Pat YOUR OWN Back but WE Got It!
Have you ever suddenly realized some things you did in the past were remarkable?
I've been thinking a lot lately of some pretty great things I have accomplished and never celebrated. Here's why.
I have and am being spoiled by a lot of older people - disproportionately women - who have made a space for me in their lives. They also may have touched mine previously, personally and through others. Some ways I was aware of but many more of which I wasn't.
This positive attention centered around things I've done and things I can do, is helping me though my particular dogged miasma. I now have goggles, a respirator, rain boots, and a daily dose of sensibility. I am also being lectured, chided, threatened, ordered about, ignored, scoffed at and set straight. As I have a firm tendency to resist any manner of textbook mothering (which probably causes them to go underground with their attempts) I guess I am giving in. But the unwavering support seems to always be there. And the genuine enjoyment and encouragement! Gooood times.
These relationships remind me of when I first realized I was a real adult. A woman I worked with - who I think was in her 40's - asked my then 23 year-old self for some advice regarding a serious matter. Before I learned of the term imposter syndrome, I knew then how it felt. I froze for a second then tentatively gave her my honest opinion. She seemed relieved and I truly feel I helped her.
Well, now I notice the shoes get on other feet regularly. Some times the fit is tight, loose or just right. There's a marvelous give and take and knowledge is not swept aside no matter the age of the possessors. I feel privileged most-times; but am guarded as I do have a place to know. I practice patience.
Sometimes, alone with me or in groups, these elders show their weapons of words and small gestures. There is disdain, jealousy, gossip, and come-uppance. Wisdom and experience turned-out fomenting downright - usually slight and couched - cruelty! I witness glimpses of who was the Bully, the Mean Girl, the Victim, the Overindulged, the Most Popular, the Giver and the Peacemaker. As long as we all take note and check each other, there's positivity afoot. But haven't we all been one or another at times? Then I witness more as the Crusader, the Sweet girl, the Door Mat, the Ignored, the Wall-flower, the Taker and the Fighter are also presenting! And all are done with saving grace!
These relationships have me reflecting upon the kind of older person I will and hope to be.
I believe I'll be an oxymoronic multifaceted inscrutable compilation because to some others I am there already! And my senior friends remind me this is all part of the package deal.
A Loving Salute to some of my former earthly Teachers of Senior School:
Ms. Jerry D.
Mr. Dig D.
Ms. Nettie C.
Ms. Lula H.
Ms. Elizabeth M.
Ms. Jean E.
Ms. Nat D.
Ms. L. M
Mr. Weis D.
Ms. Addie J.
Mr. John D.
Ms. Inez C.
Ms. Portia H.
Ms. Virginia M.
Ms. Polly C.
Ms. Olivia B.
Ms. Corine F.
Ms. Elease D.
Ms. Betty S.
Mr. Arthur B.
Ms. Liz L.
Thank you!
Following are Quotes about aging and growing while doing so, found on the quirkily wonder-full "Brain Pickings" site.
"All in all, [Andrew] Oswald [behavioral scientist] tested a half million people in 72 countries, in both developing and developed nations. He observed the same pattern across all parts of the globe and across sexes. From Switzerland to Ecuador, from Romania to Singapore, Slovakia, Israel, Spain, Australia, and China. Happiness diminishes as we transition from childhood to adulthood and then starts rising as we grow wrinkles and acquire gray hair. And it’s not only we humans who slump in the middle and feel sunnier toward the end. Just recently, Oswald and colleagues demonstrated that even chimpanzees and orangutans appear to experience a similar pattern of midlife malaise." ~ George Eliot
"Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being." ~ Bertrand Russell
“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.” ~ Alice Walker
copyright 2018 Karen E. Dabney