A Mixed Bag

(It’s Sunday night when I typically sit down and pen a post for Monday morning. I’ve just finished responding to time-sensitive emails and polishing my submission package for one more look-over by my editor before meeting the month end deadline. Clock ticking and keen to keep my blogging commitment, I sat for several minutes to see what might emerge. I haven’t tapped into my usual sources – podcasts while I walk, newsletters, something that pops on social media – and given my focus has been quite singular in preparing poetry, the creative pump needed priming. So once again from the draft folder, this one originally penned in April, still pertinent with some reworking enhanced by today’s photo memories in Jasper 2021.)

“…while the difficult parts of aging are unavoidable, we can try not to add to them. For example, I have seen, throughout my life, the tendency to rehearse some catastrophe and thereby live it several times. So, I think the first question is always, ‘What are we adding onto a situation which is already hard enough?'”

Sharon Salzberg, Facebook, December 13, 2023

Rehearsing catastrophes.

Do you do this? Live an unpleasant event – either past or anticipated – several times, each time adding to the stew of anxiety? 

Currently it’s an event I must attend – a “no choice” choice kind of thing – that given experience is weighing heavy. I realize, in both its anticipation, and in the telling of it, I’m working myself into a corner, not allowing myself or the yet-to-be situation any space to become any different from my set-in-stone ideas. Once again, borrowing from Portia Nelson’s wonderfully pithy “Autobiography in Five Chapters,” I’m walking down the same street, heading for the same pothole, as if knowing this will somehow vindicate me.

While Sharon wrote this in relation to turning seventy specifically, and aging generally, she offers this glimpse into an aspect of our perfectly imperfect human condition.

“…aging is a mixed bag. Wisdom, perspective, gratitude—so many things grow stronger as we get older. But there are also distressing, growing incapacities from one’s body; the fear of what a moment of forgetfulness might mean; the sheer indignity of being treated as unimportant by some…”

Sharon Salzberg

I’m thinking of this in relation to how I’ve been feeling lately, seeing the tendency to overthink when feeling anxious or scared; worrying despite knowing it brings no relief nor clarity; impatience and irritability when questions of belonging lurk. The lapses in remembering that “this, too, will pass,” and that fatigue can amplify it all.

And then too, the counterpoint of moments and hours of contentment reading, immersed in a creative project, walking, sitting outside sky watching, steps consciously taken to bypass that street and its all too familiar potholes.

Maybe it’s as simple as remembering today’s photo memory from seven years ago:

“I’m restless.
Things are calling
me away. My hair is
being pulled by the
stars again.”

Anais Nin

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that we have a new dog, Walker. In the three weeks since arriving, he has settled in and is learning our routines in ways that amaze us. This is the first time in forty years having an “only” dog with no other to show him the ropes. And despite our saying “no” and “git” many times a day, we laugh and marvel as often. To quote my husband, he has become our “joy boy.” This past week, on the first anniversary of our Annie dog’s passing, I remarked to myself and wrote to my friend who took a moment to acknowledge the day, how utterly surprised I was to find myself falling in love with Walker. I wondered if and have since concluded that this is a gift of allowing myself to grieve so fully for the loss of Annie.

“I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

It’s a mixed bag, this aging thing.
The messy catastrophes. The moments of contentment.
Beings that bring joy. Breath that makes me live.
Stars that pull my hair.
Yes, to it all. With love.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.