For some reason, in comparison to many of the people that I know, I'm feeling calm--uncharacteristically calm for me. Not detached, but calm. And expectant and hopeful. This new calm started to collect in me, despite my travel-related anxieties of late October and early November, when I began diligently following the advice my husband Scott gave me early in the fall*: to stop trying to figure out my retirement and instead, to get busy doing anything that I liked doing. There's plenty I like doing, but I needed permission to act with no other goal than satisfying my momentary sense of what might be pleasurable and meaningful.
Initially, I valued Scott's advice because it freed me to explore options and interests without the pressure of identifying a direction for the next phase of my life--and without feelings of guilt related to "wasting valuable time" on larks and whims. I quickly understood that Scott was advising me to trust in time, and also in emotion and intuition as the expressions of my essential self. However, only recently--actually, when I read the Galway Kinnell poem featured in the December 3 Writer's Almanac**--did I realize that Scott had also been encouraging me to trust more in the world, to partner with it by being open to its bountiful, variegated phenomena and experiences, with which I potentially might engage meaningfully and joyfully.The poem's notion of trusting nothing but the hours themselves felt like sheer deliverance to me. The hours were the constant stuff, the dependable thing. As I felt myself leaning toward trusting the hours, the poem's imperative title resurrected the final lines of John Milton "On His Blindness" from the basement of my memory:
Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o're Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and waite.***
No need to speed. Waiting too is service. A kind of faithfulness to what we already know to have meaning and value. As Kinnell's second stanza reminds, "You're tired./ . . ./ But no one is tired enough." Kinnell delivers his injunction in the next line: "Only wait a little and listen." Which inherently suggests that there's something to be waited for and listened to. There's a world there, whether it's an inner or outer one.
Meanwhile, the outer world served up Singapore and Malaysia to be seen and listened to--each exquisitely memorable in its own way, each familiar and extraordinary for reasons I am still contemplating. And each captivating enough to transform of my expectations of late November, which I've always loved. And if expectations of late November can be changed, if new ways of loving November can develop, what other expectations and feelings might be forged and changed?
November is monsoon season in the Singapore and Malaysia; downpours punctuate the day's heat and humidity. The whoosh and clatter of those downpours--very dramatic--were, for me, peaceful and soothing. On the eve of Thanksgiving halfway
around the world, I stood in Singapore's beautiful, lush botanical gardens (in
the photo on the right) sheltered from one such downpour, watching and listening, only 24
hours after I'd been looking toward Thailand from a boat off the coast
of Langkawi, an island off of northern Malaysia (see my view in the photo on the
left). Kinnell doesn't say "Wait forever"; he says "Wait, for now." Alertness and attention are what he encourages, receptivity to and recognition of the moment--"the only time"--when each of us can "hear/ the flute of your whole existence, rehearsed by sorrows,/ play itself into total exhaustion." There's definitely sadness here that comes with loss and memory. But it's coupled with hope. I experience his language of "only time" as being about potential opportunity rather than missed opportunity. A certain type of exhaustion--complete, unfettered, cleansing depletion--is to be prized; there's a desirable, substantive emptiness to be found.
At my current retirement moment, I'm feeling alert to the stimuli and opportunities that I trust the world--its hours and spaces--will serve up. And I'm also feeling that my authentic responses to those stimuli and opportunities will yield, eventually, a coherent, or perhaps incoherent, kind of knowing and a set of associations to accompany it. Something real, worth knowing, and worth heeding.
And so I end this post with some recent artwork my cousin Annita Soble**** posted on her Facebook page as part of her Chanukah greeting.***** Yes that is a deer in the headlights--a somewhat ghostly, transparent deer that may not be associated to a particular person's stunned paralysis. But my attention is on the driver of the car, who's taking the time to stick his head out of the car window, probably to confirm that he's actually seeing what he thinks he's seeing. Oh, the curiosity and the wonder; he'll never forget this commute! Meanwhile, all the cars heading robotically in the other direction spew exhaust--perhaps even to the point of Kinnellian exhaustion. Are any of the drivers noticing the the menorah that burns bright and timeless in a window that looks out on the thoroughfare? I don't know. But I am. Here's to the bright and the timeless. May we watch for it, listen for it, see it, hear it, and experience the hope that goes with it, especially in this holiday season! * I first wrote about Scott's retirement advice in my September 28 blog post.
** http://writersalmanac.org/page/9/
*** http://www.bartleby.com/101/318.html
**** Check out more of Annita's art at <annitasoble.com>.
***** Another version of this drawing appears on the cover of Fifth Dimension, a publication of the Jewish Russian Learning Center.
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