Any Shiny Thing - Life after 50

Midlife Fiction

Change is Hard But Rewarding

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May you have an interesting life.

It’s said to be an ancient Chinese curse. Implicit in those gentle words is the premise that an interesting life can be hard, full of drama and challenge and change. The wisher is conveying his desire to see the beneficiary’s feet knocked out from under her.

Change is hard, but it’s interesting to see how we travel through it. In my own case, several months ago I promised to watch my infant granddaughter when her mother went back to work. The gratitude in the eyes of both parents was more than enough to offset the panic I felt as the first day approached. Would I do a good job? Would she suffer? Would my body suffer? My work? My marriage?

So I started babysitting. Far from my marriage suffering, it developed a new richness, because my husband wanted to be in on this babysitting thing, and he helped me almost every day and grew as attached to our little granddaughter as I did. He developed confidence, able to discuss babies with parents and grandparents alike. In the evening we’d verbally elbow each other aside, celebrating our grandparental influence on the little one.

Things went really well, beautifully in fact. I got to see my kids every morning before they left for work. I took the baby for walks in her stroller, and got down on the floor with her. She taught me the meaning of her different cries, body language and facial expressions. I began to sit in the rocker in her room as she fell asleep, learning to slow down and appreciate the quiet, meditative moments. To think that I’ve come so far in my life as to be sitting in my son’s house, listening to his little girl sleep – that I could be this old – that time could be moving on at such a clip.

A few days ago, I came down with a bad cold and the baby had no sitter because my backups weren’t available, so her parents took her to a childcare provider who has long watched the children of their coworkers. And my little gal did fine, except she cried a little.

I wonder what she thought as the day passed? Was she happy or scared? There were three other small children there, and word is that she cottoned to a little boy, not yet two. It’s good for her to start socializing with other kids. In fact, it went so well that my son is going to ask the provider to reserve a spot for her next fall.

It’s good for me, too. I’ve already told my son and DIL that my body can’t handle watching her fulltime as she becomes more mobile, so this was a blessing in disguise. But I’m wrecked over this.

I can’t wait to see her again, next Tuesday, when I begin the last month of babysitting before her parents, both teachers, begin summer recess. It amazes me that she is moving into the next stage, and I wonder if our relationship will change, but would be a small change in what has turned out to be a tumultuous three years for my family.

Ultimately, it’s just life and we’ll adjust, as we did through Dad’s death, and Mom’s breaking her leg, and my sibling blowing up the family. I’m impressed at how resilient and adaptable we all are, and the little gal is made of us. In spite of my sadness over not babysitting next fall, I know she’ll be fine.

I’ve come full circle again, from fear of watching her to fear of not watching her to joy at the prospect of spending more time with my sweetie, golfing and traveling, reading and writing.

Here is where I might say: “I wouldn’t have it any other way.” But I won’t say that.

I will say that it has been interesting.

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Bad Advice for Boomers from Author Susan Jacoby

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My greatest fear is sleepwalking through my life – finding out at the end of it that I’ve made some ridiculous miscalculation and wasted a great gift. So it seemed like a smart idea to read “Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age” by Susan Jacoby. Bill Moyers, who I respect, had vouched for her.

The premise of “Never…” is that we Boomers are in denial about the fact that we will get old and die. If we were more realistic, we’d enjoy our lives more, feel more empowered, and save a lot of money on snake oil. She says it’s cool to see portrayals of 90-year-olds mountain-biking and skydiving, but it’s not realistic, and if we accepted what is really going to happen to us, we might be better prepared.

I liked the idea. I want to be prepared and use every ounce of my life to the best of my ability, so I read the book. I finished the book. And I have never been so depressed.

If you ever thought you might age and die gracefully, expect Jacoby to bludgeon your expectations with fact, figures, historical stats and anecdotes. She even clucks away the idea of old people becoming “wise” in exchange for our old age, asking why we would suddenly become wise if we’ve been average to stupid all our lives?

I kept reading, thinking that Jacoby would eventually get to the part where she distills all her negative findings into some kind of wisdom, some guide for gleaning the most from our lives in spite of all the reasons not to. The most she can muster is this concession to her nonfiction-writing friends, who urged her to end the book on an up-note:

“And that just about sums up my ‘positive advice’: live in a place that forces you to stay on your feet, and look for work wherever and whenever you can find it.”

At the end of this book I felt like stockpiling Vicodin. Possibly motivated by the tragic loss of her longtime companion to Alzheimers’, Jacoby set out to prove to the rest of us that we have little reason to hope, and she did a good job of making her case.

However, I think the beauty of humanity is that, faced with the knowledge of insurmountable odds, we still fling ourselves heroically against the dark unknown, choosing to believe that somehow, in some small way, we might triumph. Even if, as in this case, we know we will lose the final battle, we nevertheless choose to find meaning in the prosecution of this very personal war.

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Life Rules

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Older peeps sometimes think they’re starting to figure out this thing called LIFE, and then they’re tempted to make lists of the things that work. Our rules help us feel more secure, as if the world has a bit of logic to it after all.

My former boss and mentor once told me he had developed a list of rules or guidelines he found useful throughout his life. At the time I thought it was amusing. Old people did stuff like that (he was maybe 45?) However, now that I’m older, I would love to see it. Recently I asked him if I could please get a copy, but he professed he never constructed such a list (see Rule #5, below.)

My husband invented the “90/10” rule. After thirty years of selling cars for a living, he’s studied every kind of human behavior. He says people tend to over-buy for emotional reasons, but if they knew what they needed their vehicle to do 90% of the time, they’d be happy and save a lot of money. Maybe you don’t need 4-wheel drive if you only go on an occasional picnic in the hills.

90/10 means Mom needs to live where she can have a lot of friends, because she is a social butterfly, as opposed to immediate proximity to her doctor, who she doesn’t see that often. 90/10 means it’s a good day if I accomplished 90% of my to-do list. 90/10 means we should spend more money on education than prisons.

I’m not the only one who thinks about life rules. Gail Brenner, a middle-aged psychologist, blogs about it. So do Marc and Angel, a smart young couple who are eager to share their view of the world.

Here are some of my life lessons or rules. I hope you’ll contribute yours:

  1. Ask. Listen.
  2. Don’t make eye contact with maniacs. They’re looking for somebody to torture, and it doesn’t have to be you.
  3. Before you blow your top, consider the price you’ll have to pay later, because there is always a price.
  4. She who cares the most, loses. Sick but true.
  5. Cool politeness is a useful form of cruelty.

Do you have rules for living?

Kindle readers can email me at LMSpreen@Yahoo.com.

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Identifying Your Goals – “What Do I Want” is the Wrong Question

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I’m listening to the morning rain, thinking about the fact that it’s spring break and I don’t have to go to work. How best to spend the day? When I look back, fifteen hours from now, what will I have accomplished? Will I feel happy with the way I used the time?

But I’m on the wrong track with my questions.

According to Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, “What do you want?” is too imprecise to produce a meaningful and actionable answer. In his research, Ferriss asked his clients to name the ultimate outcome that, once they achieve their goals, will have made all their efforts worthwhile. The most common response  is – wrongly – “happiness.” Wrong, he says, because it’s so ambiguous and overused it’s useless. Instead he suggests you ask yourself this: “What would excite me?” because without excitement, we won’t be able to maintain our enthusiasm for moving goalward.

When I read this chapter in Tim’s book, I got excited thinking that this wasn’t just a way to meet goals. Asking “what would excite me” might be a good way to make sure we don’t waste our lives. A day is just a small bit of the bigger picture, after all. Waste a day, waste a week, waste a life. How can I make sure that, at the end of it, I feel good about the way I spent it?

As I listen to the rain, I think that it might make me happy to have a clean office, but it won’t excite me. Now, a movie in Temecula followed by lunch in the wine country? That would excite me. Think I’ll hit the gym beforehand, earn a few alcohol credits.

And almost inadvertently move toward two of my longer-term goals: fitness and mindfulness.

Do you think this little trick will work for you? Let me know what you think.

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Too Much Time on My Hands

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Remember that old song, Boomers? Here it is on YouTube if you’re feeling nostalgic.

My big sister and I sometimes smile that refrain to each other when we see a particular example of self-indulgence or nit-pickiness. The subtext is, Who has time for such foolishness?

I write about this today because of a column by Lynn Casteel Harper, a goodhearted woman, a chaplain in fact, who lives a mindful life. Lynn writes of her friend who, each year, peruses his vocabulary in search of words to excise. What a luxurious life he must live, overflowing with time for excessive contemplation.

I live in a 55+ community with lots of retired peeps, so I have a front row seat for this phenomenon. Some of us, no longer running to jobs, have too much time on our hands and lose our perspective. We develop new bad habits of insularity, tribalism, and obsession with our own needs.

I don’t mean to be flip about folks who have worked hard for years and earned a chance to rest. God bless ’em. And who can say how a person should live his or her life? I guess what bugs me is the preoccupation with one’s own needs when there is so much good waiting to be done in our community. We’re so blessed, being retired, but it’s the way of the mind to get accustomed to any situation in which we spend a lot of time. So we nitpick the effectiveness or attitude of the housekeeper, or the degree of sparkling purity of the Olympic-sized pool.

Lately, I’m getting used to spending part of every day at the rehab hospital where my mom is laid up. At first it seemed like a place to avoid, but I’m getting to know the workers and patients, and where you can get coffee or fresh ice for a pack, and where the fresh towels are so I can wash Mom’s hair because the staff just can’t. I definitely do not have time to ponder which word I might next excise from my vocabulary.

I’ve been guilty from time to time of preoccupation with myself, but as soon as I have too much time on my hands, life tends to snap my head around and I end up chastened. The next time I start doing too much navel-gazing, I’ll go volunteer in a rest home or something.

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Two Rich Links for You

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“…the control we want to think we have over our lives is…an illusion. It is an illusion we are accepting of because the opposite of it is hard to bear. The truth of the matter is that life can change on a dime, tragedy is merely a phone call away. But what that made me understand is that not only do I not have control over everything, but I am also not responsible for everything. Life happens and we move into the changes, like it or not. It doesn’t really take courage because we have no other choice. Every day the sun comes up and the sun goes down and we get through another day.” – Marilyn Jean

That is from Marilyn’s blog, ThereMustBeSomeMistake. Marilyn, a former RN, speaks with such a moving, rich voice about her experience with breast cancer, and her new online friends are checking in with their experiences. I thought you might enjoy getting to know her. I’ve never had cancer but I’ve had a lot of surgeries and several cancer scares, so I relate to her words. What she says above just hammered my heart. I feel the same way, so much so that I made up a scene in Dakota Blues about the exact same thing, and I’ve included that excerpt at the end of this post.

I also want to turn you on to a helpful friend, Dr. Melanie G. Dr. G is a psychologist, and you might want to follow her on Twitter. She is such a curious, thoughtful reader and prolific linker that you could almost follow her alone and still have a cornucopia of helpful articles to read every day.

Finally, here’s my excerpt, where recently fired middle-aged workaholic  Karen Grace sets out from the Dakotas in a Roadtrek 190 camper van:

“Room enough, and time.” The phrase tickled around the edges of her memory, something she’d read in a book or heard in a movie, a blessing proclaimed by the Native Americans about places such as this. Here on this highway in the vast freedom of the Northern Plains, her mind uncluttered by a daily agenda or the demands of a casual populace, she could permit herself the luxury of thought. She slowed the van until it came to a stop. The wind blew in the windows, rearranging her hair until she was blind and thrumming past her ears until she was deaf. It rocked the van but Frieda still slept, and the highway was deserted for miles in both directions. Karen put the van in park and eased the door open. Her bare feet touched the blacktop, warm but not hot. She filled her lungs with the dry, clean air, right off the plains and miles from any town. She heard a squirrel chirping and saw antelope walking along on the other side of the barbed wire fence, tearing clumps of grass from the rich earth. The wild fields on both sides of the road revealed an astonishing palette of light yellow, orange, pink, blue and three colors of green: pea, mint, and forest. The rippling grasses were topped by feathery beige flowers that resembled wheat.

“Insignificance: for the first time she considered that she need not accept responsibility for everybody and everything within range in her world. In taking on that responsibility she had not only overburdened herself, but shortchanged those for whom she worried. Why had she assumed them incapable, taking that weight on her own shoulders? Other people surely carried within them their own strength, their own resources, and she finally saw that she was not responsible: not for her parents’ satisfaction with their lives, not for her relatives nor her former employees at Global Health, nor for what happened to the planet after she left it.

“Instead, she saw herself as a bright, vivid figure standing on a timeline, her ancestors barely visible behind her, their small beloved bodies dim and fading into history. In front of her she saw only stick figures moving into the unknowable and impersonal future, as anonymous as the ancestors. As if she slid a magnifying glass along the ruler of history, the figures became larger and clearer as they edged nearer in proximity to her own life. They gained names and identities, but only for that small space in time they shared with her.

“In front of the van she stood on the center line of the deserted highway, her arms outstretched, eyes closed. The wind embraced her with its clovered breath, wrapped itself around her waist, between her legs and under her arms, lifting her. She turned in a slow circle, her arms reaching out, her fingertips lengthening to touch all that she could see in three hundred and sixty degrees of solitude and peace.

“It was enough. It was everything.”

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