Month: March 2015

Reflections on the Here Year

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At the top of Notre Dame, Paris, March 18th.  My memories of this moment include the sight of Paris spread below us, as well as the awe-inspiring, echoing sound of the bells and the uneven, centuries-worn stones under my feet.  I was there.

Tomorrow marks the last day of Aidan‘s Here Year, in which I was honored and delighted to participate alongside her.  I’ve been thinking about what the big lessons or takeaways from the year were, either for me or in general, and the truth is I’m not sure I have any.  I think the lessons of spending a year thinking about presence, in a bunch of different specific spheres (marriage, friendship, time) are quieter, somehow both more urgent and less headline-y than they might be.

More than anything, The Here Year reinforced something I’ve known for a while, and around which I’ve been circling, in both my writing and in my living.

Being present is the central task of my life.

Several years ago I began to orient in the direction of being engaged with, and aware of, my own days.  It has changed everything.  This shift is documented on this blog, whose early days included a series called Present Tense about all the challenges and rewards of presence. Over the years I’ve run into difficulty when people interpret my discussion of “presence” as a way of asserting that everything is perfect.  Let me be really clear: I am not saying that being present transforms everything into wonder and smooths out all the rough edges.  Far from it.  As I’ve said before, being aware of my own life opens me up to more joy and more sorrow simultaneously.  I assure you that there’s plenty of frustration and yelling and disappointment and irritation in my life.

I am far from a zen person.  I’m still often impatient, distracted, and snappy.  Sometimes I’m on my phone when I shouldn’t be.  Now and then I check my voicemail, listen to a series of messages, and realize when I hang up I can’t remember who half of them were from, because I wasn’t really paying attention.  But the thing is, I’ve improved a lot.  A lot.  When I started blogging, and writing about presence and awareness, I was pointing myself in the direction I wanted to go.  I can see that now.  Writing here helped me identify, and then pursue, something I desperately needed.

I suspect that anyone who knows me in real life would say I’m someone who speaks and moves fast and who doesn’t always pay as close attention as she should. Hopefully anyone who has known me for a while would also say that they’ve seen a change on this dimension in me (any of you who fit this qualification and are still reading, I’d welcome your observations).

Blogging is a practice.  A daily and weekly effort, one that I keep at because over time it has made such enormous changes in my life. I think of the Tolkien quote I saw yesterday, “Little by little, one travels far” (thanks, Dina Relles).  It seems so small, a gradual effort to pay attention, to put down my phone, to listen carefully, to look at the sky, and to record what I observed.  And yet, as over years the silt in a river carves an oxbow into the land, so the very contours of my own life have changed.

The Here Year helped me to see the fruit of these years of effort, and reminded me of the fundamental importance of the work required for me to be present.  To be here now.  These choices – to sit with a child and read a book, to look a friend in the eye, to listen to the birds in the bushes, to stand still and watch a sunset – small in the moment, maybe, but there’s nothing more important.

Paying attention allows me to fully inhabit my own life.  It doesn’t, however, slow time down.  It was a bitter realization for me that no amount of being present changes the fact that time flies by me, that moments sift through my fingers even as I grasp at them.  I routinely mourn experiences even while I am still living them.  I hate feeling so keenly aware of how fast it’s all going by, and of so fiercely missing things that are over.  But I also know it’s simply the only way I want to exist in this world.  I loved thinking about and talking about and writing about what it means to be here this last year with you, Aidan, and I don’t plan to stop any time soon.

the best is often when nothing is happening

Highlights and Interstices

We think of lifetimes as mostly the exceptional
and sorrows. Marriage we remember as children,
vacations and emergencies. The uncommon parts.
But the best is often when nothing is happening.
The way a mother picks up the child almost without
noticing and carries her across Waller Street
while talking with the other woman. What if she
could keep all of that? Our lives happen between
the memorable. I have lost two thousand habitual
breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about
her is that commonplace I can no longer remember.

– Jack Gilbert

Paris

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“Why do all the good things go so fast and the bad stuff takes so long?”

Grace asked on our last night in Paris.  Oh, dear girl, I don’t know.  I blinked back tears.

We just got back from a week in Paris.  Years ago I wrote about my dedication to do everything in my power to make sure my children see the world.  We aren’t having the adventurous childhood that I was fortunate to have – living in three separate countries by the age of 12 and seeing more of Europe than I can possibly remember.  No, we are staying put.  I’m the unadventurous one.  But I do want Grace and Whit to understand that the world is large, and shining, and complicated, and thus to see that they are a very, very small part of it.  We’ve been incredibly lucky so far with trips to Jerusalem, Washington DC, the Galapagos, and now Paris.  We are not through with our exploration, that is for sure.  Watching Grace and Whit’s eyes light up when they experience something new is one of my life’s great pleasures.

Watching that in Paris was particularly poignant, because it occurred within layers of my own memory, and with my own parents watching.  We lived in Paris for four years when I was a small child (ages 3 to 7).  Last week, I often felt like I could sense the child me standing on the street corners.  We wandered past the door of our first apartment, played in the park that had been my sister’s and my favorite, and walked through Metro stops whose names I recall singing as a child.

I lived in Paris during the years that childhood memories solidify, like a boat emerging out of fog. Gradually and then without question. At 3, I remember very little.  Our first apartment is almost entirely lost to me, other than the evocative street name where it was and the long chain we pulled to flush the toilet. By 6, before we left, I remember much more.  Still, I was surprised by how much came back to me last week. I was surrounded by faint recollections as we walked the streets, almost more like sense memories than specific ones.  Even at the level of language, words I had no idea I remembered came to my lips. I understood far more of the conversations around me than I expected.

The photo above captures one of the moments where the past nudged into the present, folded like an accordion, and I felt dizzy.  I have many memories of playing in the Jardin Luxembourg with my sister, some vivid, some vague.  I also have pictures of us standing along those specific trees (probably at this very  time of year)  And yet last week it was I who was the mother, suddenly, already almost a decade older than my own mother was when she watched her American children (so much smaller than my own American children) running down the aisles between the trees and shrieking with laughter.

This time, I watched Grace and Whit run.  I pulled my coat around me tighter, glanced over at Matt, walking next to me, and tipped my face up to the blue-gray sky.  We passed the carousel where, as a child, I held a stick and tried to grab the brass ring, covered up now for the day.  Oh, time.  Oh, life.  It never ceases to take my breath away.

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Things That Make Me Happy

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I loved Aidan’s post about four things that make her happy.  Hers are big, important things, and I love what she shares.  For me, sometimes there are little things that make me disproportionately happy.  I’ve been thinking about some of those lately.  What are some hings – big or small – that make you happy?  I’d love to hear.

Clean sheets on my bed

8 uninterrupted hours of sleep

Fresh flowers (peonies, ranunculus, and parrot tulips are some of my favorites)

The smell of laundry

James Taylor’s music

Poetry

Putting on pajamas at the end of the day (“end” is relative)

Sterling silver picture frames

The sound of halyards snapping against masts

The sky

The necklace I have with charms that represent each child, plus one from my sister and an enamel heart and shrinky-dink binoculars that Grace made for me (because I like to notice things)

The words that I had engraved inside Matt’s wedding ring

My bookshelves of cherished titles

The ocean

Scallops as a design detail – on curtains, on clothing hems (my wedding dress had a scalloped hem)

 What makes you happy?

 

I wish her safe passage

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her safe passage.

– Richard Wilbur, The Writer (excerpt)

I heard this for the first time at my niece‘s christening celebration many years ago.  And now I have a daughter who wants to be a writer and who is finding some of the stuff of her life to be heavy.  Oh, life.  I heard this for the first time at my niece’s christening celebration many years ago.  I still love it.

I am taking next week off to spend with the children because they are on break.  I’ll be back on the 23rd!  Maybe, then, most of the snow will have melted.  A girl can dream.