Author: Bev

How many times in your life have you been shot down?  Or, if you’re like me on some days, how many times a day have you been metaphorically beaten down?

Maybe your work just wasn’t up to par.  Or maybe you can’t hit par, the real par in your golf game.

Perhaps everything you tried, failed or was rejected.  Or try as hard as you can, you can’t make headway, or worse, fall back a peg.

We’ve all been knocked down and had to get back up again.  It’s about the proverbial get back atop the horse after you’ve been thrown to the ground.  Or who hasn’t fallen off of their bike, only to get back on the saddle again.

I grew up going to the roller-skating rink and in the process, we learned that you fall down periodically and you just get back up and do it all over again.  I think I benefited from that experience of falling down and getting back up.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back from trauma.  Studies over the last fifty years show that the most significant factor in how resilient you are in the face of difficult situations is how loved you felt as a child.  That’s something to ponder.

I’ve known some people who’ve faced unimaginably difficult situations and bounced back seemingly quickly.  Then there are others who, after years, even decades, can’t seem to fully recover after a relatively minor psychological or physical boo-boo.

As an adult hiker, I’ve had my share of fall-downs.  As a middle-old adult I realize that falling down isn’t the end of the world.  It might hurt sometimes more than others, but eventually most of us recover, to do it all over again.  We don’t stay down.

How many rounds in terms of the fight, does a fighter get knocked down yet gets back up to fight some more?  Being knocked down seems to be on a continuum from the life knocked out of us or our family members or friends, literally, to getting the wind knocked out of you for a few seconds.

Some of us have been knocked out of a job that we dreamed of.  Or, we’ve been knocked out of a relationship that we thought was ours and it failed, died or was stolen.  We’ve had our health knocked out of us, to be cured or cared for so that we can recover our get-up-and-go.

I realize that the same circumstances that knock me out may not knock you down and vice versa.  The thing that we share, however, is that we both got back up, in our own way, or you wouldn’t be reading this.

I wonder if a sort of resilience is built into our humanity?  I’m guessing we all have the capacity to learn how to get back up and do it all again after being knocked down.  But some of us have and some of us haven’t developed the skill.

In 1314, Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland said to his troops shortly before walloping the English at Bannockburn, “If at first you don’t succeed try, try and try again.”  It’s best, we’re told, not to fear failure but rather fear not trying.

Andra Day sings in her amazingly uplifting song, Rise Up, “You’re broken down and tired of living life on a merry go round…. And you can’t find the fighter, but I see it in you…. All we need is hope, and for that we have each other….  And we will rise up, rise like the day, rise up, rise unafraid…. We’ll take the world to its feet and move mountains…. We’ll rise up, high like the waves, rise up, in spite of the ache….” 

As with each day the sun rises anew, we’re endued with the hope that we too can rise up to face another day.  You never know what this day will bring, let’s rise up and check it out.

 

From the moment we’re conceived, growth and development never cease.  We’ve come to expect that the transitions from infant to toddler, tween to adolescent, and so on, throughout the growth cycle, will present certain stereotypical challenges and behavioral changes.  But we assume that the psycho-social growth of older folks stops with their physical growth.  Au contraire, mon ami.

Lest you think your particular age-stage is more difficult than your neighbor who’s in a younger or older stage, every life-stage has its growing pains.  Even a “good” transition to something new, different, or changed can be stressful. Sudden wealth syndrome – “what a shame,” we might think.  Adapting to success, what?

Older people continue to grow and develop as well as their younger counterparts.  The literature on psycho-social changes in older adulthood is fraught with a number of telling descriptive alliterations which include: adapt, adjust, accommodate, and attitude.

I believe it’s an old military slogan to “adapt and overcome.”  So, maybe it’s truly a battle to grow older.

“Youngsters” in their twenties and thirties have joked for years about “adulting” being a strange new world that they’re not all that elated about entering.  Was it Pat Benatar who sang, “love is a battlefield?”  Well so is developmental change.

By the time we reach middle-old at around sixty-five, we’ve become more resistant to change than ever before.  Thus, the stereotypical phrase, “stuck in our ways.”

The tasks set before us from middle-old to old-old, directly challenge our uncompromising existence.  It’s not unheard of for someone in their “terrible-eighty-twos” to stomp their feet and exclaim, “I’ve always done it this way, and I’m not about to change now.”  Or, when told that we have to accept assistance, we might be heard to resist with, “I’ll figure it out myself.”

Sometimes I think I’m growing more complex over time and with effort.  Other times I just think I’m growing like a weed.  Weeds aren’t much liked by most people.  In fact, the modifier, noxious – often accompanies any mention of weeds.

I’ve grown quite fond of many weeds.  Dandelions are beautiful if you look closely at their blooms, with an open mind.  Their greens are bitter but edible if prepared artfully by trendy culinary newbies or their country cousins who’ve been eating them with bacon dressing, forever.

Thistle blooms are untouchably delightful to behold.  Bamboo is a wonder, and the speed to which it towers and spreads mimics its grass cousins.  Its uses are manifold, but like Purple Loose strife, bamboo is considered by plant experts to be a noxious or nuisance weed.

I think the most prevalent explanation for human hatred of weeds is our perfectionistic, obsessive, or controlling need to dominate, subdue, civilize, or wipe them out.  Few of us can co-exist with weeds and just appreciate them, and those who do are frequently, if not openly, ridiculed for being lazy, untidy, or slovenly about their landscape.

Weeds grow rampantly.  The whole weed-thing, as a metaphor, fits many of us in the middle-old stage of growth.  Some of our thoughts are contrary – just like weeds, to the acceptable fundamentalist rural culture that many of us live in.

Fundamentalism would have us believe that personal growth means you’ve grown higher, better and above other folks.  A more gracious perspective of growth is that it is circular rather than vertical or hierarchical.

It’s likely that a fully-grown adult will be a person of a certain age, with perhaps a relatively vast base of lived-experience. From this point of view, a “grown-up” has developed in terms of depth rather than stature.

Because I’ve grown up or might even be considered mature, doesn’t mean I’m better than you if you haven’t grown so much.  In fact, it’s possible that my growth means I’ve experienced a much larger share of adversity, and opposition than you have and been humbled into an unassuming, content, weed-patch.

Then again, some of us grew through adversity into loud, obnoxious victims of circumstance.  Maybe it’s time to judiciously pull some weeds?

Oh, my goodness, have you observed many grown-up politicians in America lately?  Apropos for these times in politics is the prophetic Scripture, Isaiah 3:4 which says in various translations: “I will make youths to be their leaders, and babes shall govern them.” 

I wonder if their power cancels their growth, as we’ve ended up with metaphorical babies leading us.   It seems that many of those baby-rulers haven’t grown nor stretched when they encountered opposition, challenge, resistance or trouble, but morphed into victims.

The developmental fight of the mature among us, is in the seeking not the finding. Growth achieved through inner wanderings is manifest in a personal style of open-ended seeking to “be all you can be,” another classic military slogan.

Discovery is fuel for the journey, not the final destination.  This makes my spirit leap within me like that of a fully-grown adult soldier, flowering like a weed.

I was once terrified of even the thought of giving a speech or presentation.  Simply put, I didn’t know how.  I had never been given the tools to speak publicly.

As it turns out, Speech 101 is a college requirement.  I put off signing up for that course as long as possible, and registered for it in my senior year.

I think I was holding out for just the right teacher; Mrs. Cook was her name, I think.  She started us out with the easiest of speeches, a demonstration of something you know how to make or do.

I chose baklava, the Greek pastry of phyllo dough, nuts and honey.  We were married students, living on a budget and we lived on Uncle’s extended farm property.

My husband had just completed a Penn State Extension course in beekeeping so we had our own honey.  We collected black walnuts from the environs of our isolated abode, and piled them on a gravel driveway to dry.

A local band of frugal squirrels nearly depleted our collection of nuts. We found most of them stored, in a hollowed-out tree trunk next to the garage shed.  We were, however, able to recover enough to hammer open for the baklava.

Long story short, I earned an A grade on the demonstration and Mrs. Cook narrowly escaped a broken tooth on a black walnut shell.  But importantly I was well on my way to becoming a confident public speaker.

Another assignment from that speech course was the Interview.  We were asked to interview someone whom we wanted to get to know.  I chose a Funeral Director, as I was curious about his work.  Truly wanting to know something is a handy tool with which to begin an interview.

Feeling much like Oprah, equipped with well-prepared notes, a microphone, and my husband’s new Superscope tape recorder fresh from his ethnomusicology field work, I set out on my first interview and earned another A grade.

Those A grades really should have gone to Mrs. Cook.  She was a gifted teacher and taught this student an invaluable life skill which I have applied in my own teaching of sociology and anthropology to quite a few young college students.

The best precept I drew from Speech 101 and my learned application of it, is a version of Fredric’s advice to Jo in Little Women, “write what you know.”  Speak about what you know and your speaking ability will shine.  Stick to what you know.

I, for one am eternally grateful to the good teachers who have taught me life lessons that have stuck.  For example, Miss Mummert taught me to type like lightning, with few errors, and believe me I treasure that skill every day.

I had few memorable college teachers, or they were memorable in the “don’t sign up for his class, he’s crazy and everybody got a D on the first exam,” kind of way.  But Mrs. Cook made up for all of them, put together.

I hope I gave Mrs. Cook a good evaluation, come the end of that academic year.  As a college teacher myself, I remember some of those anonymous evaluations. The majority of my student evaluations were positive and as I recall, a few were downright uplifting.  I’m saying publicly today, in case I didn’t back then, “thank you Mrs. Cook, your teaching gift made a difference in my life.”

If you feel so inclined, tell a teacher “Thank you.”

If you were to hear something like, “I would estimate that we won’t bring the car home from the shop for under $500;” or “My best estimate is that I will gain no less than five pounds over the holidays,” most of you would understand that I am giving an approximation of a figure that may be lower or higher when all is said and done and the task is finished.  Time will tell, eh?

In a previous column I wrote about the broken ice machine in our refrigerator.  Well, the estimate I signed for repair was exorbitant but compared to a new refrigerator, it seemed the more frugal of our immediate options.  The labor estimate was equal to the parts portion of the job.  But, for all we knew it may have taken the technician an hour or hours to install the parts and re-calibrate the freezer panel; so, we’ll see, I thought.

A week hence, two dinged-up boxes of parts arrived and the technician was scheduled to install the hopefully undamaged parts.  Matthew, the no-nonsense technician seemed unfazed by the nasty boxes which contained several hundred dollars’ worth of parts.

Matthew worked for twenty-two minutes and we trusted the shiny new panel would say it enjoyed producing ice cubes and crushing said cubes upon our request, in twenty-four hours or so.  When I asked Matthew if they would adjust the labor costs of the estimate since it ended up being pretty much what I I would describe as a “plug-and-play” job, he said it wasn’t within his purview to deal with that, but I should call billing; he just tells “them” what parts are needed.

So, we were happy with that, and enthralled with our fancy new-like ice-maker and freezer display panel.  Who was it who first said, everything is temporary?  Our happiness waned when we got the bill.

It appears that the Service Center felt that their Estimate was the bill, whether the labor time took three hours or five minutes, the labor cost was “estimated” by job code not time spent working.  It was their argument that since I signed the Estimate, I am bound to pay the amount estimated.   

More than once and to more than four folks on the “help-line,” I wanted to shout, “don’t you understand the definition of the word, estimate?”  “But you signed it,” they repeated like automatons. Honestly, I could have been saying in Swahili, “I love dandelions and there is a meteor coming toward my house,” and they would have said, “but you signed the estimate,” in response.

I learned a new word, presented as word of the day on Dictionary.com.  It’s inspissate, and means to thicken or make or become dense.  I like this word; I think mostly because it has spiss in the middle and somehow that sounds like a venomous but neutral retort fitting for a telephone help-line representative who helps you not.

I can satisfactorily envision myself saying to one and all, “must you be so inspissate about this whole estimate-thing; IT’S AN ESTIMATE, an APPROXIMATION based on the unknown, until you KNOW, then you can adjust the price accordingly!”  I know that using that word that way, stretches its connotation, but they don’t know that and my fantasy vent helps me to cope with the injustice of it all.

My age has mellowed me as to arguing about customer-service type rip-offs, to an extent.  I still retain a little bit of fight in me as to “the principal of the thing.”

So, my calm and final effort to help this “service” company see sense as to their misinterpretation of the word, estimate, was to send an email with my argument laid out in plain, English, step by obvious step.  By the way, it took me about three calls, not counting several transfers from one department to another, to get the correct email in which to send my dispute.

Approximately three weeks, hence, after receiving no reply to my well-thought-out, reasoned dispute, what I did receive was a new bill from the billing department with the expectation that I pay the estimate in its entirety.  After all, I “signed the estimate.” 

I suppose I could retain an attorney, but the principal of the thing can be quite expensive.  In fact, a friend and colleague who was owed an amount in the six figures was advised by his attorney not to pursue it because legal fees would obfuscate the amount owed.  Wowzer.

So, as the due date approached, I had to come up with a few justifications in my brain for how to be okay, dealing with the injustice that seems to be the outcome of this repair cost.  But once it’s paid, I’ll probably forget about it, until the next time something major breaks in my house.

The next time, will I remember the lesson?  And what was the lesson in all of this?

DIY and eBay or YouTube videos?  A different service company?  I think I’ll go with option number three, my son-in-law.  He’s brilliant at everything to do with remodel and repair, but I don’t like taking his time and we refuse to do “family rates.”   I don’t know for sure what I’ll do, but I’m telling myself, “Better luck next time.”

 

There’s often more to the story than meets the eye.  There’s a great mass underneath the visual tip of an iceberg.

I don’t know for certain when I learned the word, paradox, but it has enlightened my life.  So much in life is contradictory.  Unless you dig deeper, look further, or exercise your curiosity, the surface will be the sum-total of your life.

“What you see is what you get” is admirable in the sense that one has no hidden agenda, but in another sense, it is a parody.  There is always something hidden below the surface. 

As the Titanic demonstrated, or any divorced individual will tell you, what you see is not always what you get.  That house that you bought, “as is,” isn’t what you thought it was.  Straightforward, might be straight and it might go forward, but underneath it all  there are unknowns.

After looking in the bathroom mirror recently, I was startled with what I saw for the first time as an asymmetry in my eyes.  My right eye socket is smaller than my left.

I immediately shot off a text to my daughter, “why didn’t you tell me I’m a freak of nature?  I never noticed that my right eye is smaller than my left eye!”  I’ve long known that the universal perception of beauty is based on symmetry.  Since I now know that I missed the symmetry-boat, all of my illusions have been dashed.

Years ago, my sister, Dee said, “You so have Dad’s eyes.”  I think I was startled by her observation, so I looked closely at my eyes.  I hoped to recognize what she saw; Dad’s eyes.

Upon close examination, I discovered something. I’ve never seen my eyes in a mirror!  Isn’t that extraordinary and weird?

I’ve worn make-up since I was a teenager, eye makeup included.  But, until I had to include my eye color on a driver’s license application back in the day, on which I reported, hazel – I had never seen what color my eyes were.

My grown daughter being my barometer, and my husband oblivious to nuances in color, I asked her what color she thought my eyes are.  When she quickly said “green,” I was a tad astonished.  Then, I looked closely to my eye balls – focusing as microscopically as possible, only on their pigment, I saw they are quite green.

This endeavor – my search to see my own eye color – brings to mind an incident many years ago when I taught a human sexuality course.  I had assigned an exercise to my class, to attribute colors to various developmental stages of their lives.

Some students charted rainbows of nuanced color to represent hiccups and highlights in their development, along with other symbols to describe the stops and starts of their lives.  One guy was the exception.  Quite troubled, he said, “I don’t know how to do this assignment.  My chart is all blue.”  He couldn’t conceive of life stages symbolically as color.

He was me, with eye color.  I just don’t perceive it.  From looking into a mirror at myself, to looking into the eyes of my loved ones – what do I see, if not their color?      

Scientists have identified multiple senses beyond the scope of the usual five identified first by Aristotle (sight, smell, hearing, touch, & taste); up to twenty of them, in fact.  There is no hard and fast rule and no real consensus among said scientists as to the number of available senses to humans, that cause some of us to perceive another world within the world of the five major senses.

It’s quite possible that I don’t perceive eye color because my perception automatically goes to the thing beneath, behind, or under the eyes, to the essence of life.  Everything we see with our eyes, everything visible, is a reflection of something hidden, a symbol or image of something invisible or unseen. “The visible is the invisible written down,” from The Roots of Christian Mysticism.

Not everybody utilizes their capacity of vision, but remain satisfied with their imagination lying dormant, in favor of preoccupation with what’s right in front of their eyes. “Yesterday I inhaled a cloud, and immediately my eyes started raining,” Jared Kintz.  Do you have eyes to see? 

What are you seeing in the mirror?

 

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by a barrage of demands for your time?  I know I have and I often shout to no one in particular, but to the universe, “could you please just give me a break!”

Having just read a scientific article about self-compassion, I learned that giving yourself a break is the least likely act of compassion you will offer to anyone.  So, give yourself a break too.

We’re living in a world that presses hard against us to keep up, to produce perfect products and services, and to look good doing it. I’m thinking we need a break to avoid a breakdown.

I believe it’s workplace law that employees are given a break, maybe two in the course of their work day.  So, if you’re self-employed, break free from the grinding demands of your work, and take a break or two throughout your day.  Retired folks, too, live in a culture that expects everyone to keep busy and work at something, even if it’s not an official job, and need a break every now and then.

School children are given a break during the course of their studies, for play as in recess, or at least for quiet, as in study hall. Everyone needs to be cut a break sometime.

After having a break, we often feel able to go about our tasks with renewed vitality.  Studies have proven that mid-day naps are revitalizing to workers.  They come back to work as if it were a new day.  The same can be said for exercise which is both relaxing and energizing.

Separating yourself, even for a moment, from stressful events, the ongoing pressure of work, relationship-keeping, staying on top of the stuff of life, etc. is a remedy to day-time fatigue.  A walk around the block, a visit to a park, even walking down your driveway can lighten your burden.  It’s called breathing space when you interrupt the building chain of events toward burnout.

So, before you crack up, take a break.  A bit of trivia about “cracking up” – we of a certain generation had heard in some form, “she cracked up and went to the funny farm.”  That was well before making such comments landed you in social prison.  At any rate, we grew up saying that hilarious things “cracked me up.” 

I found some roots for the phrase, “cracked me up.”  Apparently, 17^th century makeup applied to a woman’s face thickly would break or crack when she laughed.  So, laughter became associated with having a breakdown, supposedly a funny one.

And fortunately, we’ve “come a long way baby,” since attributing all breakdowns to hysterical women, labeled such, because untrained male doctors in antiquity thought any anomaly in women was directly attributed to her having a uterus (Greek/hystera).  Thus, all women were considered broken and prone to hysteria, cracking up, and potentially destined for the funny farm.  A sad lesson in history which has been remedied a million times over, thank God.

On the contrary, I’m delighted to know of the Japanese Kintsukuroi tradition which in a sense celebrates brokenness. I was reminded of this tradition when in a dream, I preserved a bowl I had broken, in the freezer.  You may have seen Kintsukuroi bowls in works of art.  They repair broken bowls by filling in the cracks (I think of them as faces with wrinkles) with gold, creating a work of art.

And Jesus promises in Luke 4 to have fulfilled the Isaiah 61 prophecy, to lovingly “bind up and heal the broken-hearted.”  In fact, he was known to give preferential attention to broken creatures over the arrogant, self-serving ones who fix themselves, thank you.

I will conclude this tome with the phrase of good tidings offered liberally in the performing arts, break a leg.  Essentially reverse psychology, to appease the spirits of fate, I prefer it with the Yiddish definition of “success & blessing” or Godspeed which offers a break from the universe in the form of success, prosperity, good fortune, advancement, or even generosity. So, break a leg, ya’ll.

“Won’t you please, please help me” (Beatles, Help! 1965).  About help, I’m guilty often of not wanting any.  Do you always accept help when it’s offered?  Or, are you the one wanting to help?

What if you don’t want any help or don’t need any help?  If you decline help when it’s offered, is it rude?  Are you inclined to ask for help when you need it?

Many people with disabilities today, usually don’t want help.  In fact, I believe that it is academic protocol to instruct us to refrain from willy-nilly helping a disabled person to navigate the ableist-world.  Helping a disabled person, because of their disability, is considered not in good form.

I was once employed at a University Psychiatric Hospital, working with a renowned psychiatrist on a childhood depression project.  As in every university department, we were assisted by work-study students.  Long story short, I was once lectured by my boss for asking our work-study student if, in the rain, she wouldn’t mind heading out into the nasty weather to pick up our mail from a next-door building.  “She’s depressed, you should just tell her what you want from her, don’t ask if she wants to help you out, it’s her job and she knows that.”

The biblical Great Commission and so much of the New Testament preaches to help others, but is that help misconstrued in today’s social climate?  If you try to help somebody, does it make them feel lesser than you?

Is help a handout?  Are we so caught up in earning our way through the merit system, that we can’t see the forest for the trees, declining any help, always and forever because it was offered by grace, not earned through merit?

Is help interfering with independence?  Oh, to be sure, we are an independent lot, we Americans.  As we age, however, our independence begins to wane and we discover we need someone to help from time to time.  “Help, I need somebody, Help, not just anybody, Help, you know I need someone, help” (Beatles, Help! 1965).

“I’ll do it myself.” Sound familiar?  Most kids from three to ninety-three assert their independence this way.

 “If I want help, I’ll ask for it?”  Is it the more respectful way to be of help, to respond willingly and with verve, when asked for help?  I find, that sometimes with this tack, the former helper doesn’t want to help when you ask, because who is in control?  Their help is no longer on their terms, it is on your terms.

What happens when you can’t do it yourself?  I guess it’s different if you ask for help versus when you are offered help.  Or, in the wisdom of your age, you find it easier to humble yourself, changed your mind and opened the door to help.  “I know that I just need you like I’ve never done before” (Beatles, Help! 1965).

So, are we to stop anticipating or discerning that someone needs help, our help and just wait for them to ask?  Maybe some folks consider an offer of help, too intrusive or nosy.  How dare you notice that they might be struggling with something and think that you can make it better?  Again, does this make you appear arrogant, that you have the solution that they haven’t already considered and without you they couldn’t get by?

Presumably, the “helping professions,” jobs in which helping others through the social-impact sector, including medicine, nursing, psychotherapy/psychological-counseling, social work, life coaching, ministry, and education are in existence as a form of help to those who need it, and who ask for it.  People who fulfill these official helping roles are professional listeners, facilitators, and sounding boards.  Having gotten lost in empathy and compassion-tired in these tumultuous times, one could imagine that these folks could use a little help from a friend once in a while.

“Help me if you can, I’m feeling down And I do appreciate you being round.  Help me get my feet back on the ground.  Won’t you please, please help me” (Beatles, Help! 1965).  How can I help?