All It Takes Is A Little Love

Life is a never ending project. We might create routines for ourselves that feel comfortable, but all too often we get so caught up in things we must do that we lose sight of what is really important, what really brings happiness and contentment to ourselves and those around us. Sometimes our world is blown apart by death or illness or loss of a home or income. Suddenly everything feels different, out of control. Our anxieties flare and we feel as though we are trying to single-handedly hold back a tidal wave. In those moments of darkness we long for the way things were. We want the familiar even as we realize that we can’t really have it, at least for the time being. 

This is a difficult summer for so many people. Once we all thought that maybe the worst of the pandemic was over we all began to scurry for a semblance of normalcy, but the ebbs of flows of life don’t always give us the breaks that we desire. Some people are taking glorious vacations and filling social media with smiles and lovely scenes. Others are dealing with the anniversaries of losing loved ones to violence or death. Some are laying beloved family members to rest. People are still becoming infected with new strains of Covid and being hospitalized for weeks. Countries are experiencing wars, food shortages, fires, extreme heat. The costs of virtually everything we purchase are soaring all over the world. 

It would be easy to forget the suffering if we are having fun or to feel alone and isolated if we have not yet been fortunate enough to have a sense that life is getting better. All of the conflicting stories and emotions bring out our human flaws. People are angry, jealous, lonely, in pain. When that happens we begin to misunderstand and argue with one another. We want to blame somebody for our sorrow. 

Last week I wrote about my dear friend Sharon Saunders. She understood that when people are hurting they often act out in ways that confuse the people around them. Instead of punishing them for bad behavior she listened intently to what they were saying. She wanted to know what was making them feel so lost, so angry. She practiced what the Buddhist monk, Tich Naht Hanh, called compassionate listening. She had no judgement, no agenda. She simply heard and accepted every word that they uttered. She let them know that she had heard them and that their feelings were normal. She helped them to put the pieces of their shattered lives back together.

Tich Naht Hanh tells us that there are four mantras that we should learn a practice in our interactions with each other. The first one is: Darling, I am here for you. The second is:Darling, I know you are here. The third is: Darling, I see that you are suffering. The fourth is: Darling, I am suffering, please help me. The word darling is important because it tells the other person that you have true affection for them. My sweet friend, Zerin Sahai, uses that word often. She calls me “My darling, Mrs. Burnett.” I know that she loves me when she does that.

How beautifully simple and powerful are these ideas! They help us to fully focus our here and now on the individuals who pass through our lives just as my friend Sharon Saunders always so beautifully did. They help us to understand that it is only in hearing the actual reasons for the way people are feeling or acting that we might come to a compassionate solution for our differences. It is a willingness to admit when we ourselves are struggling. 

We humans have a tendency to compartmentalize ourselves into groups. We look upon those who are different as suspect. We compare and rank people as though they are little more than objects to be treasured or tossed away. We often listen with our minds already made up. Our conversations are really debates. This is how friendships shatter. Marriages fall apart. Politics become toxic. Wars begin. Too often we are unwilling to admit that we might be wrong or even that there is more than one answer or solution. 

Being able to really see and hear and understand the people around me and even those who are far away has been a lifelong project for me. I have role models like Sharon Saunders and Zerin Sahai whom I attempt to emulate. I practice living up to their example and I falter. I have to learn to forgive myself for speaking without thinking, thinking without love. I know that I am not alone in being this way. Each of us stumbles. Each of us knows suffering. 

The rising of the sun on a new day gives us another opportunity to get things right. It shows us that we will not be immune to sorrows or that everything will go our way even when we work very hard. Storms come to beat down our efforts and even wash them away. We are misunderstood and we misunderstand. 

Perhaps we need to learn how to take a deep breath and remind ourselves to stop and take the time to let the people that we encounter know that we actually care about them. We must be here for them. We must see that they are here for us. We need to acknowledge their suffering without platitudes or advice. We must be willing to admit to our own suffering and ask for the help that we need. If we can do such things as we go about our days we might find more happiness than sorrow, more belonging that loneliness. 

When I was a young girl one of our local television stations ran old movies each afternoon. I often came home from school and settled down on the family couch to watch the black and white films from my mother’s teen years. One of my all time favorites was a movie about Jim Thorpe starring Burt Lancaster. I enjoyed the flick so much that I have viewed it many times over the years and I never grow weary of it even though it may not have been totally accurate.

Jim Thorpe was a Native American born in Oklahoma and sent to the Carlisle School for Native American children in Pennsylvania where he played on both the football and baseball team. He was such a talented athlete that he was touted as a future All-American. During the summer breaks he played baseball for a minor league team that paid him thirty dollars a month. 

Eventually Thorpe participated in the Summer Olympics of 1912 that were held in Sweden. He won gold medals in both the pentathlon and decathlon. Sadly, a newspaper broke a story a year after his victory exposing his work on the baseball team. The Olympic committee charged Thorpe with breaking the rules and rescinded his medals. For the rest of his life Thorpe and his family would fight this decision but nothing came of their efforts. Jim Thorpe died in poverty in his sixties. 

I was fascinated with Jim Thorpe’s story. I cried watching the movie and felt that it had been unfair to take his medals. My beliefs further materialized when I later saw Olympic athletes earning lucrative contracts as spokespersons of various products. Somehow it seemed wrong that this humble man’s reputation had been so battered. Further reading showed that many people knew about his work long before he went to the Olympics and only expressed their “horror” after the story hit the newspapers. Additionally the actual rule about taking away medals indicated that any complaints had to be submitted within three months of the end of the Olympics. The investigation did not begin until well over a year after Thorpe had won. 

I remember my grandfather talking about how mistreated Native Americans had been in Oklahoma. He had worked in the area before it was even a state and had witnessed what amounted to brazen theft of land for the cost of a car battery. It made him angry to see other men taking advantage of the native people who had been humiliated over and over again. I suppose that I thought of these things with regard to Jim Thorpe and wondered if the Olympic Committee would have been as quick to take his medals if he had been a white man. I wondered why the men who coached and trained him failed to mention that he might not be eligible for the Olympic competitions because of his paid work that would have amounted to a grand total of one hundred eighty dollars. 

Happily the Jim Thorpe story was not over. After all these years the Olympic Committee agreed with me and reinstated all of his medals. While it is always great to make a wrong right, I find myself wondering if Jim Thorpe’s life might have turned out differently if he had never lost his medals and his adulation in the first place. He himself was rather resigned to his fate, often commenting that it was just one more insult to a Red man in a long line of historical injustice. 

There is a great deal of concern these days about making children feel guilty about the treatment of different groups in the story of our country. Somehow there are adults who do not seem to understand that children will learn about such things one way or another. They might hear their grandfather telling stories about his work near Native American reservations or they might watch an old movie one afternoon. What they see and hear will pique their interest, encourage them to ask questions and do some reading to find out more information. It may become an obsession them for much of their lives as the Jim Thorpe story did for me. Ironically, this was not a horrible thing, but an awakening that I believe made me a better person. 

There have always been bad things done by bad people and bad things done by good people. Talking about them is healthy and leads to critical thinking about how we should behave. Sometimes it even leads to correcting a terrible mistake. I can’t think of anything wrong with that. 

Jim Thorpe was always my hero. Now the tarnish from his name has been removed. I have a bit more spring in my step and the hint of a smile on my face knowing that I was right all along. His is a difficult story but I think I learned a great deal about people and even myself from following the saga for all these years. It’s nice to watch a good guy finally win in the end. 

I’m sitting in my daughter’s home watching her dogs while she and her family vacation in Hawaii. I am a person who enjoys quiet, so the experience is much like a kind of respite for me. I spend my days doing a whole lot of nothing while the pups hover around the chair where I sit. Now and again they want to snuggle with me or wrestle a bit and I indulge them. We have a very nice arrangement and they seem to know when to vie for my attention and when to leave me alone. For me this is a very pleasant experience.

I’ve done a great deal of surfing on my laptop computer. I’ve managed to read dozens of newspaper and magazine articles along with enjoying some online books. I do Wordle each morning and check out Facebook to see what my friends are doing. I’ve learned that practically everyone that I know seems to be on vacation somewhere having a fabulous time while the world itself seems to be imploding. At least that is the impression that I get from my reading. 

It’s easy to understand how someone who is alone and having a difficult time physically, emotionally or financially might devolve into a kind of hopeless depression if they are keeping up with the online commentaries. I suspect that our global fascination with social media and instant news flashes is both a very good and a very bad thing at one and the same time. While the internet keeps us informed and connected in a way never before possible, it also has the power to make us feel anxious and even a bit dissatisfied with ourselves. It may busy our minds with unhealthy even destructive thoughts. Such is especially true for anyone who is isolated or already living in a chaotic environment. 

I wonder sometimes what kind of impact the internet has on people with disturbed minds. I worry especially about young people who spend hours in their rooms gaming with strangers or chatting with people they barely know. Kids used to generally get out much more than many do today. It has become normal to see teens constantly gazing at their phones rather than being present in the moment of wherever they happen to be. 

I heard a recent commentary that claimed that almost fifty percent of teens are experiencing depression at some level. They speak of feeling abandoned, misunderstood, unloved. While these tend to be the somewhat normal adolescent anxieties, I wonder if they are being magnified by the barrage of online imagery and commentary that constantly invites comparisons. How many of our youngsters and even adults feel less than the others that they see others smiling and having fun when their own lives are marked with loneliness? 

Even adults are having a difficult time getting along these days. They argue with each other over how things should be, dotting their discussions with cruel insults rather than rational thoughts. Our society is a confusing mix of contradictory ideas that the various sides argue about continuously. So many among us view differences as deviant behavior rather than just accepting people as they are. Lots of young people complain of feeling unseen, unheard. They long for someone to just love and understand them rather than critique them. 

I really appreciated a feature of the last school where I worked. Each group of about one hundred twenty five students had an adult charged with watching over them as their team leader. This person regularly checked on each students’ well-being and got to intimately know each individual. In addition every two hundred fifty students had a social worker who was available for counseling or whatever else they might need, including referrals for hearing tests, glasses, or psychiatric care. those social workers listened to their charges and helped them to navigate through the angst of teen years. Finally there were three counselors who helped the students to discover their interests and develop plans for successfully navigating into adult life. 

Teams of teachers who worked side by side with the team leaders, counselors, social workers and school administrators. the goal was never to allow any student to fall through the cracks, to feel invisible. Parents were also consciously brought into the mix and encouraged to contact the school with any concerns that they might have. On the whole the attention served the students well. Mostly they understood that there was always someone who cared about them. 

It took a great deal of teamwork, effort and financial expenditure to pull off this program, but I always felt that it was worth everything that we put into it. We found the kids who were hiding in their rooms from abusive parents, the ones who were cutting themselves, those who were using drugs to numb their pain, the sorrowful teens who felt uncomfortable in their own skin or sexuality. We helped them to understand that they we really cared about them and their welfare. 

While we did not succeed in every single case, our record was mostly spectacular. Our students responded to the love we offered them, even when it was sometimes tough. They knew that they were safe in our hands and that each of them was precious. We did our best to support them through those grueling teen years. They had a foundation upon which to build the rest of their lives. 

I often wish that every single school used the model that we developed. I abhor the thought of even a single soul feeling lost and believing that he or she does not matter to anyone in the world. Everyone needs to be seen and loved without conditions. That is what we tried to do. Everyone deserves that much, but sadly we are so busy with a whole lot of nothing that we do very little for the quiet souls suffering in silence. We suggest that they pray and learn to conform when we should be instead allowing them to tell us how they really feel and what they really want. So many problems are solved just by taking time to show someone love.  

My Grandpa Little was my hero, and yet as I think back on this, I realize that even when I held him in high esteem I somewhat underestimated what a great man he was. He was only minimally educated much as people of his era were. Nonetheless he was able to read and write. He devoured books, newspapers and magazines and then dotted his conversations with information that he had learned. He was a builder who was able to repair almost anything in a house. He had a folksy wisdom and more than anything he was a remarkable storyteller. In another time he might have been an historian or a journalist or even a writer of books. He was also a survivor who adapted to whatever challenges came his way. He always did so with grace. 

When my grandfather was about 90 years old he was still incredibly healthy and his mind was brilliant. He owned a car and drove himself around his neighborhood, but not much farther. On one occasion he was leaving a grocery store when he accidentally backed into a cart that someone had left in the middle of the parking lot. It bothered him so much that he had not noticed the cart that he decided that it was time to quit driving. He believed that his mistake meant that he no longer belonged behind the wheel of a car. 

Grandpa drove carefully home and called one of his granddaughters. He told her that he wanted to give her his car with the proviso that she would be willing to drive him around whenever he needed to run errands or go see his doctor. She was thrilled to accept the deal and he boasted that a “menace” had been taken off the road. 

I marveled that he understood the nature of his aging process and was more concerned about the safety of others than his own pride. With his own doing he also rented a room from a young widow whose only hope of keeping her home was to lease space to a roommate. He would stay with her for eighteen years and they would become like father and daughter to one another. Because he was incredibly healthy and very much in control of his mind until he turned one hundred eight, he helped her with repairs on her home and nursed her when she was sick. Eventually they pooled their resources to pay for food and utilities. It was a lovely arrangement that seemed to work well for both of them as well as a third person who eventually came to live in the house with them. It was like Golden Girls meets Three’s Company.

My son-in-law’s grandfather was very much like mine. He reached a point after the death of his wife when he decided without any prodding to surrender his car and sign up for a suite in an independent senior living home. For him it was a logical move that allowed him to continue to live a full life while also being part of a community that watched over him. His family not only visited often but they also picked him up for family parties and celebrations and sometimes just for watching ballgames together. He kept his sense of humor and enjoyed great times until he was one hundred years old. As his health grew a bit worse he shifted to assisted living without a complaint. 

We each enjoy our homes, our privacy and our independence, but as the years go by our physical and mental health often begins to decline. Unless we live in a family community much like the Amish do, we may reach a point of being unable to care for ourselves as well as we should. The greatest gift that we can give our children is the willingness to adjust to the aging process without battling to hold on to the way we have always done things. Readily accepting the realities of our situations lessens the anxieties that our offspring may have regarding our safety. How that happens may look different in each case, but when we begin to defer to the care of others we are demonstrating great wisdom, not weakness. To everything there really is a season.

I’m still quite healthy and capable, but at my age things can change in a heartbeat. I have already instructed my daughters not to listen to me if I become foolish or incapable of making good decisions. I love my home and my routines, but I don’t wish to become a burden on my daughters by fighting their attempts to keep me safe. I keep thinking that I want to create a kind of living will for them in which I state my intention to trust them with their decision in the future. I would like to do this while I still have total control over my mind. Perhaps if I put my thoughts in writing, my children will be able to show me those documents if I balk later. It will be like a kind of insurance policy for their well-being and mine. They won’t have to second guess their decisions because I will have made it clear that I trust them to know when I need to give up my car, my home and my independence. 

I hope that I will actually be much like my grandfather. My health is exceptional right now and I still write daily, read constantly and teach mathematics to a number of students. I don’t want to take my present status for granted because I have seen so many situations where everything changed rapidly. I want my daughters to be certain that in my right mind I realize that a time may come when they must take control of my future. It will lift the burden of uncertainty and even guilt that often comes with eldercare. I want to be like my Grandpa and my son-in-law’s granddaddy as well. They were incredibly wise men who gave their families the gift of peace of mind without any strings attached. I can’t think of anything better. 

I joined Twitter a while back but I originally had no idea how to navigate it. I mostly used it to lead people to my blog website just as I did on Facebook. I am not sure if I ever got any takers from Twitter, but I kept my link there in a fantastical hope that one day a publisher, director, or bookseller might view my writing and then reach out to me to talk about getting my work to a larger audience. I can dream like anyone else.

My blog has never really caught on beyond few loyal readers who appear to like most of what I write.. I know that I have lost some of my most ardent followers because I chose to write political tracts that offended them in some way. I won’t apologize for my views because at least for now I remain in a country where i have the freedom the express myself. 

I still have my infamously unpublished book which I believe to be of merit for a wide audience. It’s not that I don’t want the public to see it, but true to the form of my life, something dramatic always seems to happen just when I have the time and the funds to get my work ready for a launch. This time it involves my sweet father-in-law who is newly widowed and recently undone by emergency bowel surgery and a life threatening case of Covid-19. Needless to say I have put the book on the back burner for the time being, but I am more and more often feeling guilty for making so many excuses for not presenting it to the public because it is a story that becomes more and more important over time.

Lots of people are talking about mental illness these days. What they don’t often discuss is how difficult it is to get help for family members who need it. The first step is finding someone willing to take a new patient. There are so many blockades to that process that it is almost impossible to describe. Insurance defines who gets which doctor. Of late many of the most prestigious psychiatrists only take cash. Some practices are full. Getting an appointment is frustrating and then comes the battle with the person who is sick. Not all mentally ill persons go gently into the good night of therapy. 

When my mom was her sickest I cried, pleaded, screamed, and one time even slapped her in the face to persuade her to accept help. I am not an abusive person. I abhor physical violence, but I could not watch her deteriorating for another moment. When she balked and refused to keep an appointment with her doctor I lost it and found my hand on her cheek as she snarled the poisonous and psychotic mania of her bipolar disorder. It was a low point in my life, but it worked. I got her to the help that she needed and for a time saw my sweet mother once again. 

I feel for families dealing with a mentally ill relative. It becomes an unwanted and exhausting task to keep a noncompliant person as healthy as possible. Over and over again the same battles arise and there is always a temptation to simply walk away from all responsibility. Only love is a powerful enough motivator to fight the system and the person who is sick. There is always the hope that one day the illness will somehow magically disappear, but that so rarely happens. 

I am proud of how things worked out with my mother. I think that in the end she understood that my intentions were always good in caring for her. I have found notations in notebooks indicating that she really did know that something was very wrong with her that she was unable to control. It was a sad way for her to have to live her life because by nature she was a delightful sprite whose heart was open, caring and lovely. We always knew she was getting sick when she sat in the dark brooding over manufactured beliefs that someone wanted to pin a crime on her. The person who emerged during those times was the antithesis of my mom. 

Mental illness is a scary thing and it is behind the rest of medicine by decades, maybe even centuries. There are still people who are spooked by it or think that it can be cured with a good attitude or lots of prayer. There have been few people on this earth as devoted to God as my mother was. She read her Bible daily and prayed earnestly. She was always kind and willing to give her last dime to someone that she thought might need it more than she did. Prayers were not enough to cure her, but they did give me and my brothers the patience and comfort that we needed to push her to accept medical help. 

Life was mostly good with my mother but the specter of mental illness always loomed large. Her bipolar disorder was chronic. The chemistry in her brain went awry in a cyclical fashion that marked the seasons of our lives for over forty years. It was a painful disease for my mom and one that affected my brothers and me as well. It distressed us to see her suffering over and over again, but I would tell anyone who is dealing with such misery that keeping our mother as well as possible was one of the most rewarding things we ever did. My book documents our journey. Watch for A Little Bit of Living in the near future. I just have to get a few things in order from my father-in-law and I’ll get serious about presenting a book that I really believe will bring hope to many folks. My failure to launch must surely end soon.