Holding on and letting go

In her comment, Jooliedee asked after my post about London two days ago what I meant about “holding on to one’s self.”  It is, I think, a confusing, jumbled up process.  Not neat and clean like solving a mathematical equation or even like applying for a bank account.

My first London – the first place my world expanded in a big bang creating a whole new universe – was New York City.  I was 26 years old and after nine years, had just walked out of the convent.  I had no idea how naive I was.  I only knew that New York in 1966 felt like the most exciting place in the world.  And I thought that young people were about to overthrown the old stodgy, hypocritical ways of the past.

We were marching for civil rights and then against the Vietnam war.  We were experimenting with drugs and free sex, with Woodstock music and  living in communes.  I resisted the last, but none of the others.

It seemed to me that everyone else knew what they were doing, and it was only I who was overwhelmed.  I was living in Greenwich Village while I studying for my Ph.D. at the New School for Social Research and was whirling.

I was whirling, but I wasn’t having an absolutely fabulous time.  I was disoriented, confused, and often unhappy.  I did not understand how casual sex was for the men I slept with and was beginning to develop a bitter edge.  I was succeeding brilliantly in my studies, though, and was lucky enough to land a university position within weeks after earning my degree.

Gradually I began to right myself, to choose what I wanted to take from New York and what I didn’t.  And finally I met Peter.  That made all the difference.

Looking back, how would I say one can “hold on to one self”?

A young college student came into my office once.  She was distraught because she’d slept with someone the night before and hated herself for it.  No, I said, don’t hate yourself.  Learn about yourself.  Learn that you are someone who doesn’t like to sleep around.  That’s not true of everyone.  But it is for you.

That is what I would say about every new experience.  Don’t take drugs just because everybody else is doing it.  Decide what you want for yourself.  I smoked marijuana regularly until I found the hassle of getting it was more trouble than it was worth.  In truth, I might still be smoking it if it were legal, and even now I support the legalization of drugs.  I’m too chemically volatile to try anything like LSD or crack.  And I don’t personally want to take the kind of risk drug-taking involves.  But it’s my choice, not someone else’s.

I’d say the same thing about alcohol, about how much money someone wants to make, the things they want to buy, the clothes they wear, the friends we choose, the parties one goes to, where we chose to live, the jobs we look for.   Try things out, yes!  but then make up your own mind.  That is the crucial part.  Don’t just wake up the next morning and stumble on.

Above all, don’t just go along with the crowd.  Because one can’t do that and still hold on to one’s self.

Going forward rapidly backward

I sent an email to a friend at his office last week and received the following automated response:

I am not available to read your email right now.  I will return to the office on 12/31/1969.

I told him I thought he should market the trick of getting a second stab at living the last 40 years or so and become unfathomly rich overnight.  Whatever overnight is in the context of a backward leap in time.

Alternatively, before giving up the day job, he might consider re-allocating the IT jobs in his office.

It also occurred to me that I don’t want to live the last 40 years all over again.  I like living now better.

An old love affair with London

I fell in love with London the first time I was there forty years ago.  And every time I have returned – most often with my husband – it has been a heady, intoxicating experience.  A hundred times we have look at our lives and asked if there was some way we could live there.  Or possibly just buy a one-room studio where we could come whenever we wanted.

London was like a lover one knows is untrustworthy and capricious.  But at the same time whose charm seems mesmerizing, whose allure made me want to throw away everything just to be there.  I wanted not to care if it was financially feasible, if it would destroy as many opportunities as it would create, if it was fickle and dangerous and uncaring.

London Tower Bridge

I never gave an uncommitted yes to London.  I never lived there full time.  But I never left with new ideas and energy and excitement.  And every time I went back, the old temptations were there again.  It’s not too late, I’d say, perhaps now…

But London always wanted just a little too much for too little in return.

We have just returned from a week in London.  It was invigorating and exciting, and I kept waiting for that old fascination.  But it was like seeing an old lover with whose loss I am finally reconciled.  I knew that I no longer wanted to live there full time.  The price has always been too high, and I’m glad in the end that I did not pay it.

Yet, I would not tell someone young not to go to London, whatever magical place might be their London.  I wouldn’t say it is too dangerous, too deceitful, too egocentric, too superficial.  I would say yes, go!  yes, dare;  yes, risk it.

But I guess, as the Spanish say, I would also whisper “tenga cuidado.” Have care.  Don’t believe too much.  Hold on to your own self.  Because otherwise London will take it and you won’t have it anymore.

Blog break

I plan to be back by December 6.  That’s the day Dutch children put their shoes outside the door with the hope that Santa Nicholas (who in his pre-saint incarnation was a much-loved bishop) will put something in them.  It’s the more modest precursor to Santa Claus who actually gets into the house via the chimney.

The name of my father’s family in Germany was Von Hoerrman.  Von is roughly equivalent to the prefix of “Lord,” or possibly “Sir.”  But dad always said he thought the original name was actually Van Hoerrman, from the Dutch, rather than from the more lordly German.

As children we used to put our shoes out for Saint Nicholas, a tradition from my father’s side of the family.  So perhaps I do have some Dutch forebears along with my German, Polish, and possibly Jewish ancestors.

Not, actually, that I ever turn up anything in my shoes these days.

In any case, I hope to return here on the Day of the Shoes.

Why I can’t say thank you

Several weeks ago while I was waiting for a plane at Heathrow Airport, I wandered into the local Starbucks for two lattes.  While I was waiting, a brother and sister, about 12 and 10, came in and ordered a chocolate drink, a latte, and two espresso to go.  When the clerk told the older brother the cost, he said “wait a minute,” and went away, presumably to get another pound or two from the waiting adults.  But he returned and said he didn’t have the money.

I waited to see what the clerk would say.  What she did say was that she couldn’t serve him if he couldn’t pay. He did a rapid calculation and said “skip the latte.”  It was obviously his drink he was foregoing.

“I’ll pay for it,” I said.  (It was a bank-breaking $3.50.)  The ten-year old sister turned to me and said with the unnerving maturity that children are sometime are capable of “Oh thank you so much.  Thank you.  I hope we will be able to repay you some day.”

“No,” I said.  ”You won’t be able to repay me.  You will have to repay someone else some day.  You won’t have the chance to repay me.  That’s how life works.”

And that’s why I can’t say thank you on this wonderful Thanksgiving Day.  Because so many of the people I want to say thank you to are no longer here.

• I can’t say thank you to my mom who was dead for several decades before I realized what an outstandingly generous woman she was.
• I can’t say thank you to the three teachers who introduced me to a world of math and philosophy and science that I did not dream I was capable of.
• I can’t say thank you to the young man who grabbed me on the escalator when my trailing coat got caught in the moving stairs and possibly saved my life.
• I can’t say thank you to the woman who simply shook her head in the negative when saw me flirting with a married man who was a womanizer, and who saved me, I am sure, from an episode of angry bitterness.
• I can’t say thank you to some of my students who made my teaching life so rewarding.
• I can’t say thank you for hundreds of other small and large gifts I have received undeserved.  Because the people I would like to thank aren’t in my life any more.

But I still have a profound debt of gratitude on this Thanksgiving Day.

On a $3.50 repayment plan, I’m going to have to live an awful lot longer to pay it back.

The limitations of perfection

If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.                                                                                                                  Albert Einstein

I’ve never actually worked the numbers, but I think most of my family have above average IQs.  Most of us are also well-organized, hard-working, industrious, and reliable.  On occasions even heroically so.

But by and large, I don’t think we’re very creative.  Take me, for example.  I am good at explaining difficult concepts.  Even on occasion something as difficult as relativity – once I got my own head around it.  I’m good enough at criticizing theories, comparing them, rejecting or provisionally accepting them.  But I could probably count the number of original thoughts I’ve had with the fingers of one hand and still have several fingers to spare.

Yesterday the reason for this suddenly seemed blindingly obvious.  We were raised as Roman Catholics.  Not only as Catholics, but as thinking Catholics.  Which means that we were immersed in the Platonic world view in which perfection exists in a supernatural world and toward which we should strive.

The problem with perfection, though, is that there isn’t any room for mistakes.  Getting the right answers, doing the right thing is perfect.  Saying something foolish or outlandish is to fall short.  So if one doesn’t know the right answer, it is better to be quiet rather than blurt out something stupid.

Or unexpected. Or creative.

For example, my little sister Mary once put forth the idea that we think with our stomachs.  Oh how we laughed.  I remembered that last month when I read that researchers have found clear changes that take place in the stomach when we concentrate.  But Mary, at the age of probably about five, was humiliated.

And that’s the problem.  Aiming to be perfect sets one on a very narrow path of established right answers.  If you are smart enough, you trip less often than most.  But you won’t risk being creative.  Not unless you are very courageous, willing to be laughed at, or simply have such a kooky brain that these outrageous ideas just keep coming whatever the social cost.

Brainstorming is often the first step toward coming up with a creative idea.  Saying anything that comes to mind, not criticizing it but seeing where else it can take you.  We didn’t brainstorm in my family.  We worked at getting the right answer.

As  I move toward completing my 7th decade, I am reaching the conclusion that right answers have a lot to answer for.

The Chosen

I have just watched a documentary on 17th century Scotland during which the Presbyterians decided that they were God’s Chosen People and everyone was equal in the sight of God.  Unfortunately, if you were not a Scottish Presbyterian, you were not among God’s Chosen People, and therefore were not equal.

This seems to happen so often in history.  Countries again and again believe they are special, and then hijack God to be exclusively on their side, which gives them the right to bully everybody else.

Though to be fair, peoples are known to do the same thing without purported authorization from God as well.

How long is now?

For some unknown reason I was remembering today a conversation I had at about the age of twelve with my sister C who was about three.  By the time I was twelve, I had a lot of authority in the house, and if I told one of my younger sibs they could do something, it was pretty close to my mother giving permission.

So I’m in the kitchen with my sister C about 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and she asked me if she could have a cookie.

“Not now,” I said.  ”Maybe later.”
Long silence.  Presumably to give the impression that the subject has changed.  Then:

C:  ”How long is now?”
T:  ”Well, how long now is depends on what you’re talking about.  But now is until something important changes.  Sometimes now is a long time, sometimes it’s very short.  Like now might be short if Mom says dinner is ready now.  But it might be long if she says it’s winter time now.”

A few minutes after this conversation I finished what I was doing in the kitchen and left.  When I returned, C was eating a cookie.

“C!” I said.  ”I told you that you couldn’t have a cookie now.”
“I know, but you said now was over when something important happened.”

I knew already I was not going to win this battle.

“And what happened that was important enough for it not to be now any more?”  I asked.
“You went to the bathroom.  That’s important.”

I said in the About the Author page of this blog that I thought I learned to value the importance of seeing more than one point of view because my eyes each create a slightly different image.  So I have a permanent experience of the fact that things can look different if you look at them from another perspective.

But I doubt now that’s where I learned it.  I learned it because Dad was a lawyer.  And successful lawyers learn to look at both sides of an argument if they want to win their case.

And then, of course, there was all that practice in the kitchen around negotiating cookies and all the things the word now can mean.

Testing results

In one of those tests they give to prepare children for real life, a seven-year old was asked where the constitution was signed.

“At the bottom,” he said.

It is not recorded whether it was considered a right answer.

I’d give him credit myself.

Have we got this backwards?

Last month I bought an energy tracker.  It’s a gadget that plugs into the wall and it will tell you how much electricity is being used by whatever appliance is then plugged into it.

So far it has changed my habits sufficiently to reduce my annual bill by $100.  It’s a great idea.

As I am earnestly trying to reduce the atrocious percentage of carbon that I’m responsible for throwing into the atmosphere, I read that the OPEC countries – the oil producers who are so benefitting from the world’s oil extravaganza – are aggrieved.  They have announced if there is an agreement in Copenhagen in December to reduce world oil consumption, that they expect to receive compensation.

I wish I could dismiss this as simply preposterous self-serving egocentrism.  But what I’m afraid of is that they might use their oil to force some concessions to this outrageous demand.

It looks to me as if they could hold the world to ransom.

Unless, of course, we find some major effective alternative.  That really would be a giant step for mankind.