Wait, What?

Every now and then I come across something, someone, or some comment that totally throws me for a loop.  Not often, mind you.  I am the kind of person who you tell your life story to in the grocery line.  I guess I just look sympathetic; and, I do that mirror listening thing without thinking about what I want to tell you about myself or trying to insert my own stories into yours.  (Yes, being introverted helps here, but I’ve got it down pat.)  Also, I’ve been teaching for twenty years, so to really, truly shock me is a formidable task.  Gay?  Cool.  Don’t know what you want to do when you grow up?  Join the club.  Want to move to Montana and live as a hermit with only books and a case of beer?  Have fun!  Confused?  Me, too.  Lost and just need a hug?  C’mon in.  In love with your cousin’s best friend’s ex-girlfriend’s dog?  Okay.  Dislike your parents and hate your friends?  I’m your sounding board.  Really – you cannot shock me.

But, just when I know I have heard it all and seen most of it, I’m blindsided.  This past week I was talking with a group of women.  To be precise, I was listening to a group of women talk. I did not know all of them; several of us had just met for the first time. The age range was 40-70. Topics ranged from marriage to children to in-laws to pets to jobs and back again.  At one point, one of the older ladies suggested, “I guess it’s about having a dream.  I mean, you have to have something you want to do.  A goal.  A dream. I’m retired and I still don’t have enough time to do everything I want to do.”  In less than half a breath a younger woman piped up, “Maybe that’s my problem.”  We looked at her expectantly.  “I mean,” she continued, “I don’t really have any dreams except to just be with my husband.”  Wait. What?  She went on to iterate a couple of dreams he has, but she concluded that comment with, “All I really want to do is spend time with him.”

Now, you’ll all be glad to know that I beat down the feminist in me that wanted to lecture her on losing her identity in a man.  I also shushed the counselor in me who wanted to tell her that she needed to do some kind of guided imagery in order to visualize who she wants to be.  You’ll also be relieved to know that I did not allow the reader in me to quote all sorts of literary ideas about becoming your own person.  And, yep, she did it.  This forty-something woman shocked me.  It really seems to me that hanging your one dream on another human being is a recipe for tragedy.

I don’t know lots of things “for sure,” as Oprah puts it, but I do know for sure that if you have one dream that you assign your happiness to and it  revolves around another person, you will be disappointed.  That kind of pressure will doom a relationship and poison a friendship.  My dream depends upon you?  No.  Who – male or female – thinks that wrapping up the sum total of all of your dreams into one person is a good idea?  Her dream is just to spend time with her husband.  Ancillary to cultivating herself as a human being and cultivating her own interests and dreams, it’s not a bad thing to want to spend time with one’s husband.  In fact, many would argue it’s quite excellent to want to spend time with loved ones.  Let me reiterate:  that’s her only dream.  Her one dream for the rest of her life hangs upon another person. Her one dream for the remaining 45 years on the planet is to spend time with her husband.  That’s it.  Wait. What? 

So, the husband-time-spending thing aside, this woman has only ONE dream for her remaining time in life.  That’s it.  One.  That One is a progression of a role in a family. Only that.  I know women here in Augusta, and I assume they exist all over this country if not the world, whose mission in life has been and continues to be:  graduate high school, go to college, find a husband, marry, have children, join the country club, take family vacations, help the children graduate high school, help the children go to college, help the children get married, help the children have children, enjoy the grandchildren and eventually die.  And, yes, before you ask, I have taught and counseling high school girls whose life plan is some iteration of the above sequence.  In 2013.  Yes, there are girls and women whose whole existence seems to bizarrely rotate around others.  Where, oh where, is the desire for personal development?  For cultivating your own talents?  Women, if you are reading this, you have hundreds, if not thousands, of opportunities to make a life for yourself.  And, most certainly, you may want it to include marriage or family life and many of your desires and dreams and talents may dovetail into family life, but please, oh please, I beg you not to roll up all of your dreams into what your husband wants to do or into some future children. God forbid he becomes ill or dies or leaves you – please have some thoughts about what it is that YOU want.  You and only you. What are your dreams for yourself? If you were totally on your own, what would you do to develop your interests and achieve your dreams?  Wait, what?

Yes, I know that what I’m suggesting might be a lecture for human beings, but it really seems especially applicable to women who roll up their own identity in a husband and family or who minimize themselves for any other person.  Who knows what will happen?  Please develop yourself – individually.  Surely you have interests and talents and desires for your own development.  Children grow up.  Children move out.  Spouses are not extensions of who you are – they are (hopefully) wonderful  additions to who you are, but you must always be you first and foremost. 

Perhaps this lady was simplifying what Jean Webster suggested, “I'm going to enjoy every second, and I'm going to know I'm enjoying it while I'm enjoying it. Most people don't live; they just race. They are trying to reach some goal far away on the horizon, and in the heat of the going they get so breathless and panting that they lose sight of the beautiful, tranquil country they are passing through; and then the first thing they know, they are old and worn out, and it doesn't make any difference whether they've reached the goal or not.”  Perhaps my new friend wants to just enjoy time with her husband, and I do wish her all the happiness doing so, but I still say she needs a goal.   “It must be borne in mind that the tragedy of life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. It isn’t a calamity to die with dreams unfulfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream. Something for ourselves that we are working towards.” (B.E. Mays) 

And that, my new friend, is a tragedy that can be avoided.

Control

The other night I was invited to a friend’s house.  Out of the blue.  The kind of invitation that makes you think, “Who canceled and how far down on the I-guess-we-could-invite-her list was I?”  Still, I was free and so were the drinks, so I went.  It was a small gathering – the kind of gathering that evokes Jordan Baker’s Gatsby musing:  “At small parties there’s never any privacy.”  Indeed there wasn't, but we were an amiable group and all of the people (dog and baby included) chatted and enjoyed shared company for the evening.

At one point a woman began extolling the virtues and coolness of a new gadget she had been using, the UP by Jawbone.  This bracelet-like device that tracks exercise and sleep habits, calories burned, and probably a few more things that I’m forgetting right now.  It is sleek looking and plugs directly into your iPhone or iPad to convert its data into charts and graphs.  She demonstrated her new device for about thirty minutes, then she wandered off to make loud and uncomfortably intimate inquiries of her teenage son who was busying himself with reruns of The Big Bang Theory on television.

The next day, I recalled that my friend Kathy has a Jawbone device; I proceeded to text her, inquiring about it usefulness.  Kathy thought the device was interesting and useful, but she doesn't always wear it as a matter of fashion.  Next was my sister, a trainer and a person who, unless under extreme duress, has not missed a day of exercise since 1982.  Her response to the capabilities of this device:  just eat a little, exercise a little, sleep a little.  In short, why buy a device to track or remind you to do this?  She posed this question:  if someone told you they wanted to read 20 minutes a day and had purchased a device to help them do this, what would you say?  She went on to assert that all one really needs to do is put it in one’s calendar, and do it.

My sister isn’t wrong, but people feel the need to control things.  The modern person seems to think that controlling everything is best. If people didn’t feel this way, the Jawbone, helicopter parenting, and these house alarms with cameras that you can access from your phone would not have been invented.  Despite such advances (not including the helicopter parenting), people are at a loss as to how to control their worlds.  The idea of self-control does not seem to apply here, so the idea that one can simply put it on the calendar and do it goes out the window.  This has to do with the inundation of information that people receive.  Surface information.  We hear about things, or we see them in our Facebook feeds, or we skim a headline, and voila! we are “informed.”  The more we are informed, the more we feel that we must do.  We must eat organic and local; we must exercise 30 minutes a day; we must spend 20 minutes a day reading with our child; we must call our parents daily; we must track our sleep patterns; we must know our cholesterol.   It’s all a bit much.  Add to this that we need to be informed about current events and bake cupcakes for the fund-raiser tomorrow, top it all off with remembering usernames and passwords, and it gets hard to breathe. It is a bastardized keeping up with the Joneses. 

Once we have information and perceived requirements for living, we must get everything scheduled and organized and planned.  And, then once that’s done, we are in control.  Whew.  We can relax and follow the schedule.  Except.  Except the information is ever-changing.  So are circumstances.  Who hasn’t gotten the week planned when a beloved spouse throws a wrench into the plans with a business trip or a wild hair to finally fix the bathroom tile?  Maybe an illness or a broken toe curtails our planned dog-walking.  Perhaps a long-lost friend calls.  A child comes home with a half-frozen, starving kitten that needs to be nursed through the night.  Such occurrences madden so many people and stress so many relationships because such occurrences are not the calendar.  The thing is: human beings want to be in control.    The ever-changing refuses to be controlled.  People don’t like that.  If I don’t know what’s going to happen next, I can’t be in control, and if I am not in control, then things might get hairy, and if things get hairy, I may react in an unpredicted way, and if I react in an unpredicted way people may see the real, deep-heart me, and if people see the real me…  Aha!  Perhaps the heart of this control issue is here: have human beings become afraid of being human?  Would we like to be slightly agitated or a sniveling mess?  Can we go to work overly tired because we spent the night on the phone with an old friend in distress?  Is it okay to skip a workout to meet a new friend?  If it’s not in the plan, then perhaps we shouldn't.   If you stick to your carefully planned day, then you will know what is going to happen and avoid unforeseen emotions or stresses.

Real, human responses to crises and opportunities are not planned ahead of time.  But we don’t want to be vulnerable to forces outside of ourselves.  Our school motto is “To be rather than to seem.”  But, that isn’t the real world‘s motto.  The real world would like things to seem okay, because if everything seems okay, then the seeming has to eventually become reality, right?  In order for things to seem okay, we need to control many of those things – preferably all of them.  But, being in control is exhausting even with a smart phone and a sleep-tracking bracelet.

I am particularly good at getting organized, especially at the start of a new school year, but I sometimes stink at the follow-through.  I have a smart phone to help me get and stay organized, but let me be honest, sometimes I just play Ruzzle and text friends…okay, most often I just do that. If whatever devices, from jotting things down on the calendar to tracking your sleep and steps with a mini-computer, help you to make plans and live the life you want to live, then “it’s all good.”  Still, rather than using such things for control, perhaps we should use them for organization, and maybe we can all remember to embrace this messy, unplannable life that is at its happiest when unannounced guests come by and the best laid plans and sleep patterns get thrown out the window.