That Time of the Year

I need to find a new favorite time of year. I had always loved September and December.

The former for its promise of a new start. (Forget January 1; the time to start fresh has always been the beginning of the new school year.)

And the latter, for the approaching sights and sounds of Christmas. Not the shopping (to which I seem to be allergic) and the other commercial parts of Christmas; but rather the dogged infusion of Advent light that denies the lengthening of the nights, and the vulnerable sounds of unaccompanied carols.

After a few years of struggling to reclaim the comfort I used to find in early fall and early winter, I think I may need to move on. Three Septembers ago my mother died suddenly, on a crisp fall day that should have felt like a fresh new beginning. In subsequent years, the accumulated mental fatigue of my summer job and the cyclic reminder of my mom's passing have made September a hurdle.

But I expected that. Not a person who has lost a loved one can help but mark that anniversary. It is early December that surprises me. I have a great job that requires a brief intense period of travel every November. Returning home at Thanksgiving should be, in contrast, a particularly enjoyable time. But somehow it's increasingly accompanied by soul-searching of the worst sort - the kind that feeds on fatigue. And, as I finally realized today, this time of year still belongs to my mother.

See, Christmas was her hobby. She and my dad ran a small cottage business making and selling holiday crafts. Adorable, whimsical and beautiful creations. I always coveted them and enjoyed picking out one of each year's new items from whatever was left over after the series of fall craft shows. So I should take some comfort in that fact that I now have one of pretty much every design she ever made. The truth is that it's overwhelming. My son helped me take 24 boxes out of the attic yesterday. There's no way I can display all of these charming angels and snowmen and Saint Nicks and wreaths. And the act of sorting through them every Christmas is beginning to defeat me.

Clearly a problem that needs to be and will be solved. In the meantime, I am trolling for a new favorite season. This year I have my sights and my hopes pinned on April.

I believe in the tradition of gratitude journals, but I've never been disciplined enough to keep one, and my "real" blog isn't conducive to such things. So here's my Thanksgiving 2008 list. Longer than the typical 5, and a bit more overarching.

• Good health. Can't be overrated.
• Kind, intuitive, loving children. Two of my favorite people in the world.
• A tireless, wise husband who will never let me forget how to laugh.
• Stable, challenging, rewarding work. Grounded, empathetic colleagues.
• Music. Even if I ignore its essence for months at a time. It's always there when I come back.
• Home. I've often been embarrassed about caring, but am realizing that I shouldn't be.
• Time. Eigenzeit. It's doesn't give up its secrets easily, but it's there if I just look for it.

The Plan

Yes, I had a plan. Five months ago I was full of confidence about it. And the fact that I haven't written in as many months doesn't mean that the plan didn't work. It wasn't a wild success, mind you. But it made a dent.

The plan was born of cruel self-examination, and it is characteristically bullet-pointed and compulsive. (To purge those obsessions would've truly been beyond its scope.) It seems odd to say that it's too personal to divulge here, but it probably is. Its primary characteristics are a quest for mindfulness and release from worry. Too much of life escapes my notice. And I'm only beginning to learn that the things that prompt the most anxiety are not the ones that will get you in the end.

Percentage effectiveness? Probably somewhere in the high single digits. But I'll take it, for a start. Even though I almost lost sight of myself many times (the key word being "almost"), most of the time I could conjure up a shadow or a glimmer of recognition.

So it's back to work - refining and recommitting, reintroducing myself.

Transitions

My kids are in transition years. And I get weepy every time I think about it. What's going on here?

I who remained (not resolutely, just by default) dry-eyed at every other milestone, am not able to keep my heart in one piece when I think about my daughter graduating from college... Previously taking perverse pride in being unsentimental, I now can't look at my new high-school-graduate son without tearing up.

What's that about?

A Plan

I decided to walk until I had a plan. It only took about 10 miles.

I believe it's a good plan, too. There's something about putting one foot in front of the other for a few hours that gets the brain in gear. Almost as if the cogs are intertwined, and the feet are an engine that clears the haze. I forget this at my peril.

Too too many weeks (in truth, months) have passed in a state of agitation and lethargy. It must be stopped. And now I have a plan.

Lessons

Some lessons learned in this spring of 2008:

You can't force someone to grow. I've always known this in my heart, but I suspected that my unwillingness to take a tough approach to teaching came from weakness rather than philosophy. But a recent case study reinforces the stupidity of believing that any of us wield enough power to force another person to learn, to change, to grow. All we can do is provide an environment that allows risk-taking.

Details are double-edged swords. Ignore them at your peril. But fixate on them disproportionately and they become missiles of destruction.

Just when you think they weren't paying attention, kids will demonstrate that they have absorbed more than you ever wanted them to. If only we could pass on only our better traits to the next generation.

Having a tenuous grasp on the past can also be a blessing. Forgetting has its liabilities, but the ability to move on may be a gift.

The biggest lessons come as a surprise. A friend who faces terminal illness with grace, another who lives with faith despite crushing economic hardship, a loved one who has the courage to be happy again.

Saturation

My brother taught me that rainy days provide some of the best opportunities for nature photography. Even though bright sunny days seem optimal, the color is most saturated on days like today.

The rain is more welcome than I had anticipated. This week's dose of spring sunshine was exhilarating, but the rain is what I needed.


I'm not a true nature girl, but I relish the power of nature to lift me outside myself, to provide gentle external larger-than-myself motion that somehow quiets my mind. It's why we love the seashore and the fireside. The waves and the flames create a rhythm that's far more harmonious than the frantic rhythm of our own minds. So I submit to the motion of the rain and the drama of the thunder, and I find some of the clarity I've buried beneath the debris of my thoughts.

Taking the camera out in the rain also brought the opportunity to spend time with loved ones. My mom's Garden Angels keeping watch over the flowers, my grandmother's old water pump, and my husband's grandfather's wagon wheel.

Moving On

I just made a familiar commute for probably the last time. A short-term arrangement took me periodically to a town a few hours south of home, and now my reason for driving there is gone. I've never been one to be sentimental about the past, but I'm entering what I sense will be a period of change that will challenge me more than any before.

I shall miss Route 29, oddly enough. I've grown up a lot on this road, perhaps more than I have almost anywhere else. My first dozen trips were fraught with sadness and fear. Incrementally, the anxiety was replaced with quiet happiness and optimism.

This time, there was wistfulness. These days are good days, and I'm not sure I want to let them go.

Heaven

I'm a believer, but I've never felt as if the tools we're given in this life are sufficient to understand what lies beyond. But recently I've discerned a definition of heaven that doesn't feel earthbound.

Heaven is a place where all the people you've ever loved are happy.

Serenity Prayer

I came of age in the 60's and the 70's, and the Serenity Prayer was a bit of a cliche. That powerful mantra that helped so many people get their lives back from all sort of addiction and abuse became trite. So it's receded into a cobwebbed corner of my mind.

Time to dust it off. I tend to be full of misbegotten courage to change the things I think I can. But I'm coming up way short on the acceptance and wisdom parts. I am, more and more, trying to operate outside what the motivational speakers call my "circle of influence."

I don't exactly know why, but I sense that I do need to figure out the reasons before this will be fixed.

Regression

Lessons that should become easier with time are frustratingly difficult to learn.

Eigenzeit indeed. It takes so little for the conviction that taking control of one's own time is important to be bulldozed by an army of opposing forces: things that scream to be done, and the belief (deep somewhere in my bones) that to stand in the way of these demands is selfish, childish and unrealistic.

Until something takes over my body and my soul and demands that I stop.

My father says that I have such a poor memory because I don't look back. "She lives in the here and now," says he. I wish it were so. The ugly truth is that I don't remember anything because I'm never really present when things happen. I'm in the future. Planning, obsessing, worrying, strategizing. It seems like a harmless enough game, but that's an illusion.

I woke up yesterday and realized that it had probably been days since I had taken a deep breath. One of the symptoms of living in the future: forgetting that your body can't leave the present. And the first thing that happens when I breathe deep is that I cry. For absolutely no reason. Nothing is terribly wrong. Many things are amazingly right.

Those people for whom mindfulness is a way of life: how do they get there? Were they closer to start with than the rest of us? Is their will so much stronger? Do they trust more?

All of that self-discipline that's lavished on the to-do list needs to be redirected.

Morning Person

I always thought that one of the signs that I had become a true grown-up would be my transformation into a Morning Person. Sadly, I’ve almost never spontaneously risen earlier than I absolutely have to. Occasionally, though, when I have to rise before the sun (as I did this morning to catch an early train to New York), I catch a glimpse of the clarity and calm that Morning People call their own. And on days like today, I promise myself that I will finally become one of them. It’s a game I play with myself, but for a few hours, it feels like real life.

Distance

Parents rarely have the opportunity to see their children in the same way that the rest of the world does. We all know that our kids save their rawest, neediest behavior for us. It’s a compliment, really – that they feel safe enough to be able to disintegrate, knowing that we won’t love them less even when they are a complete mess. (This applies to 20-year-olds as much as 2-year-olds.) So we are sometimes surprised when outsiders recognize our offspring as the fascinating, mature, wonderful people they really are.

Those of us whose kids indulge in sports or performing arts sit back and wonder who that interesting, brave, strong young person is out there on the field or up there on the stage. That young man looks so confident and pre-possessed. Could he be my son? That young woman seems so self-assured and compelling. She’s related to me... imagine that! Seeing them without myopia is the only way to know who they are.

Important details often come into focus with proximity. But sometimes distance is the most important lens there is.

Read, Read, Read

Already I'm cheating by posting a picture that I didn't take. But at least the photo was my idea.

I told my daughter that she should memorialize her last spring in college by taking a picture of the books she had to buy for this semester.

I miss reading sometimes, but a sight like this is enough to bring me back to reality. And the reality of this particular evening is that I'm trying to finish Obama's book and figure out who gets my vote in the morning :)

End of an Era

From the trimmed down elementary-school version of Seussical to this year's swan song during my son's senior year in high school, I've been swimming in a wonderful Broadway musical stream. I will miss the rush I get from these crazy shows, and my life will be poorer without all of these crazy teenagers in it.

Today has been spent sifting through various scores, trying to help the director decide what might be vocally castable, wondering anew at the mess that is these old Tams Witmark scores, and running from the fact that this is probably the end of an era. I get plenty of chances to produce shows at work, but it's not the same. The stakes are higher, and the satisfaction is different.

I could continue to volunteer hundreds of hours at a time once my kids are out of school, but I know I won't. I guess I don't miss it that much. But it's my prerogative to be nostalgic, and to enjoy this final run around the sun.

Eigenzeit

Einstein spoke of Eigenzeit, and even though I don't pretend to understand physics, the concept of "proper time" or "own time" has lately been my siren call. Einstein showed that there is no fixed or absolute time independent of the system to which it refers. Eigenzeit is time measured internally and locally. Time as it should be experienced, with decisions based on instincts, values and relationships rather than on calendars, budgets and lists

This is my midlife crisis blog - part of an attempt to reclaim (or perhaps claim?) my own proper time. I'm not a martyr, even though I'm descended from a long line of them. But Iived my first few decades for my parents, the next couple for my kids, and now I'm in danger of drowning the remaining time in my work.

I've been a fitful journal keeper - knowing how healthy and helpful personal writing can be, but not being able to commit. There is something embarrassingly indulgent about it, and after all, who has time for such indulgences? :) However, a personal blog is both indulgent and vain, so I'm not sure why I'm here.

My internal obsessive list-maker knows why.

1) I have frighteningly little access to my memories. I believe they must be in there. Or perhaps I just have to believe it to stay sane. But they won't be dredged up. The act of writing freezes moments in time, and I'm somehow desperate to do that. And as Samuel Johnson said, "The true art of memory is the art of attention." Perhaps writing will force me to pay attention. Mindfulness is the most elusive goal of my life.

2) I am inspired by friends and colleagues who blog their photos. My visual observational skills are pitiful, yet I am intrigued by these images. I'm related (by blood, no less) to a professional photographer, so perhaps there's hope. I intend to spend a few moments each day actually looking around me. And capturing what I see whenever I can. Lower your expectations, for this is a purely selfish exercise.

3) Even though Eigenzeit has been a footnote in my life so far, one way to bring it to the fore is to consciously reclaim my own time in small increments. Thinking, and subsequently writing, about something other than work has to be a step in the right direction.

Today's photo is of a scroll on my wall. Emblematic of the inauguration of this blog. I brought it home from Shanghai last fall. At the time I bought it, I chose it from among others based on the meaning of the Chinese characters in it. Now I can't remember what it says, only that it spoke to me at the time.