Ringing Out the Old, Ringing In the Blue!

Grethe Wittrock Wallhanging at the Fuller Craft Museum

So already, maybe it's because I've been learning the song "Taking a Chance on Love"* for the last couple of weeks. It's hard not to smile when you're singing words like

     Here I go again
     I hear those trumpets blow again,
     all aglow again, 
     taking a chance on love.

Whatever the reason, the new year has me ringing out the old, and ringing in the blue--the bright blue. I'm walking around with the feeling that "things are mending now/ I see a rainbow blending now." It's a feeling, not an accomplishment, and I'm grateful for it.

The friends who told me that adjusting to retirement takes about two years were right. Right now, retirement is sitting on my shoulders like a familiar cloak. Often when I walk out the door wearing it, I don't know where I'm going or where I fit. But sometimes I do know. Meanwhile, just as one retired friend had foretold, people have stopped asking me what my plans are and what I'm doing with myself. I still have no overarching purpose, no big goals except to say yes to projects and activities that I feel immediately excited about, to keep writing, and to trust "the process," which is what I'm finally actually doing. I suspect that my energy and optimism reflect that I'm finally trusting that way will lead to way, and way-to-way is the only way I can go. It's taken two years to get to this point.

As December wound down, my time increasingly became my own. With my parents relatively settled in their new independent living community and the flurry of holiday rehearsals and socializing behind me, I looked toward the horizon at the fast-approaching new year with a sense that certain challenges had been met. New and different ones would no doubt surface in the future, but for the moment, the sea was calm and the coast was clear. With the second anniversary of my retirement from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School just weeks away, I had more choices than I'd had in a long time because I had more time and fewer worries. 

That combination made me feel a lot like I felt two years ago when, for the first time in forever, I wasn't struggling to bring the first semester to a coherent close while trying to plan an inspiring second-semester launch. I recalled the mid-January Saturday that my husband Scott and I hung his M.F.A show** in the gallery of Johnson State College in northern Vermont. As approaching evening turned the snow-covered quadrangle blue, we acknowledged to each other that each of us thought his work looked wonderful in that space. Ahead of us both lay a next phase. But in that moment, we relished being surrounded by his powerful paintings and sculptures. Then we savored the first feelings of freedom from all the effort and hours that had made that moment and that achievement possible.


But such moments don't last, and seldom do we stand at junctures that so dramatically restructure our lives. Days later, Scott went back to work, teaching his community college students, most of whom didn't know that he'd just achieved something major. And I began "the adjustment."

Fortunately, times and people do change, however. When mid-December of this year brought familiar feelings of being mildly adrift rather than joyously empowered to do exactly as I pleased, I had a thought that I'd never had before: while I'm often not sure what will most please me in a given moment, I know for sure that there is much that does please me--much that has meaning for me, much that I believe is important, much that I love. Why spend so much time worrying about trying to match the right pursuit to the right moment when there are plenty of moments, I wondered. So in the final days of December, I resolved to become a creature of habit--or habits. Multiple habits that please me in a range of ways. 

The thought of habits sent me back to two books, one of which I've read countless times--The Plague by Albert Camus--and one of which I've never managed to read through--Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives by Gretchen Rubin. Camus first mentions habits in The Plague's first chapter in which he describes the character of the city of Oran: "The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits" (4).  Sentences later, after enumerating the unexamined routines of Oran's citizens when they're not "'doing business,'" Camus explains that while "these habits are not peculiar to our town," "there exist towns and countries where people have now and then have an inkling of something different" (4). While Camus views habit as the antidote to boredom and the unhappiness that often accompanies it, Rubin is concerned with the habits that transform us in order to bring us closer to our goals. In Rubin's world, inklings--especially about ourselves--are to be heeded and appreciated, especially if the purpose of our habits is to reach our goals and feel happy as a result.

I think I've resisted reading Rubin's book because--and I could be wrong about this--it's so much about the goals and happiness of the individual. The world and its needs--momentary, perpetual, and eternal--are of secondary if any importance. Yes, I know I should read the book (and writing this is making me question my assumptions about it). But any habits I'd want to develop would have to lead, or at least have the potential to lead, to more than just my personal satisfaction. Not that self-care habits aren't important: if we don't take care of ourselves, we're likely at some point to be less effective at taking care of others.  But I want habits that help me to have inklings about the world, grow in my comprehension and appreciation of it, figure out how to contribute to it in this evolving next phase of my life. I want others to have inklings, too, and for the same reasons.

So given the literature on habits and my own needs and desires, what would it mean for me to become a person of habits? I knew it would mean, in part, re-establishing some old habits, like walking regularly, daily if possible; taking lots of photographs; writing "morning pages" in the journal an old friend had given me in late September; and making at least one vegetarian soup or entree every week. All of these routines, often good for both my personal well-being and my need to step beyond myself, had fallen by the wayside this fall as my parents tackled the question of "to move or not to move"; made a final decision; and then sorted, discarded, packed, and actually moved--all with much advice and help (sometimes wanted, sometimes not) from my sisters and me. 

And I also knew it would mean establishing some new routines--not necessarily daily habits, but regular focusd efforts--that would help me move toward certain goals and resolves, some related to work and some to play:

• Having resolved to reconnect with good friends whom I haven't seen in a year or more, I've committed to contacting one old friend per week to hatch a plan to get together. I have two "old friend" lunch dates on my calendar. 

• Having received This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems by Wendell Berry as a Christmas present, I plan to read--and I've already begun--a year's worth of Sabbath poems (there are on average twelve poems for each year from 1979 through 2012) every day until I've read the whole book. Berry's relationship with the woods near his home, the ones about which he often writes in his Sabbath poems because his habit of walking in them on Sundays, has always fascinated me.

• I've also decided to read one chapter a week--I've yet to begin--of Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth to help me think about the mythic and mythological aspects of Scott's paintings. A professional storyteller fan*** of Scott's work who recently saw  "Autumn Spring" (at the right) was surprised to learn that Scott had no knowledge of the Greek myth in which Daphne is transformed into a laurel tree to avoid Apollo's advances. Is Scott's imagination giving him access to some primordial dream-truth that others learn through myth? Might a deeper understanding of mythology's sources and functions help both Scott and me to create a context that would invite more people into the sometimes unsettling world of his paintings? Might a carefully curated exhibition of Scott's works create a setting in which other artists could perform their mythology-inspired art and music? 

So I've begun to cultivate most of my "new" habits, which often means fitting them in around prior commitments. But a funny thing happened on my way to the CRLS Teachers' Resource Center last Tuesday, where I was headed to facilitate some of the curriculum development work the Kimbrough Scholars Program****  teacher team is currently doing. When I signed in at the security desk to receive the yellow badge that's required of any official visitor to the high school, I actually felt like a visitor to the high school for the very first time. That new feeling felt more right than strange. The people who had said adjustment to retirement would take two years had called it just right.

When I first renewed my habit of carrying my camera with me, I noticed pale blues, grays, and whites dominating my photos. Winter, I thought, as I explained to myself the predominance of muted colors in my nature photos. But time of year didn't explain the softened colors of the collected quilts and wallhangings in the Art as Quilt: Transitions in Contemporary Textile Media exhibition at the Fuller Craft Museum. Strange coincidence, I mused.

As days passed, though, and I walked more, took more pictures, and more fully enjoyed the unseasonable early January weather, I began seeing the vibrant, and it was blue. As I looked toward Squantum from the northern stretch of Wollaston Beach one morning, one facade of a bright blue house cheerfully commanded my full attention--and in so doing, obliterated the pale winter-world conception to which I'd been clinging. When I got home, I looked back through the photos I'd taken recently: there were swaths and patches of bright blue in many of them. How had I managed to overlook them in the quilt landscape I'd photographed at the Fuller Craft Museum?

Sometimes it takes something shifting within us, and despite us, for us to see, feel, and set out anew. At mid-January, I'm feeling eager and grateful and surprised, ready to make a habit of taking a chance. Here's to the mystery of it all--and the hope. 

*  Latouche, John, and Ted Fetter. "Lyrics-"Taking a Chance on Love"" - Google Play Music. EMI Miller Catalogue Inc., n.d. Web. 12 Jan. 2016. You can watch this YouTube video if you want to hear Ethel Waters sing this song in Cabin in the Sky.
** You can check out my husband Scott Ketcham's paintings on his web site, <www.scottketcham.com>.
*** The professional storyteller visitor was my fellow Unicorn Singer, Joan Gatturna, who researched and wrote the script for Unicorn Singers' "'All is Calm, All is Bright': The Christmas Truce of 1914 in Song and Narration." I wrote about this program as part of a December 2014 blog post, called "Crossing Lines and the Christmas Truce of 1914": <http://soalready.blogspot.com/2014/12/crossing-lines-and-christmas-truce-of.html>.
**** Working with this group has been one of the most satisfying, clarifying, enlightening experiences of my retirement; stay tuned for a future blog post on this topic.