I sat down with Margaret Anne Smith at a local coffee house with a reputation for good lattes and a spectrum of social justice projects that support many marginalized members of our community.  It seemed a fitting setting for a conversation with a woman who is, among other things, an advocate for the disenfranchised, sitting on the board of a harm reduction enterprise that supports people living with addiction.  Margaret Anne Smith holds a PhD in English Literature, specializing in 20^th Century poetry, and has taught her entire career in the post-secondary setting.  She is an academic, a teacher, a poet, and a fiber artist.  She is married, a mother of two, and has the sort of old-world integrity and essential goodness that makes you believe that we are not without hope, no matter what unbelievable chicanery we witness daily on the evening news.  As I listened to her speak, I couldn’t help thinking of the power of a single individual to effect great change in the world around her, especially one armed with a sharp analytical mind trained to notice what others do not see, and gifted with a clear, insightful voice to ask the right questions.  She is currently at work on a book of poetry that celebrates local coastal beauty and lure.  It is a collection I very much look forward to reading someday.

Tell me your life story in seven sentences or less? 

I grew up in Saint John and…same sentence… moved back here on purpose, after spending a dozen years away.  I love my extended family and friends. I have been married to David for 36 very good years. We have two great kids. I live near the Bay of Fundy. I am a teacher. I am a reader and a writer.

What is the best thing about getting older?

Learning…I was going to say discovering, but it’s not like a momentary discovery, there is no switch that flips, there’s no ‘aha moment’… it’s a gradual process of learning what I care about. And the other side of it, is learning what I don’t give a fuck about, and that list has changed with time.

What is the worst thing about getting older?

Joint pain and not being able to see as well as I want to in my 50s. That’s the part that surprised me, the pain came so much earlier than I anticipated.  I’m on the cataract waiting list which depresses me, but I look forward to losing the heavy progressive lenses.

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

My knees and my feet to be honest.  It’s not my optimism…it’s not my hope, it’s not my energy level I’m worried about losing …it’s my joints. I had envisioned at this age, those walking trips in Europe, but there’s no chance.  I couldn’t physically do it… it’s my knees. I want to be able to hike for ten kilometers and I just can’t.

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

I think it’s probably learning the difference between spending your energy on things you cannot change and spending your energy on things you can.  And that exists on several levels   So there are things that maybe I cannot change about myself,… my feet hurt, I can’t take a walking trip across Ireland. Ok…goodbye to that idea, and now what can I do instead? Because I think spending your energy on things you can’t change makes you bitter, and we don’t want to be bitter little old ladies in waiting… because it would be easy, wouldn’t it?

So that’s personal, so now let’s take it to the next level to the people in my circle.  There are certain things I can’t change, and you can invest in those relationships but there are some things you just absolutely cannot change.  I like Glennon Doyle’s Podcast?  It’s called “We Can Do Hard Things”.  It’s American and its funny as hell, and they interview  a lot of interesting people and one of the great episodes is about  how to fortify yourself for the holiday season in terms of dealing with your family and expectations.  A great piece of advice he gives is ‘Be not surprised’ because you know Uncle Bob is going to go down the same road he took last year, so don’t be outraged and horrified by it, just adopt an attitude of ‘yeah, whatever, I still love you,’ when people behave in ways they have always behaved, ‘be not surprised.’

Jewel has a song I really like from 1998, I’m dating myself here, it’s called Life Uncommon. She says ‘no longer lend your strength to that which you wish to be free from.”  It’s about using your voice and that  speaks to me now…where do you use your energy… where do you use your voice.

The other part of that question is what you do about the global piece and that is much more difficult right now.  I try to be selective and pick the bite-sized things that I can do.  I joined the Board of Avenue B that operates on a harm reduction model.  I have no lived experience with addiction myself, or in my circle, but I thought I can be on the board.  I’m good at policy and procedure…and I try to make choices with some integrity. I don’t live in a tent, I’m not a drug user, but l am devastated by the inhumanity that’s everywhere in our cities and small towns now and how people are being treated so badly and left out.  We talked about water fountains at the meeting last night.  If you were thirsty and unhoused…where do you go?   

Do you have a favourite quote?

Yes, it’s a quote by Vaclav Havel.  I like it because he distinguishes between hope and optimism. It’s a quote from his time in prison.  His language is beautiful of course, but for me the beauty is that he isn’t saying, it will all be fine…because so often it is not fine. He takes hope from being a big cartoony rainbow thing and makes it real.

“The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us, or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.

Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from “elsewhere.” It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.”

Do you have a favourite word?

Sea…as in the ocean. The word sea represents all kinds of things metaphorically but for me it is both a personal, and local place of refuge…it always has been …since I was old enough to ride my bike off the cliff, which I did by the way…I was a free-range kid in West Saint john.  I might edit that out for my mother.

There is something timeless about the sea… I love the rhythm, I love the sound.  It’s also a metaphor for connection, wrapping around the globe, and it’s a measuring stick for what we are doing to the planet which is a big concern for me.  I think because we can see the trees being cut down and we can see the trees on fire on tv, it’s a little harder to ignore, but we could go to Bayshore this morning and think all is well…and it’s not.  We need to pay a bit more attention… we need to pay a lot more attention. 

Describe your perfect day.

Sunshine. Great coffee. The ocean.  My husband and my kids and their partners and nothing planned. 

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

Given the state of the world, I want to sit down with Greta Thunberg.  Three reasons.  She is young and we need to listen to the younger voices, about everything. I mean look at where the power is…still in the hands of old rich white guys and that has to change.  Secondly, she is willing to make incredible sacrifices for the future. I’m interested in asking her, why, what do you see, what do you envision, what are you giving up and what are you giving it up for?  Three would be the climate crisis, it’s going to cook us and were pretending it’s not.  I want to talk about that.

Tell me three things that bring you joy.

Real conversations.  Real, not honest, because even honest conversations have a few lies in them.

David, Kevin, and Maureen …from the beginning all the way to this morning.  So much joy in that little family of mine.

Time outdoors.  Some of it goes back to the free-range childhood.  Total freedom.  It might have been an illusion, or it might have been quite real, that no one was paying any attention to us kids.   We were free, and time outdoors reminds me of my freedom.  Also, as an artist I appreciate the changing light and the shadows cast by the sun and the changing colours of the season.  My shoulders lower when I step out the door.

Name a guilty pleasure.

Ice cream. Too much fat, too much sugar but it hasn’t made me give it up.  It’s a favourite treat.

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

I do believe in life after death, but I don’t know what it looks like.  And I don’t even have an assumed visual. I think when I was young, I did have an idea that was based on a religious tradition…heavenly gates…clouds. So now I think there is so much beauty and goodness, despite the horrors, and I don’t think those things can just come to an end.  There has to be something else.  My sense of what that is has changed, because I think there is something else for the right whale as well, and for the pigeon on the roof… that we’re all part of this interconnectedness that we can’t really, fully appreciate now and maybe our great joy in the afterlife is coming to understand what that interconnectedness means.   

What would you like your eulogy to say?

I boiled it down to two things. First, I want my children to write it, and I trust them. Second, and how’s this for a mothers’ control, I hope they would say that they saw that I remained engaged until the end of my days.  I don’t like the word engaged… maybe passionate, passionate is better, engaged is so psycho-ed, or maybe that I cared, but that’s too Hallmark.  Passionate works, and passionate about what doesn’t really matter…maybe when I’m 80 I’ll be passionate about my pansy collection.