Monthly Archives: June 2024

Being Content

Posted on June 20, 2024 by | Leave a comment

Growing up—regardless of where or with whom I was living—I was always looking forward to the time when I would not be there. Lamenting the reality of being in a situation and relishing the thought of freedom from it was a constant state of mind.

I realize now that I didn’t change much as an adult. Reading through some of my old papers, I came across a paragraph I wrote in response to this stimulus statement: What a bore it is waking up in the morning the same person.

I wrote:

“What a bore it is waking up in the morning the same person. I wish I were already what I keep thinking and hoping I’m going to be. The same feelings of “when I grow up” face me each morning, day, week, month, and year. I’m bored with the anticipation. What is it going to be? What am I going to be? When? I have no fantasies of what I want to be. I don’t want to work at it. I want a miracle. The boredom is not complete, however, since I fear that I’ve been waiting for something that does not exist. My boredom is laced with the fear that perhaps I already am.“

Today, when I respond to queries about how I’m really doing, I can say with all candor and conviction that I’m content. Being content means more to me than just being all right or okay. For someone who has always yearned for something more or something else, being content is a sense of extreme wellbeing, happiness, and joy.

This long-awaited sense of contentment does not, however, diminish my New Year’s Day attitude that, “The best is yet to come!”

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Posted in fate, Identity, reflection

Vulnerable

Posted on June 13, 2024 by | 1 comment

Always in shades, we didn’t know what her face looked like. Behind the shades, she seemed aloof, almost hostile.

Without the dark glasses, my friend and I were surprised at what we saw. To me, the look on her face was like that of a small child—innocent and open. I had the urge to protect and comfort her. My friend said that the woman seemed somewhat agitated. 

While I searched for a word to describe what we saw and felt, my friend said, “She looked vulnerable.”

Yes, vulnerable.

The rest of the week, I continued to think about the word “vulnerable.” What does it mean to feel and be vulnerable?

When I was with other friends, I would bring up the topic of vulnerability and ask them to tell me what being vulnerable meant to them and under what circumstances they recalled or would imagine that they would be vulnerable. 

My question elicited thoughtful responses. Most common among the ways of defining being vulnerable was feeling open, exposed, defenseless, transparent. When my friends described the circumstances when they thought they would feel or have felt vulnerable, they realized that what they were feeling was fear rather than what they thought of as vulnerability. The situations they described always involved fear of bodily harm by someone else.

Musing about fear and vulnerability, I realized that I would much rather experience fear than vulnerability.  I could use the adrenalin generated by fear to fight or flee. In such a scenario, fear comes from outside one’s self, stimulated by the threat of the other.

Experimenting with what I thought feeling vulnerable would be like, what came to mind were those instances in which close friends or family had hurt or disappointed me. Only people for whom I cared deeply could elicit a feeling of vulnerability. There is no rush of adrenalin. In fact, the heart is depressed. There is no fight or resistance. Only sadness, humility, and helplessness because in truth, being vulnerable requires cooperation of the self.

These thoughts bring me back to the mysterious woman who had a face of openness and innocence all the while showing a layer of pain. Based on this fleeting moment of visibility, I think that she had the courage to offer herself up to being vulnerable.

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Posted in empathy, reflection, women

Images in My Mind’s Eye

Posted on June 6, 2024 by | 2 comments

Retired friends were talking about things they left at their previous homes and wished they had kept. After the conversation, I began to take a mental tour of the house I left in Maryland when I moved to Arizona. As my imagination took me from room to room, I recalled the fun adventures Charles and I had as we shopped for and selected everything.

Reminiscing as I visualized each room and space, I have no regrets about leaving almost everything we owned behind. We enjoyed them for years and I am grateful for that. There are, however, two exceptions to my laissez-faire attitude about what I left behind.   

While I could not have kept these two items because of my current space, I would like to be able to look at them every now and then.

Both of these prized items were in a room seldom entered unless there was a special occasion. We made what had been a game room into our living room, despite its being in the very back of the house. 

In place of the game room’s pool table, our living room featured a large, square, black lacquer coffee table with fat rounded legs making it appear as if crouching low to the floor. That table owned the space it covered. It could not be dismissed.

A particular photo comes to mind of a friend sitting on the floor next to the table while celebrating Christmas with us. Despite a riot of wrapping paper strewn across the table and the loveliness of the smiling friend, that table still took center stage, quiet and magisterial.  

In that same room was what I considered the most beautiful object in the house. I don’t recall how our search started, but we were on the hunt for Quezal iridescent glass in the art nouveau style for our central light fixture to replace the previous track lighting.

We searched antique shops and contemporary shops for just the right lighting for this special room. We recognized it instantly. it was like looking at our newborn among a nursery of beautiful babies. Everything else paled in comparison.

As it turned out, it was not what we thought we were searching for. I’m unable to give a fair description of this chandelier that looked like nothing we had ever seen. There was no sparkling glass. There was no lightness about it. It was as heavy as it looked. We feared that the beautiful antique brass base needed to attach it to the sloping ceiling would not be able to support it.

Not to everyone’s taste, it had a huge bowl shape with golden brass fittings. The color of the bowl was the peach of an early Arizona evening sunset with subtle granite-like veins sparsely trailing throughout.  It was gorgeous without the light being on and awestriking when lit. When we first got it, we would walk into the room together, look up at it, and then look at each other and smile with great satisfaction.

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Posted in reflection, Retirement