4000 weeks

Embracing our finitude

One thousand words seem just about right. A picture really does say so much, in ways words just never could.

I love this picture.

This week I’ve been thinking about life, aging, wisdom, and how we can do hard things.

I confess I’d like to identify as the serene and wise-looking woman in the front row that looks like she has things figured out, but the truth is that I suspect I have a lot to learn from her. Her presence, her smirky Mona Lisa smile, it’s like she knows something that the rest of us don’t.

I’m not entirely delusional about my limitations as far as my iPhone is concerned, but being more present is high on my list of good intentions.

I also admire her subtle fashion sense. The unassuming black with the purple-rose punch of color. Not all of us have what it takes to pull off a violet frame.

In fact, judging from everyone in the photo as representative of a good majority of us, I think a whole lot of us are unaware and could learn a few things from her.

I could be wrong and she could be Cruella De Vil, but all signs point to beautiful grandma energy.

She just has that look of warmth, grace, and dignity.

I’m imagining that she probably wouldn’t even criticize our phone behaviors, she’d just smile at us with warm crinkly eyes through her colorful funky frames.

She’d understand how compelling it is and not judge us, just love us as we are.

The same way she loves everyone. The way a grandma loves a grandchild. In that, they don’t need to DO anything but just be.

A God-like love.

The kind of love that you don’t need to justify your existence for, OR really DO anything to prove that you are worthy.

Your being here is enough.

The kind of love that when you mess up you are already forgiven.

I may never own purplish rims and rock a black cardigan as well as she does, but I AM digging her essence. Her vibe. Her smile and her presence. She seems calm.

Relaxed.

And I’d like what she’s having.

I think we sometimes have trouble being graceful when it comes to our aging and culturally we seem to want to “beat” Father Time and all the things regarding aging from wrinkles and grey hairs are things we resist.

In the Chinese and Japanese cultures, filial piety – a virtue of respect for one's father, elders, and ancestors from Confucian philosophy – is highly valued. In fact, it's the law in China and other countries including India, France, the Ukraine, and Singapore.

Many ancient cultures have had a deep reverence for the elderly in their communities and seek out their wisdom and counsel for all kinds of community issues while we tend to rush people out of their jobs into early retirement and into care facilities when it becomes challenging for us to adequately care for them ourselves.

We find it comforting to read about some outlier or inspiring person that has achieved something great to prove to ourselves that it’s never too late for us either. Like maybe if 92-year-old Bob in Ontario can do it we can too?

But the truth is, he’s one in 8 billion.

And so is Sister Madonna Buder who is 92 and still competing in Ironman Triathlons… I confess did one when I was in my early 40s and there were no pictures of radiant me giving smiling high-fives. I was half her age and all I remember is having to throw up under a picnic table at the finish line. This “Iron nun” as people affectionately call her is amazing.

Of course, while I think it’s awesome that Bob and Madonna are TOTAL rock stars at 92, I guess I just want to challenge myself to see beyond this kind of thinking now.

Can we just RELAX?

Does life require a bucket list and the pressure of making every minute count?

Is it okay not to feel pressured to become some super uber-heroic age-defying version of ourselves or look 25 years younger than our “real age”?

The real truth is that regardless of how “well” we age, we still have a place in the family of things.

Wrinkles schminkles.

We can come as we are and live our one “wild and precious life” as our beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver demonstrated, by simply being ourselves. Mary went for quiet walks in the woods every morning and wrote down her poetic observations and she told Krista Tippett in an inspiring interview On Being that “she was saved by the beauty of the world”.

Mary’s interview from 2015 is so rich with wisdom, I have a feeling she would be fast friends with the woman with the purple frames from the picture at the top of this post. She may not have purple-rimmed glasses but she does have a poetry anthology of “greatest hits” and no one can deny that she really did rock a black sweater.

One day not long ago, my husband showed me this chart and I found it intriguing.

It represents our life in weeks… this one is my own.

Even better, let’s make one for you: your life in weeks.

Every red dot represents a week you’ve lived and the empty ones are the blocks you have left if you make it to the age of 90.

The average age is closer to 80 (4,000 weeks) but the oldest documented woman on record was a French woman who was 122 years old. She even met Vincent van Gogh.

How does it make you feel?

I spent some quality time with my friend Ruth this week and check out what her chart looks like:

4,700 weeks have already been logged for Ruthie who is now just over 90 years old.

It’s interesting to see it all laid out like this.

Can we even embrace our finitude?

Seneca lamented “the shortness of life”. Maybe some days feel short but some feel interminably long (especially it seems when our kids are under the age of 3?!)

My mom told me the joke that life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer you get to the end the faster it goes. This speeding up of subjective time with age is well documented by psychologists, but there is no consensus on the cause. A paper published by Harvard had Professor Adrian Bejan present an argument based on the physics of neural signal processing. He hypothesizes that, over time, the rate at which we process visual information slows down, and this is what makes time “speed up” as we grow older.

This week I had a conversation with Ruth and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. '

I visit Ruth and a few others every two or three weeks in a local retirement community - I jokingly call them “the golden girls”. It’s pretty simple what we do… we sit, we visit, and chat about their lives all while knitting. Sometimes there are bouts of silence or comments about the lap blankets they are working on for the local hospital, but it feels like so much more than that to me.

My girlfriend Laura and I started this local “Women’s Collective” to help bring women together in creative ways and stir up some free fun for local women of every generation to just sit and be in a room together and learn from one another. We get wool donated and just doing something creative side-by-side feels good.

When they heard that I was marrying a young couple this weekend, everyone began reminiscing about their own wedding days.

They were all special stories, but one of my favorites was from a German woman who came to Canada to be with her betrothed, and the immigration law in Canada at the time stated that they needed to get married within 3 weeks of her arrival. They only had enough money scraped together to have a handful of guests including their witnesses so on her wedding day she made a potato salad and they bought 6 beers to enjoy with their “wedding party” after the nuptials, but the fond look in her eye said much more. In fact, it may have cost pennies at the time, but it was the perfect wedding day and they have been happily married for over 60 years.

A feeling washed over me of wow, we have really gotten ourselves off course these days with our elaborate high-price-tagged wedding extravaganzas.

If you came into the retirement community with me, it’s probably like most others. You would probably observe that it’s a nice clean place. Well furnished. Friendly staff. The kind of place any of us would probably be happy to move into if we didn’t want to live on our own with all kinds of apartment living options based on the level of care we required.

They laugh, do puzzles, and bond over the not-so-great food, shingles, and sore joints but they are in good company. They have lovely families, but most of them visit on special occasions and I’ve observed that they feel varying degrees of loneliness and come to terms with their “golden years” in the best ways they can.

Sadly, many have lost their partners and their children are busy with their young families and their own lives. They understand, of course, but sometimes they cry. Just having someone listen to them is all I think I offer most days.

I sometimes wonder if I’ll live in a place like this someday.

I do love going there and sometimes I leave and I feel emotional. Often a bit teary and grateful to have gone, but this week I could feel the tears start rolling down my cheeks as soon as I walked through the sliding glass doors and I felt the fresh air hit my face.

I had just been pulled aside by Ruth who wanted to give me an update as I had offered to help give her a ride to the doctor. I have grown to love her. Her shaky soft 90-year-old hands taught me to knit last year for the first time. She’s just a beautiful person. She’s been having difficulty breathing and sleeping and it took a few months to get in to see a specialist but her son finally took her and she got the results. In a nutshell, she needs a complicated surgery, but they indelicately told her it wasn’t an option because she probably won’t survive it: “You’ll likely die on the table” is what the doctor told her and in his defense, I’m not even sure there is a nicer way to say that or if there is a bedside manner would soften the blow of that kind of news.

As I listened to her and my eyes misted up and so did hers.

This was it.

Her little red squares were all filled up and her time was running out.

I observed my thinking wandering to my car and trying to soften the blow with platitudes like she lived a long happy life, she has a beautiful family that loves her.. but they just didn’t register. I felt heartbroken and so did she. She has a brand new great-grandchild to love and she’s not ready for her life to end.

Driving away my mind drifted back to another friend in the hospital who admitted herself last week and has been struggling with debilitating depression. I just let the tears keep coming. She’s finding just getting through the day so hard right now.

All she really wants is to find some peace of mind. She asked me the impossible question… “Nona, do you think it’s possible for me to ever feel joy again? Will I ever get better?”

I’m not sure it matters what I think, all that truly matters is what SHE thinks, and what she believes.

This is her experience and her red dots matter to me.

Two of my favorite humans are suffering and there is nothing I can do to help either of them change their outcome, this is their journey.

It can feel so humbling to be here sometimes.

Neither Ruth nor my friend feels like they have control over their lives and as much as we like to think we do, the truth is NONE of us do either.

It’s out of our hands and it’s in God’s.

It feels like a pre-facet of grief.

It could all be a portal to a greater understanding, connectedness, and greater impact on all of us if we can see beyond what we’re taught and told our lives are about and what we need to do to be happy.

Maybe it’s not what we think.

Many of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions advocate surrender to God as a means of transcending the individual self.

Maybe our giving our lives up to God is what is called for in these circumstances.

I’m reading “Be As You Are” based on the teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi and I’m on a chapter called “Surrender”. To paraphrase, it basically says that true surrender transcended worshipping God as a subject (a power outside of us) and could only be successfully accomplished when the one who imagined that he was separate from God (ego) ceased to exist. That we must free ourselves of the idea that any of us are capable of acting independently of God. That we need to lose ourselves in God. God alone exists and the ego does not.

In the same lane, the bible says “Thy will be done”, not MY will which is the way most of us try to tackle our bad news, we try to just cope. That’s what we surrender along with our egos. We energetically give all of our burdens and worries up to a higher power and THEN we’ll experience grace and peace.

We wait and we get still.

We listen until we are guided.

We will eventually feel a deep abiding peace that “passeth understanding” regardless of the circumstances we face.

Can we make peace with what is in this moment?

With the messes. With our child that just punched his brother in the face? With our diagnosis or our prognosis, our bank account balance, and even our marriage that is hanging by a thread along with our own sanity.

Can we allow ourselves to let go of trying so hard to improve ourselves and make our lives something they never needed to be in the first place and just be here?

Feel it all and then give it up.

Let go.

Relax with what is. Even if we have trouble getting out of bed or only have a few months to live.

Consider the possibility that maybe looking younger, living longer, and looking good until we die may not be the point of being human.

Time is finite. We made it up and no matter how efficient we get we'll never do everything we think we're supposed to do.

Our inboxes will keep filling themselves up.

Maybe it’s time to acknowledge our limitations and be honest with ourselves that the life we're living right now is IT because it’s the one we have.

We can stop struggling against the limits of time.

Really enjoy what we're doing right now and who we’re doing it with.

To love others as they are and to love ourselves as we are.

The peril of the instrumentalization of time, and grids like these is that we are always doing something for what might happen in the future. Like taking a picture of fireworks or a famous person so you can enjoy it later instead of enjoying the moment.

This moment is all we have.

It's not necessarily an easy thing to do, but to me, it is liberating to realize that we can. In THIS very moment. Like reading these words and letting them seep into your heart.

We can trade in a flawless fantasy where we do everything perfectly for the messy reality where we do a handful of things in ways we might fail at.

We can give up certainty to some extent since committing to something means taking a path without knowing exactly where you're going but trusting that you’ll be guided and shown where you’re needed in your day-to-day life.

We can recoil from the notion that this is it. The brevity of life. We can finally see that we fight how things are so we don’t have to consciously participate in feeling powerless.

To become empowered we all must accept the limitations and lack of control over our lives.

In the end, we’ll accomplish more of what matters and is meaningful to us.

Like this grey… “something” in the basket beside my desk. ha.

To me, it’s beautiful because it’s the first thing I’ve ever knit. It tells a story without words of how at the bottom you can see I struggled. Then I slowly seem to get the hang of it and things begin to tighten up closer to the needles up top. I found my groove.

Just like life. Keep going.

Best of all, it reminds me of Ruthie. I can hear her peels of laughter when I joked that she was getting the front of a grey sweater for Christmas.

It also reminds me of all the stories that were told by “the golden girls” while each stitch was either painstakingly made or even accidentally dropped in a fit of giggles like the imperfect tapestries of our own lives.

Touching it reminds me of the woman I’ve sat with and listened to that has changed my heart and reminded me of what really matters.

I’d like to leave you with a song. It was written by Glennon Doyle’s young daughter Tish Melton along with Brandy Carlile. The song and the podcast are called: We Can Do Hard Things. I especially love the line “I continue to believe the best people are free, and it took some time, but I’m finally fine”.

Everything is going to be okay.

We really can do hard things by gracefully accepting the life we have now as it is.

Letting go and surrendering our ideas of how things should be to a higher power.

Give it ALL up.

Let’s all create some space in our minds to allow ourselves to see what our life circumstances are trying to show us.

And let’s delete our inboxes while we’re at it. Liz recommends it. I am adding this paragraph after the fact, I spent a magical evening with the incredible Elizabeth Gilbert in Toronto last night, and let’s just say that there were some jaw-dropping synchronicities between our dinner conversations before the event and her presentation. But I think it was her black outfit with her purplish rose lenses that made it feel truly Divine.

I took out my phone and took a picture after all, but it was worth it.

With love,

Nona

ps. Liz closed the evening with one of her favorite poems that moved me and I dedicate it to anyone that is feeling the burden of life…

Wait Without Hope

By: T.S. Eliot

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.