissolve in a moment
    like salt in a weakened broth.
    What you held in your hand,
    what you counted and carefully saved,
    all this must go so you know
    how desolate the landscape can be
    between the regions of kindness.
    How you ride and ride
    thinking the bus will never stop,
    the passengers eating maize and chicken
    will stare out the window forever.

    Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
    you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
    lies dead by the side of the road.
    You must see how this could be you,
    how he too was someone
    who journeyed through the night with plans
    and the simple breath that kept him alive.

    Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
    you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
    You must wake up with sorrow.
    You must speak to it till your voice
    catches the thread of all sorrows
    and you see the size of the cloth.
    Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
    only kindness that ties your shoes
    and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
    only kindness that raises its head
    from the crowd of the world to say
    It is I you have been looking for,
    and then goes with you everywhere
    like a shadow or a friend.

  • The Meaning of Life

    “To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breadth of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of snowbirds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years.”

    Rachel Louise Carson

    “I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
    down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
    to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
    when someone sneezes, a leftover
    from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
    And sometimes, when you spill lemons
    from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
    pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
    We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
    and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
    at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
    to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.We have so little of each other, now. So far
    from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
    What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
    fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
    have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.    “

    Danusha Lameris

    150 odd days shy of turning 60, I’ll admit, a blog post titled “The Meaning of Life” seems a little ambitious, even arrogant… utter hubris really.  Shouldn’t I be a bit closer to posthumous before attempting such a feat.  Still, it’s a dark, rainy, January day as I write this, and on rainy days when the lights glow orange, and the rain patters against the windowpanes, “no one…not even the rain has such small hands” (Cummings), I find myself incapsulated in liminal space, a portal between what has been and what will be.  It feels like the clocks have stopped and the kettle is whistling shrill, and I have been gifted stolen hours to decipher secret things, adrift in a liminal sea. I have some notes… and as the house settles around me, if I’m honest, I find myself engaged in a full-on discourse with my dear, departed brother.  If that lends the following any weight, I’m glad of it…most days I think all my thoughts are his alone anyway, truly, and I, but the scribe.

    Greater minds than ours have contemplated this age-old riddle a time or two, certainly, but, of late, I’m all the time wondering about meaning, a penchant of little old ladies in waiting, especially as we begin to lose loved ones. What are we meant to be doing, do you think, with the time we have left to us?  What’s the meaning of life?

    Maybe every soul is charged with solving this particular puzzle to their own satisfaction. But standing on the shoulders of giants, Victor Frankl, a beautiful mind if ever there was one, is as near a perfect starting point as possible. Frankl wrote that our greatest task in this life is to find meaning, and maybe what meaning we find, he suggests, depends on who we are, inside, or the eye glass we peep through for a look at the world around us. It’s important work, this search for meaning, and I’m sorry to say that a great many of us are asleep at the wheel.  Kierkegaard believed that we’re all too busy focusing on the ‘minutiae of life’. We ‘tranquilize ourselves with the trivial’, he wrote.  He called these poor souls, ‘immediate men,’ men engaged in the mundane, lost in a life of endless, repetitive deck swabbing, and never looking out to sea.

    Still others among us get so weary in their search for meaning, they convince themselves that there is no meaning to be found at all.  Even wise old Uncle Bill wrote that, “Life is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” A beautiful line, but complete blather of course.  Shakespeare isn’t alone either.  Douglas Adams’ answer to “life, the universe, and everything” is just a number, 42 to be exact. Literary critics have worked themselves into a frenzy of deconstructive contortion, mining for meaning in Adams’ enigmatic answer but, it’s just a random number. Adams is suggesting, ever so smartly, that the universe is, in fact, random, morally neutral, an accident, and that there is no actual meaning to be found at all. I confess, a much younger version of myself took some shelter here for a time, but nihilism is a lonely planet, and not the one I intend to die on.

    Adams is a fine fellow, I concede, but my brother taught me to start with the poets when looking for the truth, or at least something to be getting on with, a figurative foothold, if you will, as we hang by our fingernails, over the vast existential abyss. It’s Whitman’s lines about life’s meaning that come to me now, “Answer: That you are here, that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” So, perhaps, it’s finding purpose, or a life of service or some combination of the two that makes for a meaningful life.  Picasso wraps it up pretty, “the meaning of life” he said, “is to find your gift, and its purpose is to give it away.” Bleck…sugar spike…I promise that’s as greeting card, sickly sweet derivative as I’ll get…do read on dear friends.

    Cultivating your passions, and finding purpose, are, without doubt, excellent cards to play in the boardgame of life. It’s important to find work that you love to do… daily, if only as an antidote for boredom and disenchantment…it’s like a get out of jail free card that you can play anytime, a ticket to the ferris wheel of full engagement. Of course by this calculation, a meaningful life might equate to making a lot less money, and living without many of the material comforts we hold dear in this country… a home… a car…a Sunday pot roast. Still, I’ve always found soulless work to be the greater poverty, a cost far more dear than a slender pocketbook. Finding meaning may come at a price, but it’s a fair trade I believe, just not for the faint of heart.  Maybe meaning is best mined by the brave.   Certainly such a virtue can only help. 

    It takes a bit of courage to start you on the road less travelled, but on the plus side, any quest for meaning is also, where you’ll meet your people…the ones that you’ll carry in your heart, that you’ve somehow always known, but never met before…they’re waiting for you there…on your chosen path…and such fellowship, when you find it, is like a cheat code for unlocking lasting meaning.   Thomas Merton wrote, “we do not find meaning by ourselves alone, we find it with each other.”  I’ll add to this a little venerable Vonnegut, a wise man if ever there was one, ‘the purpose of life,” he wrote, “no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved’.” That certainly has the resounding sound of truth, to my ear at least.

    Fellowship, a sense of belonging or kinship, is like a keystone, the puzzle piece that opens up a blue sky horizon or the gate to a secret garden in full bloom, each piece unique, all connected, waves moving in tandem on a wild primordial sea. Albert Schweitzer wrote that “life becomes harder when we have love for others, but it also becomes richer and happier,” and, with apologies to our learned German friend, more meaningful. “The full measure of a man,” he wrote, “is not to be found in the man himself, but in the colours and textures that come alive in others because of him.”

    “Above all, when I am finished with my days, wrote Schweitzer, “may those who knew me say, ‘He was so kind.’” Hell of an epitaph, that, and maybe the best and truest route to real and lasting meaning in this life, and further still perhaps. It’s the sort of thing people said about my brother, and the kind of person I’m working hard to become, as a little old lady…in waiting (some of us are slow learners).

    That old high school dropout, Einstein, told us that “although we experience ourselves as separate from each other and the universe as a whole, it’s actually a mass optical delusion, and that the delusion is a kind of prison.” Our job, he said, is to free ourselves from that prison and widen our circle of compassion to include all living creatures and the whole of nature.

    The natural world is a multifocal Mecca for encountering meaning. It’s encrypted in the birdsong, falling leaves and snowflakes like so many clues, and the perfume that hangs in the quiet wooded trails and winding coastal paths wakes us from our slumber, like an ancient wind that whispers the wisdom of our ancestors, and lets us walk alongside them awhile. John Muir, the renowned Scottish naturalist, wrote that, “the sun shines not on us, but in us,” and “the river flows not past us but through us.”  Muir believed that going into the woods is like going home. “Into the forest I go,” he wrote, “to lose my mind and find my soul.“

    My brother tells me that meaning is all around us, but you can only see it if you nurture a sense of wonderment.  “We need to watch things” he says, “as though they were worth watching…and not just the fireworks, and the bonfires, and the birthday cake candles, mind, but all the little beauties…everywhere.  I mean the dog napping, and everyday early morning bird chatter, the laundry lines alight like kites on windy days, or the chorus that echoes from a stand of trees. It’s the rough decaled edge of an old leather bound book with a secret inside, or a kettle boiled, the first lick of frosting on a cake made with love, and the last; it’s a letter penned, a pillowed plumped, a perfectly paired sock drawer, or the glow of a lamp lit at dusk that envelopes a common room with a golden Rembrandt hue.  Even the remembering of such moments takes my breath,” he tells me.

    Is that it then…we need just look at everything with a sense of wonder…that’s where life’s meaning is found, I ask? “That’s always been enough for me,” he replies, a knowing familiar smile on his face, “and maybe one thing more.  You see, I think we’re meant to learn something while we’re here, and if we’re good students, well…then the lessons get a little harder.  The ultimate lesson of course is unconditional love. I mean, all the best people we know have experienced defeat, and struggle and loss, haven’t they, and they found their way back out of the dark, and with an even brighter light inside themselves; the sort of light that tends to ignite a spark in everyone they meet.  It’s a light that others can warm themselves by, isn’t it?”

    “Maybe we don’t need to search for meaning at all.  Maybe if we just watch closely enough, we catch glimmers of it here and there, as we swirl past.  Life is like that isn’t it, just a waltz around the room really.  There is nowhere to go, or be, nothing that must be done…maybe let go of all that sister, and just fall into step when you hear the music.”