Month: January 2024

I feel as though I am beginning to repeat myself. These days I spend most of my time doing the same things over and over again. Each evening I join my husband and my father-in-law around the dinner table where we discuss a bit of this and a bit of that. My father-in-law is ninety four years old and vaccinates between being sharp witted and sounding as though his memory is not as sharp as it once was. As with most older people he has a tendency to repeat stories over and over again. Sometimes I wonder if he is simply exercising his mind, attempting to test himself to be certain that he is still able to think for himself. Other times I think that he only has so many stories and is no longer creating new ones, so he has to keep repeating his repertoire. 

I’d tend to think that only really old people do such things but for the reality that I seem to be doing the same thing more and more often. There is only so much to say even about a long life. The mundane days don’t always lead themselves to interesting topics. Routines are par for the course for everyone. Thus all too often I hear people politely remarking that they have heard many of my tales more than once. It worries me a bit that I have not realized that I am sounding stale. 

I no longer leave my home for work. My ventures outside of my house have grown more limited than at any other time. I am a creature of habit without exciting incidents for which I am grateful, but also a bit bored. There was a time when I awoke each morning having no idea what I might encounter as I ventured outside of the protection of my little family nest. Working in schools is a grand adventure filled with split second changes from moment to moment. Being around hundreds of humans of all ages ten or more hours a day is bound to lead to funny tales, heart rending moments, interesting discoveries. 

I must say that I don’t miss the anxieties associated with being responsible for so many people, but I do find myself longing for the interplay with my fellow humans. We are indeed social creatures with a strong need for a variety of relationships. I suppose that’s why I continue to find so much joy teaching and tutoring small groups of students to this very day. It gets me out of the house, challenges me to use my mind, and provides me with a lovely opportunity to experience the optimism of youth once again rather than constantly reliving times that are long gone. 

Taking continuing education classes is also a grand adventure for me. I marvel at the world of ideas that seems to be boundless. I enjoy opening my mind to the great ideas of the past, present and future. I often find myself longing to be a full time student once again just for the opportunity to learning.

Sadly, I’m not as sharp witted as I once was. It takes me longer to find words, to remember facts, to conduct research. I suppose that if there were such a thing as earning a certificate of completion by sitting in on classes rather than having to take exams and complete projects I would be the first to volunteer. As it is I know that I no longer have the energy to work for grades. My interest in knowledge is far more personal. I simply want to seek the truths of the universe at a leisurely pace that allows me to contemplate what I have encountered.

The philosophy class that I recently took has introduced me to so many new ideas, different ways of thinking about the world and what makes humans the unique creations that they are. I have a great deal of reading that I plan to do in the coming days and weeks. There is much to consider, much to discuss. Our natures are often difficult to explain but great minds have attempted to do so. 

One of the most interesting evenings of my lifetime took place at the end of the nineteen eighties. I had received a free plane ticket from my bank and decided to use it to visit one of my dear friends who had moved to Los Angeles. We had raised our children together, spending many an hour together at swim lessons and on summer days attempting to entertain our youngsters and support each other as mothers. I was already missing her even though she had only left a few weeks before. 

She gave me the grand tour of Los Angeles which was quite lovely and then announced that one of our high school classmates also lived in Los Angeles. Our friend had married a bright young man who graduated a few years before we did. He worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory by day and had delved into a hobby of contemplating philosophy by night. Along the way he wrote a short book about the intellectual giants who had most impressed him. To my great delight he wanted to give us a preview of his thinking with a small presentation one evening. 

We gathered together in his home seated in a half circle created from dining chairs. Soon with a professorial flourish he was regaling us with thoughts that challenged our own. He asked questions and answered ours. The discussion gloriously continued for hours as we marveled at the wonder of it all. Who would have expected such an intellectual pursuit to become the highlight of a vacation to Los Angeles? It certainly surprised and delight me. To this day I smile when I remember how delightful it was. 

We humans seem to have certain innate characteristics. We are curious. We are social. We have a need to understand how and why things work. The search for answers is a marvelous way to spend our time. Perhaps when I begin to sound stale it is a sign that I need to open a book, attend a lecture, talk with experts, debate ideas collegially. Learning is part of our DNA. It should never be thought of as a frightening experience even when it challenges what we have always believed. It is food for our souls and we should never forget to feed that aspect of our humanity. It is how we stay vibrant.  

Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans. —John Lennon

I’ve spent most of my life making the best of things. I’m a confessed control freak who has a bag full of alternative plans. Experience has taught me that reaching the endpoint of my original goals has almost always been interrupted by tragedies and surprises that changed the entire focus of my efforts. I’ve learned to be ready for the unexpected moments even as I am rarely able to predict exactly what will happen from one moment to the next. I suppose that after a lifetime when a best laid plan after another went astray I almost expect the pathway of my life to be serpentine rather than straight and narrow. 

I suppose that each of us has experienced the shocking moment when everything changes, some in more brutal ways than others. We don’t expect an evening at a baseball game to end in the murder of a loved one, but I have an acquaintance who endured that horror. We fear a medical diagnosis that by definition will shorten our lives because we witness people hearing such fateful words. We are never really ready for loss or pain that seems to come from nowhere even if we have led cautious and predictable lives. As the song says life happens when we least expect it. 

I never imagined losing my father at the age of eight. I assumed he would be around for years to come. I thought that he and I would share all of my milestones and I hoped that I would make him proud of me. I suspect that he already knew that I was going to be okay and that I would not have to prove myself to him. His love was apparent to me. I’ve carried it tucked away in my memories since nineteen fifty seven. 

My mother’s descent into the depression and mania of her bipolar disorder was shocking to me. At a time when I was only beginning my life with my new husband I was not ready to become her advocate and sometimes caretaker. I was frightened and even admittedly a bit resentful of having to dedicate a portion of my energy to protecting and caring for her. I had to remind myself of the sacrifices she had made for me and my brothers as a very young widow whose own dreams had been swept away in an instant. 

Over the years I have witnessed great suffering and almost impossible challenges that friends and family members have endured. I have seen the hardships of many of my students. I have watched the unfolding of life that breaks hearts and forces painful decisions, but I have also smiled at the happiness that often counter balances the most difficult times. Somehow we humans are quite adept at making lemonade out of lemons. 

I have often been fascinated by the human ability to rise from the ashes like a magical phoenix. I watched my Aunt Claudia lose her incredible husband when she was only in her twenties. Sixteen years later the daughter that the two of them had created also shockingly died. My aunt’s pain was unimaginable to me and yet she found the courage to just keep moving forward. She remained a happy soul in spite of the trials that seemed to come her way with uncanny regularity. 

My husband laughs at my tendency to make promises with the addition of the phrase, “God willing.” I learned long ago that nothing is guaranteed. In spite of my realization that we don’t always get what we want, I do believe that we humans have our ways of dealing with all of the vagaries of life with surprising resilience. It may take time to adjust to our new realities, but in most situations we somehow manage, albeit a bit more dented than we once were. 

I speak of my father often as though he died only a short time ago. In a pensive moment my husband wondered aloud if he and I would ever have met had my father lived into a ripe old age rather than leaving his family as a young man. Of course we can never predict what might have happened. Those “what ifs’ are so hypothetical. Still, I feel certain that somehow my husband and I were meant to be together and that we would have found each other perhaps in a different way. 

I am the sum total of all of my days. Each moment has shaped me into the person that I am. Both my tragedies and my triumphs have affected how I face the world. So it is with each of us. We are very much alike in that each of us will face challenges that seem to arise when we are busy making other plans. Sometimes the unexpected is glorious and other times it feels as though it has defeated us. That is the conundrum that we all share. Our stories shape us but we have the power to make certain that they do not define us as we keep moving down the road. 

Life is fragile. My father died at the age of thirty three. The son of a friend died when he was only seventeen. My grandfather lived to be one hundred eight. I have lost dear friends and cousins who would have been my age had they lived. My mother is gone as well as all of my aunts and uncles. My husband seems to learn of the death of a classmate with great regularity now. Most of us knew someone who died from Covid. We read about people taken from this earth by mass shootings and wars. While we know that death is inevitable we are always stunned when we hear of it. We are all too often filled with regret that we did not take the time to share our feelings of love and gratitude with the people that we knew and loved before they were gone. 

Time is relative in a psychological way. There are intervals when the days are unbearably slow. We trudge through them exhausted and frazzled. Other moments seem to pass so quickly. The often frenzied routines and demands of living keep us focused on surviving. Before we know it we realize that we have missed that opportunity to share our feelings and our joys with the people who mean much to us and even with the people that we simply pass in our daily dealings. 

I try to write a tribute to friends and family members who have died. My blogs about them seem to touch the hearts of even those who never knew them. People tell me that I have a knack for describing and praising the souls of my departed loved ones. Somehow I wish that I might be able to tell their stories before they die. I think of how wonderful it would be for them to know how their very existence impacted me and the many people who knew them. I wonder why we humans so often only open our hearts when someone has died. It would be quite lovely if we were to take just a few minutes each day to tell the living how much they mean to us.

I recently saw a post on Facebook that related the story of a math teacher who gave her students a list with the names of every member of the class. She instructed them to write something positive about each person on the roster. At the end of the exercise she collected the papers and then spent days creating a letter for each student that listed the compliments from their fellow students. Then she gave those praise letters to each of her pupils. 

Years later one of the students had died and she attended the funeral for him. There she was reunited with many of her former students. She learned that each of them had treasured the affirmations from their fellow classmates and returned to read them whenever they began to doubt themselves. They thanked the teacher for giving them such a tremendous gift. 

One Christmas I randomly selected a few of my greeting card recipients to receive an earnest letter outlining what they meant to me. I suppose that we are so unaccustomed to receiving such a thing that many of them contacted me immediately to out of concern that I must surely be sick or depressed or in trouble of some kind. They could not imagine receiving the thoughts from my heart just because I wanted them to know how important they were to me. Somehow my gift of love seemed to embarrass or confuse them. 

I understood in that moment that if I were to ever do such a thing again I would need to preface my love letter by explaining it’s purpose. Since then I have been careful about revealing my feelings of gratitude without a clear clarification of my intentions. I suppose that we humans are so reserved and maybe even unsure of ourselves that we wonder what is behind compliments. We tend to feel a bit uncomfortable whenever someone heaps us with praise. We find it difficult to believe how many people we have touched simply by being ourselves. We live in a world of hucksters who use flattery to take from us. We keep our defenses at the ready in case someone is attempting to take advantage of us. 

It is often the smallest of encounters with our fellow humans that transform us. We may only know them for a brief moment in time and yet a seemingly small sacrifice from them will change us in positive ways forever. We should all be aware of the power that we have to realign the trajectory of a person’s day or even an entire lifetime. Every word that we utter and action that we take matters, so why not use that power to build people up rather than to ignore them or tear them down?

The world is filled with souls working away just to make it through another hour or another day. Nobody should be invisible to us. Even the surly clerk who makes our interactions difficult will no doubt smile if we find something nice to say to her/him. Each of us enjoy those moments when we realize that the work we have done in our lives actually meant something to someone. No paycheck gives us as much joy as a single sincere compliment. Such comments are especially important when they randomly arrive when we are in difficult times. 

I’m going to try harder to showcase some very important people who made me the person I am today. I have spoken of my mother and father and grandparents quite often but there are so many others who changed me for the better. I hope to let them know the gifts of their being that taught me how to love others as well as myself. It will be one of my goals this year to let them know how much I have appreciated them. 

I grew up in the Catholic Church. In fact, I attended Catholic schools for twelve years where I was imbued with an excellent education as well as a strong sense of the beliefs of my religion. Somehow I realized that I needed to attend a college that would provide me with a more inclusive view of the world than the one that had sheltered me for the first seventeen years of my life. I turned down a number of acceptances and scholarships to Catholic universities around the country in favor of attending the University of Houston which offered a much larger and more diverse outlook on life. I felt the need to learn more about people of other faiths from other places and even those who had no faith at all. Somehow I understood that it was long past time for me to interact with more than just mostly Catholics like myself before going to work in the world at large. 

I had grown up in a safe bubble with wonderfully loving people but without any real contrast to my own carefully protected beliefs. Only once had I encountered a challenge to my religion and ways of thinking. It happened with a girl from my neighborhood who asked me questions about my church with some incredibly different beliefs that I had never realized existed. Then she challenged me to test my faith by attending services at her church for contrast. 

I never got that opportunity to widen my horizons because my mother’s reaction to the invitation was to ask the pastor of our congregation if it was admissible for me to visit another branch of Christianity. When he insisted that I must be protected from such an adventure lest I become confused, my mother promptly forbade me from even considering such a bold journey into another system of belief. Still, I wondered what would have been wrong with expanding my worldview in a fairly benign environment with my friend. 

College introduced me to people of many cultures and spiritual points of view. It was an exciting time during which I encountered people from around the world who approached the spiritual aspects of being human in very different ways from my own. I began to realize both the similarities and differences between the individuals with whom I made contact. I saw that it seemed to be in our natures to seek answers to eternal questions in spiritual ways and sometimes to use logic and critical thinking to deny the very idea of God. I saw that some beliefs were rigid and others more open to considering alternative ways of living. I found both good and bad people within the same or similar belief systems. I became more open to the idea that none of us possess all of the answers but we all have a tendency to seek them. 

Over time my mother became more open to differing ways of defining our individual philosophies about ethics and the rules that guided them. She seemed to realize that even among the microcosm of her family the spiritual evolution that had transpired to create life long Catholics, converts to other Christian sects, agnostics and atheists had left very good people within each group. She began to study eastern influenced religions to learn more about them. She opened her mind to the possibility that God very legitimately comes to each person in the form that best suits their situations in the world. She even saw that those who questioned the very existence of a higher being were often more spiritual and loving than those unwilling to accept that faith or lack of it is founded on our personal beliefs about our purposes in life. 

My mother-in-law became my religious mentor in many ways as well. She had been raised in the Episcopal Church but converted to Catholicism after marrying my father-in-law who was a devout follower of that faith. She did so only after much study and many conversations with a priest willing to convey the tenets of the Catholic religion. To insure that she was converting with an open mind he introduced her to a treasure trove of brilliant dissertations on the universal search by humans to find answers to our eternal questions. By the time she officially became a Catholic she had read texts from Augustine and Aquinas as well as those from every corner and belief systems of the world. She had become a quasi religious expert capable of discussing everything from the origins of the Greek gods to the nihilism of Nietzsche. 

On Sundays she and I held soirees together while the men watched sports in another room and the children played the games of youth. We sipped on tea and seriously discussed questions about the existence of a true God and what that being might represent for our lives. Those were heady times for me that made me more and more willing to understand those whose beliefs seemed to be so counter to mine. I was able to compare and contrast with a background of knowledge that helped me to realize that the search for answers about our human place in the world are universal. I learned how to respect the earnestness of our individual spiritual journeys. 

Not long ago I was invited to the baptism of some of my mathematics students. I had been baptized as an infant so it was quite interesting to see the ceremony that requires the participants to actively pronounce and seal their beliefs in the act of accepting Jesus as their savior. It was active rather than passive as my own baptism had been. I found many commonalities between my church and theirs, but also distinct differences as well. It was profoundly wonderful to participate in a ceremony in which I saw my students on a spiritual journey that took a slightly different path than my own. It reminded me of what truly makes humans different from other creatures. We are the only ones looking for truths about who we are and how we should be. There is glory in that even if the answers we find are very different. Instead of pushing others to share our own feelings about a higher being we might do better to simply honor the decisions that our fellow humans have made and do our best to be open to the idea that maybe there really are alternative pathways to the same place. It would be a mistake to enforce one way of thinking on everyone. The variety of ideas is a good thing. Let’s leave it that way.