Tag: poetry

Old Folks and the Wisdom of Appreciating Little Things

Younger people sometimes make fun of their elders for the simple pleasure we find in routine – waiting for the mail, afternoon tea, watching our favorite television show, knitting a sock, dead-heading the roses.  Somehow, they think small pleasures are signs of a diminished life.  However, there is every reason to believe that these are the constituents of the good life.  Maybe this is something we learn in our old age.

You may remember that at the end of Voltaire’s Candide, that satire of the optimistic philosophy that all things are for the best, Candide counsels us that we must all simply “cultivate our own garden.”  I have always thought that it was a way of reminding us that the worth of our lives, the joy of our lives, comes from paying attention to the small things that we do every day, the things that truly make up our lives.   As I have aged and the distractions of the outside world are more easily kept at bay, I have realized what good advice this is.

My husband and I have been reading Thomas Hardy lately, and at the end of the Mayor of Casterbridge, I was quite taken by a passage which talks about the “ever-after” of Elizabeth Jane, a central character who has suffered much from the ups and downs of life:

Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly irradiated at some half-way point by daybeams rich as hers.  But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more.  And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquillity had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.

While you might not agree with Hardy that life is a “general drama of pain,” we must all agree that it is no Eden either. Hardy’s “solution” was akin to Voltaire’s:

As the lively and sparkling emotions of her early married life cohered into an equable serenity, the finer movements of her nature found scope in discovering to the narrow-lived ones around her the secret (as she had once learnt of it) of making limited opportunities endurable; which she deemed to consist in the cunning enlargement, by a species of microscopic treatment, of those minute forms of satisfaction that offer themselves to everybody  not in positive pain; which, thus handled, have much of the same inspiriting effect upon life as wider  interests cursorily embraced.

This talk of the cultivation and appreciation of “minute forms of satisfaction” is brilliant, I think, – and true.  I think of the little pleasures in our life – watching “Grantchester,” espresso on Saturday night, a good pasta dinner – what would life be without them?  Hardy is skeptical enough to put a caveat in (“to everybody not in positive pain”), but generally he gives us hope.

I wrote some years ago about the wonderful book by Marion Milner, A Life of One’s Own.  It was based on a journal this amazing woman kept in an effort to try to ascertain what, really, made her happy:

I could not by direct effort feel love towards someone, or by direct effort make myself happy.  What then was entirely under the control of my will?  It seemed to me that the only thing that was even potentially so controlled was my attention.  I could not control what I saw when I looked in a certain direction, but I could, generally at least, control which direction I should look in.

And mostly, her attention and her joy were on the small moments of life.

When long-married couples are separated by death or disability, they often talk about missing the little things – the glass of wine after dinner, the game of Scrabble on Sunday afternoons, or the standing joke about who was going to wash the dishes.

Small pleasures should not crowd out the more important things in life (and this can begin to happen if we are not careful), but they should be valued for the fact that they often contribute to those more important things – chances to share love, restore our balance, touch base with who we are.

So, when young folks roll their eyes over our rituals and small attentions, just realize that they have a lot to learn.  And never neglect or take for granted the simple pleasures of life that last into old age.

In Praise of Ordinary Times

My husband and I just got back from a week away from home and are slowly getting back to… normal.  As far as I am concerned, ordinary time is a precious commodity.  While the definitions of ordinary or normal sound pretty boring – “usual, typical, expected” –  I think normal life is undervalued, and I would prefer to define it in terms like “comfortable, relaxed, and reassuring.”  We have our rituals (Thursday is shopping and laundry, Tuesday and Saturday are hike days, Saturday is movie night), but the quiet anticipation of known events nurtures me far more than waiting in crowded airports or sleeping in strange beds.

I know that I am in the minority on this.  Advice columns tell us older folks to keep trying new things, exploring unfamiliar places, stretching our wings.  We have friends who spend half their lives on cruise ships, and others who spend as much time visiting one relative or another.  I would remind everyone that if you peeled back the travel industry’s propaganda, you could find documented risks to the elderly from air travel (blood clots, etc.), cruise ships (petri dishes of germs) and relocations of any kind.   How much more likely are we to fall trying to find a strange bathroom in the middle of the night?

There is a wonderful line in the movie, Mrs. Miniver.  Suffering the deprivations, apprehensions, and demands of life in wartime Britain, Mrs. Miniver (played flawlessly by Greer Garson) thinks back to what normal life was like, and promises herself to cherish it when and if it returns.  The movie was based on a series of newspaper columns by Jan Struther, and in one of them, the writer reflects on her feelings about returning home after a holiday:

Not that she didn’t enjoy the holidays, but she always felt – and it was, perhaps, the measure of her peculiar happiness – a little relieved when they were over.  Her normal life pleased her so well that she was half afraid to step out of its frame in case one day she would find herself unable to get back.

It is true that many old folks have a tendency toward the static, toward ritual, toward constancy.  Our culture works against this and has somewhat tainted what should be one of the major joys of old age.  By now, my readers know that one of my favorite novels is Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent.  Lady Slane, elderly and retired far from children, grandchildren, and obligations, finds life’s “last, supreme luxury” to be the time to sit and reflect, to live a life of one’s own making, to enjoy one’s own quiet habits.

Some Christian churches have periods of what are called “Ordinary Time.”  Generally, they are times that are not special because they are neither just before Christmas and Easter (Advent, Lent) nor just after (Epiphany, Eastertide).  Holy Week is coming up soon, with many churches having a dozen or more services; I’m sure the rectors sometimes long for ordinary time.

Ordinary Time brings me to T.S. Eliot and his poem “Ash Wednesday.”  Eliot seems to rebuff those exhortations that we “stretch” ourselves as we grow older.  Eliot spurns such advice, quoting Shakespeare in the process:

Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

I sometimes mourn lost stamina, but I never mourn lost ambition or the impetus of “striving.”  I resist replacing forced imperatives of youth (those of employment and raising children) with self-imposed ones of old age (doing “what is expected of me” or “what is good for me”).  I want to define my own normality.  I want to stay at home and reflect like Lady Slane.  I am accused (often and even by loved ones) of being boring.  However, this agèd eagle is not bored.  And I am not afraid of ordinary times.  I am just happy to be at home among my books and chairs and pots and pans.  And my quiet thoughts.

For the value of ritual, you might try my story about Walden Pond, “Again and Again and Again.”  And, please be assured, if cruises and world tours make you happy, keep at it.  Just don’t expect me to envy you.

Dayspring Mishandled – “Remember Not the Sins of My Youth”

“Dayspring Mishandled” is a short story by Rudyard Kipling, and is also a phrase in a pseudo-Chaucer poem (“Gertrude’s Prayer”) that Kipling wrote to go with that tale.  The first stanza of that poem is as follows:

That which is marred at birth Time shall not mend,
Nor water out of bitter well make clean;
All evil thing returneth at the end,
Or elseway walketh in our blood unseen.
Whereby the more is sorrow in certaine—
Dayspring mishandled cometh not agen.

Dayspring is an old word for dawn, for the early part of the day, and Kipling’s point is that things we did, mistakes we made, in our early life cannot be corrected and may have consequences for the rest of our life.  This is both a fairly negative attitude and perhaps also a fairly true one.  How unfair it seems that decisions that we made when we were nineteen about marriage or education or conduct should have repercussions for the rest of our lives!  “Remember not the sins of my youth,” cries the 25th Psalm.  The Psalmist is talking to God, but he might as well have been talking to himself.  Who wouldn’t want to forget the transgressions of their youth?  Who can?

There are two kinds of “dayspring mishandled” that bother us, I think, as we look back from our old age.  First, we acknowledge missed chances, like not taking full advantage of our educational opportunities.  Regrets like these are ours alone, and we can usually remediate, atone, or come to peace in some way within ourselves.  Second, there is the guilt of doing things (or not doing them) that affect other people as well as ourselves.  This is a harder kind of remorse – even if we felt that we had no choice (if we wanted to survive) when we did whatever caused the pain.  Nevertheless, parents, children, spouses, friends – suffered.  I have always taken some solace from the words of Mary Oliver:

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Of course, Mary Oliver had no children.  Your children live longer than you do, and they never forget.

Literature has often addressed this idea of coming to terms with “dayspring mishandled;” one thinks of Oedipus the King or Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge. Of special interest in this regard are works written by older authors, who are looking back at a long past. I recently reread T.S. Eliot’s play The Elder Statesman, his last major work, written when he was seventy and about six years before his death.  It is all about the mistakes of youth – and how they can destroy the rest of life if left to fester.  Lord Claverton (the elder statesman) laments:

Those who flee from their past will always lose the race,

I know this from experience.  When you reach your goal,

 Your imagined paradise of success and grandeur,

 You will find your past failure waiting there to greet you.

And yet, Eliot gives us a relatively happy ending.  Old Lord Calverton ends up in a rest home full of people who know the secrets he has tried to keep hidden for so many years.  The secrets come out, the children forgive, and the old man dies in peace: “I’ve been freed from the self that pretends to be someone;/In becoming no one, I begin to live. /It is worth dying, to find out what life is.”  I recommend The Elder Statesman; I think Eliot learned much between “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and his last play.

We would like to forget our instances of dayspring mishandled, but we cannot.  Not only are the consequences very real, but as the wonderful Haruki Murakami says, “You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them. If nothing else, you need to remember that. You can’t erase history, or change it. It would be like destroying yourself.” Ah, yes.  Not easy.  But is it at least worth hanging the dirty laundry on the line with the hope that, after all these years, sun and time will bleach out the stains?

Like all of us, I have my share of regrets, of daysprings mishandled.  Besides acceptance (easily said, nearly impossible to live), the thing that helps me is to remember that dayspring is something that happens every morning.  Each day we get a new chance and an older and wiser self with which to face the challenges and the gifts.

I am not going be specific about my regrets here. But I have often written fiction about people who are trying to realize the “ideal” of the poet James Fenton:

This is my past
Which I shall not discard.
This is the ideal.
This is hard.

Since it is Lent, you might look at my story, “Shrove Tuesday.”