[Image: “Ever Onward,” by John E. Simpson. Note that this depicts not a single path, but three: there’s the one, the “subject” to the extent that the photo has one, running diagonally northwest-to-southeast; there’s one straighter horizontal path sorta sitting up on the hillside to the right, with no obvious way of getting to it; and then there’s also one — a fatter, “easier” route, to the left (I took the photo while standing at a fork).]
Astute observers of the rhythms of my RAMH postings (there are a few of you!) have probably noticed a breakdown of same during the last couple weeks. To wit: the weird, scrambled, exceedingly brief post of a couple Fridays ago, and then… nothing.
No mystery, really, and no cause for alarm. I spent ten days in New Jersey with my family, helping our elderly parents downsize from the home they’ve shared for decades to a senior facility nearby. (My own “help” consisted I think mostly of the psychological sort; my three sibs, who all live within an hour of Mom and Stepdad, have done by far the bulk of the manual and spiritual heavy lifting over the last few months, especially.)
Anyhow, last week I’d actually begun a regular “whiskey river Friday” post, but then ran out of time to wrap it up. Here then is my selection from whiskey river last week:
Afterwards
Mostly you look back and say, “Well, OK. Things might have been different, sure, and it’s not too bad, but look — things happen like that, and you did what you could.”
You go back and pick up the pieces. There’s tomorrow. There’s that long bend in the river on the way home. Fluffy bursts of milkweed are floating through shafts of sunlight or disappearing where trees reach out from their deep dark roots.
Maybe people have to go in and out of shadows till they learn that floating, that immensity waiting to receive whatever arrives with trust. Maybe somebody has to explore what happens when one of us wanders over near the edge and falls for awhile. Maybe it was your turn.
(William Stafford [source (not canonical)])
Balance that against this one from more recent days, also from whiskey river (second two paragraphs):
I do think that society doesn’t encourage us to be self-aware enough to understand what motivates us to do what we do. Many people actually believe that loving themselves means being in denial of their weaknesses and seeming failures and instead talking themselves up with affirmations. But that’s missing the point.
Self-love is not just about constantly giving yourself praise and telling yourself how awesome you are. It’s about loving the real you, the human you—the person who has feet of clay, who comes undone under criticism, who sometimes fails and disappoints others. It’s about making a commitment to yourself that you will stick by yourself—even if no one else does.
That’s what I mean when I say you must love yourself as though your life depends on it, because quite simply, I know without a doubt that it does!
(Anita Moorjani [source])
Those selections, separated in time, seem to me related — related to frailty and disappointment, and to the resilience, the equanimity (which must be learned and practiced) which together help us to move on beyond those low points.
But, y’know, we don’t have to wait until things go wrong to respond to them. We can anticipate the coming wrongness; we can train ourselves to pay attention in advance — not predicting all the possible futures and playing the odds thereon but just resolving, knowing, that when the time comes, we’ll be ready: ready not to panic, not to stampede for the easiest double-doored exit, but to turn calmly… and to go that way. It needn’t be in some other wildly different direction; it might even just lead us — one precise step at a time — along a “path among paths” headed the same way as the mob. But it will be our path, one we recognize and have prepped ourselves for all along, maybe without even realizing it…
A lot of these thoughts have been roiling around in my mind as a result of the New Jersey visit. Mom and Stepdad have been living a reality of reduced circumstances for a good while now — a reality of paths being successively closed off to them. Failing hearing and eyesight, diminished mobility, a world driven ever more by new technologies, global pandemic… it all adds up. It didn’t make them downsize; they could have stayed, even now. But every day of not-choosing added to the risk, not just to each of them, to them as a couple, but to the other person.
And so they sort of inhaled, deeply, and started to pack up everything they can take with them, and prepared to leave behind everything they cannot.
With all this in my head, then, just a couple days ago I stumbled across this from another writer. Here, he cites favorite quotes from two of his favorite sources (and of course, none of this come from whiskey river):
I’ve known people to refuse an opportunity to leave a rutted, well-worn path because it can be so disorienting at times and also lengthy. In the Gospels Jesus uses this very imagery when he says, “Go through the narrow gate, because the wide gate and the broad road lead to disaster. Many go that way, of course, and yet a narrow gate and a little lane lead to life. Unfortunately, few choose them” (Matthew 7). Thoreau adds to that advice: “I might pursue some path, however solitary and narrow and crooked, in which I could walk with love and reverence.”
(Thomas Moore [source])
…and then this:
The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.
(Muhammad Ali [source])
Mom and Stepdad are well beyond 50. But that reality has taught them, among other thing, not to waste the opportunity to choose from and follow the paths — however narrow — still open to them.
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