Little Old Lady … in Waiting

Tag: philosophy

  • 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.”

  • The Little Old Lady…in waiting sits down with Ottawa podcaster Trudy Chapman

    The Little Old Lady…in waiting sits down with Ottawa podcaster Trudy Chapman

    https://meanderings-with-trudy.simplecast.com/episodes/meander-with-sylvie-fitzgerald

  • Solvitur Ambulando…It Is Solved by Walking

    “Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.” – Linda Hogan (Native American writer )

    “‘But it isn’t easy ‘ said Pooh. ‘Poetry and hums arent things which you get, they’re things that get you. And all you can do is go where they can find you.’”- A.A. Milne

    If I’ve ever invited you on a walk then there is a fair chance you’re someone I love very much…family, and a handful of friends I keep close, like “a cloak, to mind (my) life.”(O’Donahue) I don’t walk, as our ancestors once did, to arrive at a particular destination, nor can I honestly say that I walk to safeguard my health, although, as a nurse, I know it to be powerful medicine, and an essential practice in the Little old lady in waiting’s handbook on how best to live a long and healthy life.  For me, walking is a sacred sojourn, like writing in a journal, or sitting down for a cup of tea on a busy day to savour a last bit of cake; it is a solitary ritual, a reflective exercise, a rich, sensual, fortifying experience, that grounds me in the present moment, and reveals a deeper way of looking, illuminating a world just beyond what our sedentary eyes can capture. Walking is a portal to the natural world where time may stand still, where we may even disappear for a while, as our unconscious unfurls, and insights and creative leaps lay waiting on well-trod paths like so many flowers to be gathered, an endless bouquet of ideas and dreams waiting to be revealed and rehomed.

    I have always believed a regular walking regime to be a salve for most of life’s ailments.  All those feel-good neurotransmitters dormant and eager for activation. I won’t bore you with the overly marketed health benefits…well, maybe just a quick review. Just as the doctors have always preached, walking, even a little, can significantly increase your lifespan, and reduce your biological age (marginally more appealing to the chronologically disadvantaged).  Walking also lowers your risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and depression.  If that’s not enough to persuade you, there is also statistically significant evidence that walking lowers your stress level and reduces rumination and negative thinking.  Wait… I mean I’m down with the stress management, but I’m kind of trauma bonded with the rumination and negative thinking, that’s half my material.  Whatever…you get the idea…the health zealots are spot on, walking is good for you, body, and mind…but when has that ever been sufficient incentive to lace up, or drop the fork, if you see what I mean…again with the negative thinking and rumination. Let’s try again. Little old lady in waiting to little old lady in waiting, post-menopausal women who walk 4 hours a week have a 41% lower risk of hip fracture.  I like that. That’s positive…right?  I’m not sure where they get these exact numbers but I found it on my socials so it must be true. 

    Health considerations aside, here is what I know about walking from my own clinical trials, population of one.  No matter the setting for my walk: be it the sleepy, maturely tree’d, largely childless suburb that I call home, or any of the woodland parks scattered liberally in our beautiful picture province, or possibly the sea paths that wind along the miles of coastland in our stunning port city, nestled on the Bay of Fundy, or even a streetscape in the heritage block of Canada’s oldest incorporated city; a walk out of doors is a way through the wardrobe to a bountiful sensual world, where a steady stream of eye candy and auditory enchantments remind us to embrace the wild animal within, an invitation to howl for all the little old ladies in waiting, sat at home disguised  in grandma’s clothes, both figuratively, and literally some days.  We are meant to move our bodies, we our built to explore on foot, our ancestors walking ten times the distances we typically cover today. 

    Outside, in the natural world I am routinely transported by the startling beauty of the Disneyesque birds that sing in choirs on my quiet street, their sweet sad tunes in perfect pitch; or the spiral dance of autumnal leaves twirling upward as though commanded by the invisible hand of some ancient sorceress, reciting a spell to safeguard the woodland wildlife from winter on its way.  I hope she remembers to include me and mine in her magic. The animals nearby have a narrative all their own as they go about their daily errands and I nod to them when we meet: the black-sheep squirrel who lives in the tree at the front of my house, alone and happy to be so, or the family of deer who eat from my neighbours unpicked apple tree, heavy with fruit. I met, by chance, a beautiful fox not long ago, but neither of us had time to stop.

    Near the sea, I always envision I am walking with my dead relatives and even imagine I can hear their whispers in the wind and on the waves.  Walking in the woods, the air is perfumed with spruce and pine and something more elusive that smells like childhood and brings me back to a more innocent age, when the scariest monster I could imagine lived under my bed, not some beast who throws Gatsby themed balls, an evil, self-proclaimed king whose every soundbite is some variation of “let them eat cake.”  In the woods, while I’m walking at least, the king is dead…long live all the wild beings who walk this beautiful planet in peace.

    Saunter, stroll, scuttle, scale or stride,  I walk faithfully, alone, into the halcyon summer breeze of fresh cut grass and full strength sunny days, or the warm spring rain that bursts gardens into bloom, or my favourite, the crisp autumnal harvest days scented with chimney smoke and alight with golden interior tapestries of life, the window frames of  our neighbours homes in the gloaming, or out into the first snowfall of winter, a crampon crawl up and down frozen streets,  footfalls in virgin snow where I spy the tracks of smaller species, freshly awoken from a winter’s sleep.  Garlanded in cap and scarf, mittened, earmuffed, and balaclava’d, I’m adrift, a snowman flying through the air…la la la la la laaaaa.

    Outside, enveloped by ancient all-knowing trees, or surrounded by heritage architecture older than three little old ladies in waiting counted together, or stood at the thin space adjacent to the sea, there is a clarity of mind to be discovered that cannot be found in a book, or sat safely by the fireside, nor even under the tutelage of a wise seer.  There is a reverie known to the solitary walker (Rousseau), an enlightenment, an illumination, a flow of insights around every corner we turn. One foot in front of the other, there is space to think and puzzle and solve all the vexations visited upon us. Walking costs us nothing but time, no special gear required, only the capacity to listen to the resounding truth of our own intuition, a voice inside that speaks louder in silence, in the quiet found out of doors.

    A walkers’ trail is alive with imagery that invokes tangential lines of poetry and philosophical enquiry.  There is a hum when we walk…a higher frequency, a quiver of ideas and creative sparks. “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?” (Oliver) “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.” (Elliot) And if while walking we by chance fall awake for a moment, to know this life is only a dream, how do we stay awake long enough to remember we are dreaming? (Wittgenstein). Walking is a whirlwind dance of ideas, a flow, an unconscious current in a deep primordial sea. And the story we rehearse inside ourselves, making up the parts we can’t quite recall, is a conversation I am happy to host most every day.

    I like to walk at a slower pace now, not quite the crawl my geriatric dog prefers, stopping to sniff every few feet, but I’m more interested in exercise for my mind and the quieting or distilling of my thoughts, than I am in exercising my body or protecting my cardiovascular health or even promoting longevity…still, perhaps aging backwards is something to aspire to.

    For me walking is a meditation, “with every step, I arrive.” (Thich Nhat Hahn) I practice slowing down, I come awake and allow time to stretch out before me, like clotheslines where birds gossip with their friends and freshly laundered linens flap their wings.  I see winter bared branches with captured notes and receipts, escaped from recycled bins, adrift in the wind like so many clues. I listen to the sound of my own footsteps and then deeper still to my breath, and my own heartbeat, and the hum that hangs over everything, the sound of the universe, I suspect, like an hourglass set close to a microphone recording the ever-escaping sands of time.

    I have found many treasures on my walks: old coins and worry stones, sea glass and driftwood art, lost letters and grocery lists, emblems of lives lived next to our own, and reminders that we are, none of us, alone.   I have heard the voices of lost loved ones and remembered the thoughts and images of versions of myself long since lost with them.  Walking I have found the answers to problems, big and small, I’ve found perspective, and gratitude, an abiding peace, and a strong feeling of connection with something greater than myself, something capable of conjuring the unspeakable beauty that is all around us, best viewed by foot, moving at your own pace, walking alone, in the natural world.