Shifting

Pema Chodron, as usual, nails it when she describes life's energy as shifting and fluid. Don't get attached to anything or anyone because change will happen. If doesn't mean you can't love (your life as it is, your dearest other)—of course you can. You are indeed created to love. What gets you into trouble is your determination to hold on to that love no matter what.

 

The older I get (oh, we're not going back to that theme again, are we?)—the older I get the more I am made aware of the inevitability of loss. This is hardly an original thought. If I were being critical, I would chide myself for coming so late to such an obvious idea.

 

But I grew up in a small town. Oh, wait! That's no excuse, surely. Well, there was something about my young life that predisposed me to think that if I could just get it right, once and for all, then my life would unspool with no knots or glitches. Even Julian of Norwich said it (not that I knew this when I was young): All shall be well. All shall be well. All manner of thing shall be well.

 

But she didn't mean that smooth sailing was ahead. She meant that despite the rough seas and the shipwrecks and the total despair that might follow—despite these things, the overriding philosophy is that all shall be well.

 

In the last year or so I have seen accidents and disease strike many friends, many neighbours. Change is rampant. The settled life I once coveted is quite simply unattainable. Setbacks happen, and disaster arises to destroy.

 

The only solution is to prepare for it by knowing that life's energy is constantly shifting. Sometimes I stand when riding public transit. Although I do hold on to a pole or a strap, especially on a bumpy bus (I may be curious but I'm not stupid), I try to hold lightly, circling the pole, say, with my thumb and index finger—enough to keep from falling in the event of a sudden stop. But the point is to allow myself to balance and shift, to be flexible and movable.

 

This physical manifestation of the principle of shifting and changing can propel me into readiness for movement in other parts of my life: don't hold tightly. Put a little sway in your day.

 

Enough moralizing. In the long run, I can either do it or not do it. The next time a change affects me, will I throw a Kavanaugh-esque temper tantrum? Or will I have the courage to breathe and accept?

 

 

Copyright © 2022 Ann Tudor
Musings blog: http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

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Bewilderment

Bewilderment.

An affliction more painful than

bewitching or botheration.

In any crowd you can pick out the faces

beset by bewilderment.

What am I doing here?

Are there any answers?

Is there a way to escape?

How do I learn what I should be doing?

Or is there even a "should" at all?

Perhaps I should (!) just go along

with whatever comes?

Go along to get along?

Is there a right way?

Is there only one right way?

 

Someone told me it's simply a question

of dealing, more or less skilfully,

with the situations I find myself in.

Could that be true?

By simply releasing my life's companion

(i.e., bewilderment)

will I find myself free to act?

 

These are the questions I see

on the bewildered faces in any crowd.

 

 

Copyright © 2022 Ann Tudor
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Going Forward

I was thinking recently about physical motion--specifically forward motion, and I remembered that I used to love to skip. I don't know when I stopped skipping. Maybe when you reach a certain weight your knees can no longer support that one-footed jump. Or maybe it just seems unbecoming and undignified to skip. I do remember that skipping takes a great deal of energy and will tire you out much faster than walking the same distance.

 

Related movements are hopping and jumping, leading to our expressing the nearness of a destination as simply a hop, skip, and jump away from where we are now.

 

Physical motion leads to action verbs. Now, "sit" is a verb that denotes an action, but it could hardly be called an action verb (and I have to admit that to sit is one my favourite verbs to enact).

 

Slide. Skate. Hobble. Toddle. Lope. Run. Hurdle. Jog. Bounce, even, though its motion is more vertical than forward. When I come back (i.e., in my next life, if I'm lucky/unlucky enough to be human again and not a slug or a grasshopper) in that next life I'm going to make it a point to learn to ice-skate from my earliest years so that I can glide (action verb) gracefully around the oval of a rink.

 

I used to roller-skate. Like all children of those times I had skates that you fastened on to your shoes (your Oxfords, not your tennis shoes) with screw clamps at the toes that required a special skate key that one could never find when it was time for skating. One summer a roller skating rink came to our town, situated in a large tent on the east side of town; it became the place to hang out. You could rent the appropriately-wheeled skates (ordinary sidewalk skates weren't allowed). So all summer long I rented skates, seething with envy of my friends ("the girls") who had managed to persuade their parents to buy them their own white, high-topped roller skates, as elegant as any figure skater's.

 

I began my campaign, asking for roller skates for Christmas or my birthday. I wanted them. It was a long and arduous process for my parents to find a pair, living as we did in the heart of nowhere. Finally (I found out later) my aunt Jeannette bought the skates for me while on a rare pre-Christmas shopping trip to Indianapolis, so skates were under the tree for me that year. Purchased at great cost and emotional energy, but finally mine.

 

Summer came and the skating rink tent opened again. Unfortunately, "the girls" had shifted their attention to . . . whatever. Boyfriends? Tennis? Whatever it was that deflected them from skating, no one skated any longer. So of course I didn't skate, either. The skating rink was not where I wanted to be. I never wore my beautiful, brand-new white, high-topped roller skates. Never.

 

So there's a moment of shame to contemplate. There's a memory when the action verb (to skate) failed to move me forward.

 

Let's move on to "hurdle", a vigorous action verb. One can hurdle all obstacles (usually metaphorically) or one can get out there on the track team and actually leap those hurdles that keep arising in your path. The faster you run between hurdles, the more quickly the next hurdle appears before you. I cannot contemplate leaping over even one of those wooden frames. My older brother was a hurdler. How did he do it? A mystery.

 

Have I now exhausted my thoughts on physical forward motion? And does all physical motion have to be forward? Are we meant to keep moving forward or die, like a pool full of sharks?

 

If I look at another category of being, the mental, can I truthfully say that I'm moving forward? No, on all mental levels (including memory and arithmetic) my movement is decidedly backward. Ah, well.

 

 

Copyright © 2022 Ann Tudor
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Crossing the Bridge

When we were little, the five of us, long before Mary Eileen was even a gleam in Daddy's eye, as they say, we used to "go for a ride." This must have been post-World War II, since we wouldn't have been frittering away the wartime gas rations with family joyrides. So, 1946, say, and we were 12, 10, 8, 6, and 5.

 

Indiana summers were hot and muggy. To us it was normal to dry off after a bath and still be as wet as we were before drying. The humidity was fierce. But it's all we knew and we dealt with it as everyone did in those pre-A/C days.

 

On hot summer evenings we would put on our pajamas and pile into the family station wagon for a ride. This was always at Daddy's instigation, or so I remember. Maybe it was Eileen's idea; she was very much bothered by the heat.

 

In any event, there we were with seven people in the car. Windows were open with the expectation of a slightly cooler evening breeze. And we would sing. I've already told you what we sang: "Show me the way to go home", "Down by the old mill stream", and "I've got sixpence." These were for starters, and always with harmony. Daddy's tenor led us. I don't think Eileen sang, ever. How typical (of me, of all of us) that we didn't watch, didn't pay attention to her. Was she having a good time?

 

But here we are on the back roads of the county, which Daddy knew from his own lifetime in that place, and which we just rode through blindly. But at the end of the ride (every time? once a summer? once a week?) we ended up at the dangerous bridge.

 

This was a condemned bridge across the old canal extension that connected the Wabash to the town. Here's how we knew it was condemned: big signs saying "Bridge condemned! Not safe! Do not cross!" Words like that. In hindsight I see the bridge as a couple of probably still-safe steel spans. The cross-pieces—that is, the boards that made a bridge out of those steel spans—were rotted through. Some were missing. The danger was obvious. At least, that's how my mind's eye sees it.

 

So here we are at the bridge and the car slows, stops. "Well, whaddaya think?" says Myron, father of five. "Should we do it? Should we cross the bridge?" He probably said something like "I told you we'd cross that bridge when we came to it—and here we are now. We've come to it." He was always one for a pun or a joke. But this was no joke. The car nosed up to the barricade. Daddy kept nudging, daring: do it? Not do it?

 

Well, if he was giving us a choice, we were loudly unanimous: don't do it! But we were only five little voices against his authority. Eileen? Did she say, "Myron, don't!" Did she ever say that? I'll check with a sibling (which I'll have to do sooner rather than later, because we're of an age . . .)

 

I said there was a barricade, but it obviously wasn't so complete that Daddy couldn't swerve around it. And he would take that station wagon full of his nearest and dearest—or so one might have imagined—onto the rickety bridge that could have collapsed at any time. We screamed and shook and bawled in terror. But he always went over the bridge.

 

Not on this evidence alone, I have to say that Myron was a bit of a sadist.

 

Maybe this was his way of dealing with the family overpopulation problem that resulted from having married a staunch Irish Catholic. Maybe when he signed off on the Church's procreation covenants he didn't realize how fertile his bride was, or how quickly a family could grow from one to too many to count. If the bridge had ever collapsed, it would have ended all his problems. Or maybe there was no danger at all. Maybe Myron knew that the city erected those danger signs only to deter mischief-making teens (yes, even then teens did their durndest to create havoc).

 

It's been the mystery of a lifetime: was our father really trying to kill us?

 

 

Copyright © 2022 Ann Tudor
Musings blog: http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

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