Tripping over Life’s Little Lessons
Random thoughts kicking around …
1. My friend Katie’s Facebook status recently read (to paraphrase): “Katie is grateful for all of the reasons she is tired.” I’d like to borrow and adopt that as my own default tagline. There’s nothing wrong with complaining and worrying sometimes, but I’m a big believer in attitude making a genuine difference in how our lives proceed. Not that daily gratitude will prevent disaster and sadness, but that disaster and sadness will be made easier to bear. I am thankful not to have to test this theory, except in small ways, at present.
2. Experience = wisdom. Right? Somehow I’ve always accepted as fact that layers of experience, age, will gradually result in wisdom gained. Except I’ve had the revelation that it’s possible to keep discovering the same things over and over again, in slightly mutated form, such that it would seem all that marvelous experience hasn’t been exceptionally integrated into a grand interior mural of cohesive wisdom, but is hanging about in separate clumsy segments waiting for me to trip over it again. Partly, this is to do with age itself, and the feeling that time continues to speed up, and the fact that my brain is actually about two seasons behind, right now. It’s so hard to maintain a focus, to remember the resolutions, to stick with the plan (while trying to remain flexible) and ultimately better oneself. The previous sentence would be a terrible mantra.
3. Speaking of mantras, my siblings, when confronted with the above rambling non-mantra, suggested I should keep a “Life’s Little Lessons” kind of diary. A list somewhere with those nuggets of wisdom recorded.
4. Just had another thought: maybe it’s not that important to remember these lessons. Maybe experience simply kicks in during a regular day as situations arise, everything from walking to the library in the rain pushings a stroller and pulling a three-year-old on her bicycle (and enjoying it, as experience tells me such moments are fleeting), to rewriting a story a million times over, because there is always something more to learn.
5. Little Life Lessons have a tendency to sound bland, trite, and obvious written down.
6. Still, it might be nice to return to thoughts like: I like baking bread! Or, I’m glad for everything that makes me tired! Or, three-year-olds need to feel like they’re independent sometimes! Or, you can always say your sorry, even if it was an accident! Et cetera. Yup, that could become addictive. (Why each life lesson cries out for an exclamation point, I cannot say. But it does!)
7. Writing. I want to blog about the writing, but nothing coheres into firm thought, just the usual angst-ridden blether. I’m finishing a poetry collection right now, mostly on young motherhood, and memory. And I’m continually writing and rewriting these stories in the Nicaragua book, and wondering how many more years will be wasted/usefully applied in pursuit of that book, and whether perhaps the subject is just too loaded and therefore doomed. Perhaps I will understand more clearly when this draft is done, but if experience has taught me anything … no, I won’t.
8. What was that about daily gratitude? Here’s a little life lesson: it is infinitely easier to be grateful for and to love my children than to be grateful for and to love my other creative outlet of writing. I have such a simple relationship with my children, despite the minute complexities. I just love them. I trust my instincts about them, and have never questioned this journey we’re on together. But the writing … I love it and crave it and need it; and hate it and resent it and agonize over it. I haven’t yet discovered the antidote.