“Where have you been hiding today after your long, productive night of writing?” Erma inquired.
With both a tear and a smile, Sylvia thoughtfully replied, “I was pleasantly spending time in the room of Remember.”
“The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.
~Frederick Buechner
Sylvia never really thought about it until yesterday. After a burst of anger followed by a short period of self-deprecation and sadness, she stops herself dead in her tracks. Neither the vexation nor the momentary lack of self-approval is who she is. They are volatile but thankfully short-lived. She is best who she is when she is standing still in the fresh air. No desire to make herself or anyone else happy.
Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not ‘yours,’ not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.
~Eckhart Tolle
“Wide open. Closed. Squinting. Teary. Winking. They say it all, don’t they?” Sylvia asked of her friend rhetorically. Erma, with a quick roll of hers, replied.
At once, the two friends sitting across from each other with masks covering all but their eyes, broke out in laughter. Their friendship was so easy because they knew each other deeply and could read each other’s movements. Words, though never lacking, were rarely needed these days. Their eyes always recounted their stories.
Almost nothing need be said when you have eyes.
~Tarjei Vesaas
Sylvia hasn’t returned calls lately. She hasn’t written all of her thank-you notes for the outpouring of support and sympathy she has received. She’s getting there little by little, but she feels apologies are in order. She doesn’t want anyone to think she’s self-absorbed.
“Are you nuts? Stop apologizing for being human,” scolds Erma. “There is a time and a place to ask for forgiveness. Now is neither the time nor the place, Syl. Swallow the words ‘I’m sorry’ as if they are chocolate today. Trust me, they melt in your mouth like M&Ms when they aren’t called for.”
Moments of melancholy made better with friendship and chocolate. ************** ********📢Here are a few interesting reads on women and their penchant for apologizing– for everything. https://childmind.org/article/why-girls-apologize-too-much/ https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-22/why-women-say-sorry-and-what-to-say-instead/11985026
“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.”
~Maya Angelou
Erma: Ready for the day? Anything exciting planned?
Sylvia: Nothing really, just more of the same.
Erma: Oh, no. Moving mountains again, Syl?
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Wednesday Wisdom: If there is an obstacle in your path, remember this: Up. Over. Around. OR choose a different path.
The beginning of the week and the end of a day. Ah, Mondays. Sylvia and Erma have a late afternoon chat and decide not to look too far ahead for a change. In fact, Sylvia tells her friend that she refuses to swallow, taste, or commit to anything more than a sip at a time. She just wants to sit and savor momentary satisfaction.
**************
“Our souls are satisfied one sip at a time.”
~Marnie Swedberg
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#overfiftyandfine #womenhelpingwomen
As Sylvia prepares for another first, Erma reminds her that all of us are experiencing firsts again. New day. New perspective. Fresh cup of coffee. Even the things that are done ritualistically have a freshness to them.
It’s a perfect day to re-read a favorite and find a little something new in it to feed your spirit and/or cleanse your soul. Soak it in or let it go. It’ll be the last first of its kind.
https://overfiftyandfine.com/2018/08/05/the-best-and-worst-of-firsts/
Fine. Just fine.
Sylvia: Why do we say that? We all do. “How are you?” “Fine. You?” “Fine.” “How’s the family?” “Fine.” “Work?” “Fine.” Seriously, what is fine?
Erma: God, you are cranky sometimes, Sylvia. Fine is,well, fine. It’s okay. Fine means the status quo is being maintained. If everything is fine, there’s nothing to worry about, I guess. Why do you ask?
Sylvia: It bothers me. Fine is such an empty response, and I rather believe that nothing is fine. We all hide behind fine because we don’t want others to know how not fine we really are.
Erma: Well, I don’t think we hide behind it. I think we use it because it’s quick, easy, and serves the purpose of providing a response to a question that most people ask merely out of politeness. Think about it. Does the clerk at the checkout at Safeway truly care how my day is going? Does the plumber, who rings my doorbell at 8 a.m. knowing that I have called his answering service in the middle of the night with just the right amount of histrionics to warrant being moved up to his first call of the day, does he truly want to listen to how unfine I really am? No, of course not. Cases-in-point of simple niceties, Sylvia.
Sylvia: That’s just it, Erma. I’m kind of over simple niceties. I don’t want to hear one more. Wait. Let me amend that to say that I despise hearing that reply from someone who is close to me. I will no longer placate those who claim to care for me with a simple fine. And to boot, if I ask you- someone whom I trust, care about, and see fit to spend inordinate amounts of time with on a regular basis, know that my expectation exceeds niceties. Give me all you’ve got- for better or worse. I can take it. Actually, I expect nothing other than the truth, raw and honest, even brutal, given that we are friends, family, on the cusp of, or in the midst of a meaningful relationship.
Erma: Oh my God, okay, enough, I get it. You don’t like fine. You don’t want fine. Nix “fine” and bring on…bring on what?
Sylvia: Bring it on. Whoever you are, whatever you feel, give it to me straight. Our friendship can handle it. The world can handle it.
Erma: And what if the world can’t. What if I can’t?
Sylvia: Then, fuck it. REMEMBER? I told you a while back that most of life can be summed up in a word or two.
Sylvia: Erma, I’m always so damn emotional.
Erma: You are emotional because you feel deeply. All strong women do!
“A strong woman is one who feels deeply and loves fiercely. Her tears flow as abundantly as her laughter…”
(Native American saying)
#strong #empowered #bffs
I know. I know. Most of you are probably thinking that because we are a month into summer, Sylvia and Erma are preparing to rant about swimwear, body image expectations, and disappointments in both. Nope. Not at all. While Erma has accepted that the hourglass form she once coveted has erupted into collagenless dunes, so much so that she avoids the mirror for anything other than lipstick application, Sylvia is only mildly disappointed in her glow this year. Though a little less than satisfied with the topography that this past year has mapped onto her flesh given the angst and havoc being wreaked globally (let alone her corner of the world), Sylvia is not sizing herself up like that. At all. She’s measuring life in memories and moments– not inches or centimeters. Sylvia finds herself missing little things, simple tidbits that she thought would be a part of her life but that she hasn’t experienced at all yet. She also laments huge unfathomable and immeasurable losses this year. A tape measure, a scale, a barometer? No, none of those will suffice, even superficially.
Erma: How can you miss something you’ve never known, Sylvia? Why do you torture yourself with wanting the unknown? Remember, the grass isn’t always greener.
Sylvia: Don’t you know by now that I can’t give up. I won’t give up. It’s not a matter of the grass being greener. It’s not even that I want morsels of life that are out-of-reach. What I’m missing are pieces of life that I eagerly anticipated, those which I thought I’d have to look back on by now. I don’t miss memories of times or places I have visited. I miss those memories that I thought I would have made by now- that I should have made by now.
Erma: See, that’s the problem. You set a schedule, a timeline for your happiness-years ago- never factoring in life changes.
Sylvia: That’s just plain silly. Of course, I anticipated changes. I knew I’d graduate. I knew I’d work. I knew I’d become a mother and a wife and a million other things. I factored change into the life equation as a variable.
Erma: Ah, there it is. That was the mistake. Well, maybe not a mistake but surely a misguided assumption. Change isn’t a variable at all. Change is a constant. Everything else is a variable!
Sylvia: Working. Motherhood. Marriage. Relationships. They have consistently made up my days. They most certainly have felt like constants- cores of my being.
Erma: I fear you’ve really missed out on how to assess your decades or even if those years need to be examined, quantified, and qualified, my friend. I never thought you quite so naïve.
Sylvia: I don’t think it is naivete at all. I simply never factored in death – the demise of relationships and final goodbyes of those I loved deepest. I say “simply” but it’s anything and everything but simple.
Those moments and memories that Sylvia feels she’s missed out on? They are not inconsequential, but what she has learned and continues to navigate is they aren’t everything. She has made choices, set priorities, and picked her figs from the tree as they have been dangled or dropped before her. Perhaps what Sylvia feels she has missed in life is not lacking at all. She has time, not to regret or reshape memories but to make more. She is finally realizing that life is not one tree with many branches; life comprises many trees from many different orchards.
Erma: Stop trying to measure. Inches. Centimeters. Pounds. Barrels. Bushels. Baskets. So many ways to quantify everything. And I’d rather believe that life is not made to be measured at all, not by what we have or what we don’t have. Life is meant to be savored- in totality- after all or most of the fruit has fallen or been picked from the tree. You’ve eaten the plump and juicy, tasted the bruised and rotten parts, and made a whole lot of juice.
Stop measuring. Squeeze out the juice. Press on.
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I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
