Tag: habits

No One Wants Our China, Recipes, or Habits

I ran across these lines from Psalm 19 this morning and got thinking about just how “one day tells a story to the next”:

2 One day tells a story to the next.
One night shares knowledge with the next
3 without talking,
without words,
without their voices being heard.

What knowledge is our day “sharing with the next”?  What traditions have we passed down?  What has been accepted?  The next generation clearly don’t want our good china or best recipes, while they might be happy to inherit our jewelry and silverware if the items can be readily converted to cash. The NYTimes recently dealt with this issue in relation to the family china: “Younger people are just not interested” says the article. “The dishes are frequently one of the items left over at estate sales. Storage units and landfills are brimming with it.”  No one is to blame; it is just that the world has changed so much.  Between us and our grandparents, a big break.  Between us and our grandchildren, a chasm.  They don’t have our habits, our concerns, our way of doing things, our sense of history.  So says the old lady.

Our generation greatly widened this divergence from tradition, so we can’t exempt ourselves from blame.  We bridled (no pun intended) at registering for wedding china and silver; we were the first generation of women to regularly wear slacks and then – blue jeans.  My grandparents, with their Depression/WWII era thrift and discipline, were completely flummoxed by their grandchildren approaching adulthood in the late 1960s.  For good reason. But we at least had lives that looked a little like theirs.   We ate meals together, celebrated holidays in traditional ways, and wore pajamas and robes.

But the change is almost absolute at this point – this generation has kitchens, yes, and many of them are very pretty kitchens because they are seldom used.  This generation celebrates the more consumer-related holidays in grand gift-giving fashion, but skip church services and big sit-down family dinners. Either they never wear pajamas or maybe I just can’t differentiate between their daywear and their nightwear.  They are much kinder to their children than we were, but their children are not kinder to them.  Would I have gotten out of cooking or going to church on Christmas Eve if I thought I could?  Maybe.  But I was always glad that I had not. 

Of course, there are many more differences from our generation.  No planning menus a week in advance, no Christmas Clubs, no new hats for Easter.   All gone by the board, along with top sheets on the bed.  Again, I don’t know if the new generation is right or wrong, but they don’t seem any happier.  And there is surely no room in their lives for the family china or our string of pearls or the workaday cookbooks stuffed with recipes clipped from newspapers that were actually printed on paper.

One note here: I have almost nothing in common with the Conservative Right in this country (more on that another time), but I can understand (although not sympathize with) their extreme last-gasp effort to roll back the tide.  I might have a little more empathy if they were concentrating on the worst of it – improving slipping education levels, decreasing recidivism, working to curb and cure drug abuse, and limiting the power of technology in our lives.  But they would rather spend their efforts sweeping away those things in which life really is better – civil rights, women’s rights, vast improvements in public health, tolerance of all kinds.  And all this in the name of returning to the glory of the past.  Enough on that for now.

I realize that “things” like dishes are not important in any ultimate sense, but they are part of our lives.  As Borges notes about his possessions in his wonderful poem, “Things”: “They’ll long outlast our oblivion; And never know that we are gone.” 

The china and the pajamas and the recipes are only symbols; but I do care about the loss of communal family things – like leisurely dinners together or the games and sing-a-longs of car trips before everyone had their own source of entertainment under their thumbs.  I miss sitting in a pew in church candlelight and just being quiet together.  But when you change some things, others follow.  We can write a will, but we cannot control our real legacy.  Things like china are only reminders, placeholders.  I will hold onto my china (for now) and my values, but I cannot force them on anyone else.  And as for the things, they’ll “never know that we are gone.”

If you want to read a story about coming to terms with the loss of valued items in our lives, you might try “The Mustard Seed.”  For loss of rituals, you might try “Baptismal Rights.”  Regarding the rituals and habits of old folks, you might try “Routine is the Housekeeper of Inspiration.” And just know that the next time we move – whether to assisted living or the nursing home or the cemetery – the china is not going with us.

 

Travel, Rituals, and Old Age

My husband and I just returned from a ten-day marathon in New England with all our relatives.  We are not used to hotel beds, restaurant food, and such a rich diet of forced socialization.  It was reassuring and comforting to see people we love, but we missed our rituals – from tea at 3PM to oatmeal on weekdays to the PBS News Hour on Wednesday nights (we can only stomach the news once a week).  We are home now and nestling back into our routines, and this has gotten me thinking about the value and meaning of ritual.  I am also thinking about it because I found myself trying to defend it on several occasions while we were gone.

Usually, I would say as I sat down at the restaurants our hosts had chosen, Thursday is the day we have fish.  Or, upon being asked if we eat oatmeal every morning (we bring our old-fashioned oats with us), I would reply that we ate oatmeal Monday through Friday, have pancakes on Saturday and eggs on Sunday.  Generally, our friends and relatives were appalled.  You know what you are going to be doing every day of the week? they exclaim.  What kind of life is that?

It is a sacred kind of life as far as I am concerned.  And a life that leaves much room for contemplation and creativity.  It may not work for everyone, but not worrying about what’s for breakfast or dinner, or what we are going to watch for our nightly hour/dose of daily television leaves room for the more intriguing parts of life.  It is not that our rituals are not important; it is that they are holy.  These moments in our days are like a religious Book of Hours, where we perform and say the duties of the day between work, play, thought, meditation.  I would never criticize someone who lived a spontaneous life in all respects, but such is a life of continual decisions and effort of which I am no longer capable – if I ever was.

Ritual also teaches us to appreciate the small wonders of life.  In one of my favorite books, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery writes “When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things.”  Back home after a major disruption in our routines, the blueberries on our oatmeal, my peanut butter and cracker afternoon snack, become luminescent in their beloved familiarity.  And this, in turn, reminds me to appreciate all life.

Routine makes for contentment rather than thrills, but who says that happiness is something to be “pursued”?  I would say that the pursuit of happiness is an oxymoron (with due deference to Jefferson).  Children love to hear the same bedtime story over and over again; they sleep the peace of the familiar.  Monasteries and convents are models of a scheduled life, and yet they fertilize the genius of a Thomas Merton, a Hildegarde, a Gregor Mendel.

And I think of Nietzsche, who raised the question of eternal return – is it possible to live our lives in such a manner that we would be happy to live them again and again?  Or would it become an eternal frustration, a Ground Hogs Day of confusion and regret? Routine, for me, makes parts of every day a blessing of eternal return– knowing that I will come back daily, hourly, weekly to these holy points, making the rest of life easier, fuller, and more open to adventures of another sort. 

One last note: rituals and habits are “near enemies” in Buddhist terminology.  Near enemies are two things that look the same on the surface – like equanimity and indifference – but are totally different in their intention.  It is true that rituals can become habitual, but something is lost.  And I would never call a bad habit a ritual.  One must be vigilant.

This week’s story, “Paradise on Earth,” is about habits (not rituals) that develop about how we treat each other, and what can happen when things change.

 

Journaling in Old Age

Old man, old woman – it is not too late to start keeping a journal! I started to keep one conscientiously at age fifty-three, and I only wished I had done so earlier. These blogs are often an outgrowth of a journal entry, but the document, the content, is not my journal’s main value; it is the process of keeping a journal that is critical.

Like any good habit, keeping a journal is easy once you etch it into your life – scientific literature says this takes three weeks, but I would give it a few months. I started by disciplining myself (I know discipline is out of favor, but nothing worthwhile is ever done without at least a pinch of it!) to write a certain number of pages each month – ten single-space pages at font size 12. That has not changed. I often write more, but never less. And if I fall behind, I have to make it up by the last day of the month. In the early years, this often meant a lot of rubbish on the 31st! You do not have to write every day, but it’s easier to establish the habit if you do. I put in the date, skip a line, and proceed to discuss what I am reading, how I slept, what I am afraid of, surprised at, hopeless at figuring out. Give yourself lots of leeway. If all you can manage is a history of the day before or an agenda for the day ahead, so be it. Believe me, this will change!

You will find that having the journal to write slowly changes the way you view your life. You will catch yourself marking passages in books to transcribe (a journal works as a wonderful commonplace book) or trying to note exactly what someone says to you (pay attention!) so that you can record it in your journal as accurately as possible. More importantly, you will be turning your life into a narrative – your narrative. Not a Facebook narrative. (Can those people really be so happy? No way. They are either deceptive or deluded, maybe both.) Not a blog. You are not writing to impress anyone (and you should decide up front that you will not share). You are writing to try to narrate your own life. Susan Sontag said that “in the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.” Take your only opportunity to tell your own story.

I’m in my fifteenth year of doing this. I wish I had always done it – how edifying it would be to be able to look back on how I felt about being a new mother (scared and overwhelmed), how I navigated divorce (scared and overwhelmed) and then remarried (happy and overwhelmed). But the feelings I just put in parentheses are remembered. And we only have to have someone send us an old photo of ourselves or compare reminiscences with our siblings to realize that memory isn’t always completely reliable.

And (with my parentheses) I have just described another benefit (they are endless). You can look back a few months or years and see what you were worried about, what you fretted over – and recognize that those things have just evaporated. They either never happened or were not half as bad as you feared. There is a life lesson. There are many such lessons that we cannot learn anywhere but from our own experience – and experience not reified in words is hard to recall, difficult to grasp, and susceptible to psychological manipulation.  And the “search” function in Word gives me the ability to ascertain when I had a root canal (and sometimes even to settle arguments).

The document itself is a mixed blessing. For instance, there is the problem of what to do with all of this sensitive material – especially as I get older. I am not sure I would even want people I loved to read my daily thoughts (once in a great while you get angry with almost everyone), or have to decide how to dispose of them. I print out the journal monthly for vague reasons that may have something to do with the strange satisfaction of seeing the record of my life turned into copy, hole-punched, and piled up in loose-leaf binders in the closet. But I do spend time thinking about the appropriate moment in my life for a bonfire. But again, these problems are outweighed by the advantages.

So, try it. I recommend it and so do many wonderful writers and thinkers. The product is valuable. Salman Rushdie cautioned us to “never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things — childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves — that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers.” But it is really not the product that is the most important. It is the process. The daily exercise of trying to make sense of your own life. Is there a better way that you could spend your time?

I am not posting a story this week, but if you want a smile, try Rich Schram’s blog at funreadsbyrichschram.blogspot.com. I particularly recommend his “Sheetrock Ballet.”