Aging

So, today is my birthday. I'm now officially closer to 50 than I was to 40. This annual ritual we go through takes on different meanings over the years. All through my 20s and 30s I still felt like I was growing up. Mentally, things shifted dramatically during my 40s - now I feel like I'm just growing older - not that I'm always mature, mind you, there's just something about crossing that half-way mark in life that puts a different spin on things.

Truthfully, I think I like the 40s. In some ways I still mentally feel like I'm in my 30s (I'm not delusional enough to still feel like I'm in my 20s). I suspect not raising children has kept me feeling mentally young. I'm so much more cognizant in this decade of what's important in life. I look back at the things that used to rile me up 20 years ago and today I can look at the same things and realize they just aren't worth the mental energy. I deal with stressful situations different in my 40s then I did a couple decades ago. Now I'm more able to step back, put some of the emotion aside, and try to look at a problem rationally and try to look at both sides (still a challenge sometimes but easier than it used to be).

I think I'm aware of emotional aging more than physical aging - and I enjoy and am consciously aware of the emotional aging. I rationalize differently, I react differently, I prioritize differently. And honestly, I feel its for the better. It's something I've worked at over the years and am only beginning to see the efforts pay off. Emotional maturity is an evolutionary process and being conscious of it is rewarding and challenging and exciting all at the same time. At times I see how I'm handling things now, comparing my reaction to how I used to handle things, and occasionally almost wishing I could go back and redo some of my life. But those years are water under the bridge.

Life, with all its ups and downs, all its challenges, and all its lessons, is a learning experience - if we choose to make it so and not let it get the best of us. I love the line "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." Life does try to break us all at one time or another. It's sent me my share of challenges over the years but I can honestly say I have grown stronger at the broken places. It's all a work in progress. Life may be half over but there's still half to go - I hope it's a great adventure.

Book Review - Andrew Jackson: His Life & Times by H.W. Brands

I FINALLY finished this lengthy tome on Andrew Jackson. His life was fascinating, to say the least, but I sadly found little in this president to admire.

To be sure, Jackson's childhood hardly suggested the path that would lead anyone to the presidency of the United States. He lost all of his family to death at an early age and had to fend for himself. His childhood was beyond difficult and it is to his credit that he became the successful man that he did.

My biggest problem with Jackson was his love of killing people - be it in a dual or war. He was never happier than when at war - and he was at war often - against the Indians, the British, the Spanish, and the Mexicans. He was plagued with a life-time of debilitating illnesses, often confined to bed for days on end, but he would mysteriously always be able to rouse himself whenever it appeared he would be called on to lead men into war. He wasn't beyond provoking war to get what he wanted - which is exactly what he did when he decided, as a general, that Florida should be taken from the Spanish and made a part of the United States. His treatment of the Indians was abhorrent and he was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Indians, not just through war, but also through forced relocation, especially during what became known as the "Trail of Tears" when the Cherokees were forced to relocate west of the Mississippi.

Jackson also advocated for the continuation of slavery and held a number of slaves himself throughout his lifetime. He alternated between between paternalistic and abusive of them.

He was singularly devoted to his wife, who died right after he was elected president. In one of the great ironies in life, he and his wife actually adopted and lovingly raised two young Indian boys. Rachel's death clouded the rest of his life as he felt responsible for it because she never wanted him to be president. He barely pulled himself together enough to get through his inauguration.

Jackson is often referred to as the "first president of the people," or by terms similar. This was not through his own doing for Jackson never actually wanted to be, or campaigned to be, president. His friends and supporters did it for him and he felt it was his duty to respond to the call of the people. Before Jackson's election, America's presidents were chosen behind closed doors and it was basically a given who the president would be. The voting was merely a formality. So in that sense Jackson was the first president of the people because it was the first election in which the people really had a genuine say in who would lead them.

Jackson's guiding political philosophy was his belief in democracy. His belief that people knew what was best for themselves and were capable of making informed choices. This was exactly opposite the belief of his arch rival, John Quincy Adams, who was a staunch proponent of republicanism and felt the people incapable of knowing what was best for themselves. Brands says at the end of his book that Jackson believed "[d]emocracy wasn't a perversion of the republican promise but its perfection, or at least a large step toward perfection."

Jackson's strongest desire for his country, one he held to until his dying day, was that at all costs the Union should be preserved - that if it fell apart then foreign countries would seize its pieces and it would never be whole again. During his presidency, his passion nearly led him to war against South Carolina when it threatened to nullify a tariff and secede from the Union. This passion led him to fight (politically) for the annexation of Texas, the ousting of the Indian population, and to support slavery (believing the South's economy would collapse without it and knowing the South would secede if the abolitionists got into power). It was on his deathbed that he won his last political battle when he learned that Congress had voted to annex Texas and make it part of the Union.

Brands' book focuses mostly on Jackson's early life and his years as a general. Others have criticized the work for not focusing more on his presidency, but other books have been written on that portion of his life and I hope to read one of them in the not-too-distant future. I think the book did well at exploring the times he lived in and how he fit into and then helped change those times.

It is easy to set here in 2009 and judge a man who was quick to war and who defended slavery. One can argue times were different and notions of civil rights and equal rights were not developed at all in that era. But even understanding that the thinking of that era was different and less evolved than it is now, just doesn't excuse, for me, Jackson's principals, his inability to find value in all men, regardless of race or heritage, and his love of fighting and killing. I can appreciate the things he accomplished in light of his disadvantaged childhood, and I subscribe in many respects to his view of democracy. But his insatiable need for war and death left me cold.

The Creation

Image taken by Pedrito Maynard-Reid (Wales Sunrise)

Enjoy reading (or hopefully re-reading) one of my favorite poems:

THE CREATION

by: James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)

ND God stepped out on space,


And He looked around and said,
"I'm lonely --
I'll make me a world."




And far as the eye of God could see
Darkness covered everything,


Blacker than a hundred midnights
Down in a cypress swamp.




Then God smiled,
And the light broke,
And the darkness rolled up on one side,


And the light stood shining on the other,
And God said, "That's good!"




Then God reached out and took the light in His hands,
And God rolled the light around in His hands
Until He made the sun;

And He set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.


And the light that was left from making the sun
God gathered it up in a shining bal





And flung it against the darkness,


Spangling the night with the moon and stars.


Then down between


The darkness and the light
He hurled the world;
And God said, "That's good!"







Then God himself stepped down --


And the sun was on His right hand,
And the moon was on His left;
The stars were clustered about His head,
And the earth was under His feet.
And God walked, and where He trod
His footsteps hollowed the valleys out
And bulged the mountains up.




Then He stopped and looked and saw
That the earth was hot and barren.
So God stepped over to the edge of the world
And He spat out the seven seas;
He batted His eyes, and the lightnings flashed;
He clapped His hands, and the thunders rolled;
And the waters above the earth came down,
The cooling waters came down.




Then the green grass sprouted,
And the little red flowers blossomed,
The pine tree pointed his finger to the sky,
And the oak spread out his arms,
The lakes cuddled down in the hollows of the ground,
And the rivers ran down to the sea;
And God smiled again,
And the rainbow appeared,
And curled itself around His shoulder.




Then God raised His arm and He waved His hand
Over the sea and over the land,
And He said, "Bring forth! Bring forth!"
And quicker than God could drop His hand.
Fishes and fowls
And beasts and birds
Swam the rivers and the seas,
Roamed the forests and the woods,
And split the air with their wings.
And God said, "That's good!"




Then God walked around,
And God looked around
On all that He had made.
He looked at His sun,
And He looked at His moon,
And He looked at His little stars;
He looked on His world
With all its living things,
And God said, "I'm lonely still."




Then God sat down
On the side of a hill where He could think;
By a deep, wide river He sat down;
With His head in His hands,
God thought and thought,
Till He thought, "I'll make me a man!"




Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled Him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand;
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till He shaped it in His own image;




Then into it He blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul.
Amen. Amen.

What happens to a dream deferred?

I love that line from Langston Hughes' poem. The rest of the poem doesn't speak to me, it seems almost childish in a way. But that first line is haunting. Thoughts about dreaming have been on my mind a lot lately. Susan Boyle just jumped to the headlines when she competed in a British talent program singing a song from Les Miserables called "I Had a Dream." It too is haunting and the song has been in my head for many weeks now.

I've always regretted that I had no dreams when I was growing up. Nor any goals - and I think there is a difference really. I think a dream is a life's passion. I haven't had that. Goals are important and they are things you work for in life and even wish for but I don't think goals carry with them that passion that consumes you inside.

I don't think my parents really had dreams either. My mother simply wanted a happy life, which she has only had glimpses of from time to time. She wants a man to treat her well and take care of her. She'd like good health. But I don't know that she's ever had goals beyond that. I don't know that she's ever had a dream that she was passionate about. My dad was more of a dreamer - but he was all talk and never pursued anything he dreamed of doing. Maybe his were dreams deferred. Maybe they never rose to the level of dreams because if a real dream creates a passion within you it will drive you to reach that dream. Maybe his visions of the future were just well-intended goals that died from a lack of passion.

That legacy was passed down to my brother and I. My parents never encouraged us to dream to be anything in this life. There were no goals for us. No thoughts of college. No discussions of marriage and family or education or careers. Life was that thing you faced one day at a time. Life was survival. It was about working hard and paying your bills. It was about making a living and providing for your family. About having food on the table and having fun once in awhile. But there were no dreams. No planning for their future or ours. No retirement accounts, no college funds, no future, only now. Today, and maybe tomorrow at the latest, but no next week or next year or adulthood or retirement. No passion. No dreams.

I've grown up without any dreams. I've had goals and I've met a lot of them. I got a college education - and I enjoyed getting an education. There were times it almost rose to the level of passion but it was not something I planned for, it was a means to an end. To escape a family life that had fallen apart. It happened by chance. No funds were saved, no college prep classes taken in high school. My parents fully expected me to be a secretary, in our hometown, that was it. And being a secretary is noble and is work that needs to be done - but what if they had dreamed that I could be more? What if they had helped me dream of becoming more? Where would I be today?

I graduated and then did office work for a decade. I liked the job - I loved the people - but the job was going nowhere and neither was I. But still I didn't have a dream - just a goal. I went into law. And I think I'll be happy with this choice once my career gets going. But do I have that burning passion that consumes me and drives me to be as successful as I possibly can? No. At least not yet.

I used to "dream" of being rich. For nearly a decade I lived in a small town and often passed this huge onion field. And I dreamed of what it could be. I wanted that field. I don't usually take time to picture things and envision what they could be - but this was an exception. I pictured a lush estate, with a Tara-like mansion set back from the road and a beautiful iron gate at the entrance. I envisioned a lake with swans and weeping willow trees. I pictured the home having a grand staircase and off the living room french doors that opened to a beautiful music parlor with a grand piano. I was almost passionate about it. But can something be a dream if it is unrealistic? If there are no means to make it happen? Does it simply become a dream deferred? Or, if it was a vision that didn't carry with it that all-consuming passion was it really a dream at all or just greedy desire? The onion field is now a housing development. My vision has been scaled back to wishing for a mid-sized home with a fence for the cats, a non-galley kitchen with a pantry, a two-car garage, and a garden where I can plant beautiful roses. I'm almost passionate enough about it to call it a dream but the passion hasn't consumed me yet so perhaps it is simply only a goal for me to work towards.

I try to envision my career as a lawyer. There are goals I'd like to reach. If I could become passionate about some aspect of being a lawyer those goals might become dreams. There are problems in the world that I feel passionate about - abused children and animals, poverty, injustice. I have great compassion and when involved in a specific case I know in my heart I will be passionate about helping my clients. But I haven't developed a dream for where I want to see my career go. Probably because a dream requires life skills and a certain amount of self-esteem to believe you can make your dreams a reality.

Perhaps I have to start from a place more rudimentary than most. Perhaps my self-esteem must be more developed before I can develop a dream for my life, before I can become truly passionate about where I want to go and what I want to truly become. Because I believe you can't be passionate about something if there's some part of you that doesn't believe you are capable of turning your dreams into a reality. I'd like to believe that even now, at middle age with as much life behind me as before me that it's not too late to develop a dream. But I think I have to be intentional about developing other skills first, skills that will get me to a place where I truly believe that anything I set my mind to is possible. Without that belief any dream I may develop will merely be a dream deferred. Still, I think that at the end I would rather have a dream deferred than have lived a life with no dreams dreamt at all - that, I think, would be the greater sadness.

Procrastination

Procrastination has plagued me my whole life. I don't know if it's getting better or worse to be quite honest. Some days I feel hopeful - some days I can tell myself to just "do it" - whatever "it" is. Sometimes it's making a followup phone call to a prospective employer, sometimes it's cooking vegetables for dinner, sometimes it's getting on the treadmill.

But then there's these other things that I just can't seem to dive into. The ironic thing is that some of the projects I procrastinate about are actually things I enjoy doing. For instance, the heritage scrapbook I've been working on for my mom. I confiscated all of her family photos nearly four years ago - with the promise that I would NOT take three years to complete the albums like I'd taken three years to complete my brother's heritage album. Like I said, that was four years ago. So what keeps me from completing it - like so many other projects I've started?

I suspect one of the problems is that some of the projects I take on seem just too big. For one thing, with the heritage album, there really isn't any place to spread everything out without turning the house into a total disaster. But more than that is the sheer magnitude of the project. Organizing all the pictures, putting historical information together, deciding how to organize the album, and then, finally, deciding how to set up each page. Then if company comes over everything has to get packed up and put away and by the time I unpack it I have to start the organization process all over because so much time has passed I've forgotten what my organizational thought process was when I last worked on it.

The same problem exists for so many other projects. There's 1000s of recipes that need to be scanned and organized, 10,000 pieces of paper that need to have something done with them, and years and years of photos that need to be dealt with. And the longer I procrastinate the bigger the project grows - and the older I get.

Growing up my dad was always a big talker (we called it something else back then but I'll keep this clean). I think Dad had some big dreams and some things he really wanted to accomplish in life - but he just never did them. In my younger adult life I remember not wanting to be like that. But now I see I haven't escaped this family trait as much as I would have liked.

But maybe I am a little different than Dad if I think about it - because I have managed to do some of the things I used to talk about. For instance I did go to law school - even though I talked about it for years before finally doing so. I was 40 when I finished. How much further along would I be if I hadn't procrastinated all those years? I've been told I take a long time to make up my mind to do things. Am I procrastinating or just being cautious? It's not a big secret that I'm not a fan of change. But if I'm going to make big changes I want all my ducks in a row - I want to know there's security and safety at the other end of the change. So I procrastinate - or I take time to plan and think things through very carefully. It could all just be a matter of perspective. I don't know. I like thinking that when it comes to the big things in life I'm playing it safe rather than procrastinating. Kinda my way of putting a positive spin on things I guess.

I'm going to stop writing now since the only reason I started this was because I was procrastinating having to go to bed. I don't have a way to end this gracefully except to quote Scarlett O'Hara and say "Oh fiddle de dee," I can't be bothered with this now, I'll think about this tomorrow, because "After all, tomorrow is another day."

Optimism

So tonight Michael J. Fox had a TV special about optimism. He seems to have a lot of it despite having Parkinson's disease. He interviewed others who have optimism - people like Lance Armstrong and the Dali Lama. I watched it half-heartedly, not sure I was in a mood to be inspired tonight, but it did get me thinking about the topic -- again.

The burning question I have about this optimism thing is: how do you get it? If you weren't born with a type-A personality then optimism doesn't come naturally. If you weren't raised by parents who taught you anything and everything was possible in life if you worked hard enough for it and believed it would happen, or if they didn't teach you to think positively and believe that everything would turn out all right, then you grew up not learning how to be optimistic. So if you weren't born with it and weren't taught it during your formative years, then how do you get it?

Can you learn optimism late in life? If you're 45 years old and trying to find it, is it too late? Is it a skill? A talent? Or if it isn't already a part of who you are at this point in life, can you still become an optimist?

If it is possible to learn optimism then how does one go about it? Does one just wake up one morning and decide to be an optimist? Is just making a decision one day enough or is there some mantra that must be repeated? If so, for how long? Most habits take seven days to learn. Can one become an optimist in seven days just by telling yourself that you believe everything is going to work out OK? Is it simply an act of telling myself I will get the job I want, or the house I want, or live in the city I want? Is that enough?

And if I'm not an optimist does that mean I'm a pessimist? Does one have to be one or the other? Personally I think being a realist lies somewhere between the two. Being a realist means always having a Plan B in case Plan A doesn't work out. Does the need for a Plan B make me a pessimist? I hope not. I'd like more optimism in my life. I'd like to wake up tomorrow and believe that some of the impossible situations the people I love are facing are all going to work out - but I don't know if they will. I don't know if the situations in my own life, far less impossible, will work out. Am I being negative or realistic? If I wake up tomorrow and decide to become an optimist will it change the course of my life? Maybe. And maybe I was born to be a realist. A realist in the sense that I'll hope things will work out, I'll pray they will, but knowing I'm still going to need a Plan B. So maybe I'm an incurable realist - and maybe that's not so bad. Still, it couldn't hurt to experiment - to find a mantra - to wake up making a concerted effort to try optimism out for a few days. Maybe for a week I could wake up treating every morning as if it were New Year's Day - isn't that the feeling we have on New Year's Day? The feeling that we're getting a fresh start. That this year will be better. That this year everything will work out. A week of New Year's Days - it might be a fun experiment. But just in case it doesn't work out - I'll have to try a Plan B.

Scattered musings - the beginning

So I'm finally entering the world of blogs. Don't know how often I'll keep this up or what I'll say. I imagine I'll have fun musing on politics, scrapbooking, reading, job hunting, and training for my first 10k. There may be the occasional trip journal and observations about Elvis & Priscilla (my cats, not the famous couple). And maybe this will help serve as a chronological preservation of the last half of my life as I seem to have forgetten all too many events from the first half.

These things are hard to know how to start. Perhaps it is too unfocused. I see many narrow their blogs down to scrapbooking, or photography, or literature. I feel the need to want to talk about a little bit of everything and anything depending on the day and my mood.

Today is the first of what promises to be several continuous days of beautiful spring weather. We've waited sooooo very long for warmer days. The line "the winter of our discontent" goes through my head a lot. I love sweaters and bundling up, but even I'm ready for the warmer temperatures. Oh sure, when it's 100 degrees I'll probably find myself complaining, but for now I welcome some actual heat.

There are two beautiful kitties curled up at my side. They loved rolling in the sun this morning out on the deck. Elvis especially tends to gravitate towards any heat source he can find. The minute a heater is turned on in the house he will plant himself in front of it. Should I ever find my way back to Walla Walla he will be in heaven and will probably plant himself in the direct sun even on 100-degree days. Priscilla tends to be a bit more practical about these things.

It's Sabbath afternoon now and I love these kinds of Sabbaths when I can rest and rejuvenate and enjoy life for a few hours. It's time to catch up with friends on e-mail, to rest, and to spend with my cats. When it's sunny and the air smells fresh and clean outside it makes for a perfect day. Hopefully I will spend some time working on my heritage scrapbook for my mom and training for my 10k race. A race that I no longer know where or when is going to take place. I was planning to run in a race to benefit ovarian cancer research when my friend was diagnosed with the disease. But, her diagnosis has changed and she is now being treated for pancreatic cancer. Hopefully I'll soon find another race here in the Northwest that I can run in on her behalf. Meanwhile I'll keep slowly training in preparation.