Tag: nature

Build Your Own World, Create Your Own Day, Construct Your Own Life

When I was young, I thought I would have figured things out by the time I was old.  (Old then being about 50.)  Yet I seem to be fighting many of the same battles with myself that I have been fighting for seven decades.  I know I don’t need another book to tell me how to fulfill my purpose, stop procrastinating, live according to my values and priorities.  I have read a slew of those books and know what it is that I am supposed to do.  That is not the problem.  Actually doing what I know is the best thing is the problem.

Moving closer to my teenage grandchildren and hearing them interact with their parents has been somewhat enlightening in this regard.  The conversation goes like this.  Parent: “Do you think eating all that candy (or staying up late playing video games or spending your allowance on silly things) is a good choice?”  Child: “I know, I know – but I really wanted…” You get the picture.  Many days this same conversation is going on in my head, but both characters are… me.  I know what the good choices are, but as Saint Paul laments in Romans 7:19, “For the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do”.  Or as Ado Annie says in Oklahoma, “I’m just a girl who can’t say no.”

I have won the battle in some cases.  I keep a serious journal and have an exercise routine of sorts.  I take my vitamins and see my dentists and doctors as required.  I make my bed and remember birthdays and get a blog posted a couple of times a month, yet my life is overshadowed by the things I want to do and do not do.

Friends have told me just to climb out from under the guilt.  Retired people don’t really need to do anything, do they?  And yet this is not an answer for me.  I want to end every waking day by being satisfied by what I have accomplished, but I also am looking more closely (than I would like) at the end of my life.  The big deadline looms.

Three pieces of advice have helped me lately, and I am glad to pass them along.  Two are quotes from the Transcendentalists, first from Emerson in “Nature:” “Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world; and beyond its world a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you: build, therefore, your own world.”  Birds single-mindedly build their nests; we should do the same.  In old age, our nests are for nurturing ourselves and not our babies, they are for cradling us to the end.  No better reason for building your own world.

If Emerson seems to call for too much, Thoreau parses it into to smaller chunks for us to consider.  In Walden, he tries to whittle his life down to the marrow; he trims his expectations to the day in front of him.  “To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”  Make this day a good one – and our days will add up to a life, a world.   Thoreau’s gentle exhortation has gotten me through some rough patches.

Lastly, I have been reading a wonderful novel, This is Happiness, by Niall Williams.  The book was recommended in a recent NYTimes piece by Ann Patchett and is narrated by a very old man who is recalling the coming of electricity to his Irish village.  Read it to find out if the residents are happier before or after technology catches up with them!  In any case, the seventy-eight-year-old man reflects on this very subject:

Not that you ever quite know what that is [the better version of ourselves], still there he is, that better man, who remains always just ahead of you.  I write this now. Having come to realise it’s a lifelong pursuit, that once begun will not end this side of the graveyard.  With this I have made an old man’s accommodation and am reconciled to the fruits of a fruitless endeavour.

And what are the fruits of this fruitless endeavour?  Perhaps that we affected the quality of our days with Thoreau and built our own (yet imperfect) world with Emerson.  I am happy to make an old lady’s accommodation with these truths.

Bare Ruin’d Choirs – Seasons and Similes of Old Age

I have been intending to write a blog about the notion of “singularity,” but my readings on the subject seem to go on and on, so I thought I would just look around me and write about the season and the seasons of life.

This is my first autumn back in New England after almost a decade.  We moved from western North Carolina two months ago (just in time, I guess).  Autumn was longer but less colorful North Carolina; there were the brilliant yellows but not the mellow golds and reds.  Fall has always been my favorite season, and I am looking forward to the colors, the smells, and the urgency of buttoning up the house (nesting) before winter arrives.

If autumn is my favorite season, October has always been my favorite month.  For years (until the printing wore off), I used a coffee cup inscribed with Thoreau’s quote about October. Here it is, to remind us to imbibe some of the magic Henry found in October:

October is the month of painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes round the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting. October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight.

Back to our earliest records, poets used the seasons of the year as similes for the seasons of life.  We still do it all the time, talking about a “December bride” or someone being “in the autumn of his years.”  These are apt similes, much like that of the Baby New Year and Old Father Time.  We grow and blossom, reap the karma of our earlier life, and close in ourselves with the narrowing of the light at the end of the year.  One significant difference, of course, is that our lives are linear, while nature recycles upon itself. (Or, as Dante contends, the life span is a parabola! See further discussion of that possibility here.) Perhaps the problem is how we look at it; if we could accept that we are part of nature perhaps we would see it differently.

Cicero, in his “On Old Age,” uses many images of old age that relate senescence to the cycles of nature.  Thus we have age as the “tranquil evening” of the life’s day, as the “autumn” or “winter” of the life’s year, as the ripening, maturing, even withering fruit of the tree of life:

There had to be a time of withering, of readiness to fall, like the ripeness that comes to the fruits of the trees and of the earth.  But a wise man will face this prospect with resignation, for resistance against nature is as pointless as the battles of the giants against the gods.

Clearly, the giants of Silicon Vally do not agree that “resistance against nature” is pointless, but more on them in my next blog.

Shakespeare starts his masterful Sonnet 73 about old age with these lines:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

Latter day poets use the images of the seasons all the time to connote the ages of man; when Philip Larkin wrote his comic masterpiece about growing older, he titled it “The Winter Palace,” and ended with the image of a last December snowstorm:

Then there will be nothing I know.

My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.

For more examples, revisit Chesterton’s “Gold Leaves,” or Rilke’s “Autumn.” To find more correlations between the seasons and the stages of life, just look at my (incomplete) list of poems about old age.  And please send me any of your favorite poems to add to the list. Or write one.

But, back to me and to the month of October.  I used to think I was in the October of life, but that is foolish at this point.  If I were a maple tree, my leaves would have long since been raked up and hauled away.  I am more “bare ruin’d choirs” than the rich golds and yellows of this lustrous October.  I am surely in November, and probably most of the way to Thanksgiving.  The “later twilight” of life.  Robert Frost said that sorrow was his “November Guest,” but yet appreciated the season:

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow…

Yet, I can still enjoy the present October while looking over my shoulder to catch a glimpse of past Octobers, Septembers, Mays.  And forward to the dark and quiet evenings of December.