goals – Emptying The Backpack

“Good? Bad? Who Knows?

There’s an often told Chinese story, “Good or Bad, Who Knows?” about a farmer, his son and his horses. The farmer used an old horse to help plough his fields, but one day, the horse escaped and galloped off. When the farmer’s neighbors offered their sympathies to the farmer over the bad news, he simply replied, “Good? or Bad? Who Knows?”

As it happens, a week later, the old horse returned and brought with it a herd of horses! This time the neighbors congratulated the farmer on this good fortune. Once again, though, he replied, “Good? or Bad? Who knows?”

As it happens, a few days later, when the farmer’s son was attempting to tame one of the wild horses, he fell off the horse’s back and broke his leg. Everyone thought this was very bad luck. The farmer’s reaction again was, “Good? or Bad? Who knows?”

Some weeks later, then, when the army marched into the village requiring every able-bodied youth they found to enlist, they found the farmer’s son with this broken leg and he was not drafted.

“Good? or Bad? Who Knows?”

Banner Week? Week From Hell? Who Knows?

It was a banner week. Or the week from hell. Depending on when you asked me. Start seminary. Check. Get divorced. Check. Buy a house solo. Check. In one week. Ugh. Scheduling all three in one week had not been my choice: the seminary starting date was set, but the other two were simply the luck of the draw. I agreed because I wanted to be done with those moments where legal experts, signatures and explanations of terms and fees were laden with shame. Time to move forward.

Thus, on a Monday morning in 2003, I began what would be a four-year run at Vanderbilt Divinity School, one of many steps to ordination in the United Methodist Church. I had already been serving as the pastor at a small United Methodist Church. For seven years, I’d been what the UMC calls a Local Pastor, meaning I was the only pastor for that congregation and licensed (given authority) to preach, teach, marry, bury and serve communion for that congregation. During that time, I attended classes offered by the church but all the while I was waiting until my sons got a bit older before entering seminary and moving closer to ordination. I served at Wartrace United Methodist Church in Greenbrier, Tennessee, while living in Portland. Portland, Tennessee, lies about 30 miles from the church to the west and nearly 45 miles north of Nashville where the school is located. For those four years, the daily trek between the three locations would be my own little Bermuda Triangle, and I would clock 40,000 miles each year, though God knows I hated driving.

Images from Wartrace UMC, my first appointment.

God also knew that, when I was called into ministry, one of my biggest concerns was that I swore “like a sailor.” How’s this gonna work I wondered? God held my tongue, though, and miraculously, only one time did an obscenity escape my mouth while I was in front of anyone in more than a decade. (I’m gonna blame campus ministry and later working with combat veterans for my language eventually going south again.)

Back to that week. I started seminary and the daily drive back and forth forth and through the back roads. I also would close on a house on Wednesday of that week, my first solo home purchase. Though my husband and I had bought two houses together, I still found the process baffling on my own. With the help of a patient agent, I got there though and much to the relief of my youngest son, we were staying in our little town which meant he could finish high school with friends. More importantly, at least to him, we weren’t going to live in a trailer, apparently a fate worse than any other his teen brain could conjure.

I closed on this house alone on Wednesday after classes because the day before, somewhere in the midst of visits to shut-ins or the hospital and more orientation for my new Vanderbilt classes, I went to court to finalize my divorce. The court appearance was still required then and ours was early in the morning on that Tuesday. I drove down the ridge and sat in the courtroom as the judge appeared and called couple after couple to stand before him to ask if either had any other concerns or if they could agree to the final settlement.

Couple after couple said yes. Some answered quietly and sadly. One or two barked their answers as they stared at their soon-to-be exes. We were last except “we” weren’t there. The judge moved the process along fairly quickly so it was only 9: 15 or 9:20 when our names were called, but my soon-to-be ex was nowhere to be found. I went before the judge, wondered a minute or two whether or not I could change the agreement since my husband wasn’t there yet, then answered. “Yes, I am in agreement to the terms we negotiated with the help of a mediator.”

And then I was divorced. Something I’d never believed I would be. My parents were not happy together, but they stayed married. His parents struggled too but they also were still married. I had never imagined myself divorced. Of course, I never imagined in my forties I’d be preaching or attending seminary and studying theology and Bible and the elements of worship or prison ministry, either, but there I was in classes 9 a.m. every day of the week suddenly. Even nine years earlier, it had not yet entered my mind that I’d be standing in a pulpit trying to help a congregation feel closer to God OR divorced OR buying a home as a single mom. I answered yes, the gavel hit the wooden block on the judge’s bench, and we were done.

Wartrace United Methodist Church was approaching 150 years old when I went there in 1996 and the photo at the left is in front of the original building, taken around the turn of the last century.

I next saw my now ex-husband again as I walked out of the courthouse around 9:30. He was just then walking in a bit late even though he lived in the same town as the county courthouse. I had driven some thirty minutes down the ridge to get there.

“Are you here alone?” The judge had asked me before declaring us divorced.

“Yes, sir.”I had said, “It’s appropriate,” I explained, “It didn’t feel like he showed up for the marriage so I guess there’s no reason to expect him to show up for the divorce.”

The judge frowned, but declared I was no longer married to the man I’d expected to live with forever. I used to tell friends I imagined fondly the two of us walking hand in hand when we were elderly. Perhaps he’d wear a beret; I’d once seen an elderly couple walking together and the man wore a beret. They seemed to walk as if that was simply the most natural thing in the world. The two. Together.

We’d walked through life together but, ironically, we had never actually taken many walks together until our twentieth year of marriage when we were in counseling and needed to talk out so much. The only reliable privacy we had was to go for walks in the neighborhood so we could talk, or argue, without our sons needing to hear it all. I lost about twenty pounds that last year from stress and walking. I’d love to say I never found it again but that’s a different post.

I stopped briefly on the steps leading into the courthouse as my now “ex” husband entered, looking at me quizzically.

“It’s done,” I said, and he frowned.

“Do you want some coffee?” he asked.

My turn to frown. “Pass, “I said. “Heading to class.”

“How’s that going?” he asked, He’d finished his own doctorate while we were married and was none too happy to be paying me alimony while I got my Masters of Divinity, but he also liked academia and worked in it, so he was happy to chat about that if I wanted. I didn’t.

Me wilting. John Wesley Bobblehead, as always, expectant. Sensible boots and backpacks would become my uniform.

My day would be filled, thankfully, with the business of becoming a Vanderbilt student, and the myriad tasks that entailed would keep my mind occupied that day, I hoped. As soon as I got in the car, though, I wondered if I’d missed a chance. I should have planned to meet up with a friend and get drunk or find a rebound relationship or get a tattoo, I thought. Was I missing out on the chance to be self-destructive and not be judged? Damn.

I drove silently to the campus for more paperwork. Classes began on Wednesday and honestly, at the time, it felt like they would be a welcome relief. Before that, there were school loan papers to sign, books to buy, an ID to be photographed for; time to don my student pastor identity. Orientation day at Vanderbilt Divinity School was, of course, as was the entire week, played out in the muggy heat of August in Tennessee. Sadly, that all required I move about the campus in the heat dressed as a professional without looking wilted. Complicating the day for me was the layout of the campus with the walks between buildings. Those walks meandered through the beautiful campus, but not in any grid-like pattern. While pastoral on cooler days, the campus on that steamy day seemed to confound me every time I had to leave the Divinity School quad to visit another building. The paths between buildings curved and intersected and wound around various statues and even the stone crypt of Bishop William McKendree, who, I would learn, was the first Methodist Bishop born in the USA and credited with establishing Methodism on what was the western frontier in the early nineteenth century. McKendree UM churches dot the countryside in Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri. He died near Nashville while visiting family and in 1876, his remains were interred in the grounds of Vanderbilt University, along with those of other Methodist bishops, in part because the school originally was created to help educate Methodist ministers.

View of the gravestone of Bishops McKendee, Soule and McTyeire, and Amelia McTyeire, Chancellor Garland, and Dean Thomas O. Summers in 1925. Vanderbilt University Special Collections and University Archives photo archives PA.CAF.GRAV.002 (https://www.vanderbilt.edu/trees/mctyeires-grave/)

Pastoral, bucolic, flowering garden beds sat next to benches that encouraged rest and beautiful old stone buildings invited meditation, but those paths seemed designed to confuse me even though I had grown up reading maps. My father, who helped survey the paths for hundreds of miles of Missouri state highways, taught us how to read maps early, and every year at Christmas, he presented us each with the state highway version of “bling,” a new, revised state map. I was always particularly gifted at directions and maps; I corrected pathways to destinations regularly. It was a gift that I could tell you how to get “there.” Not that day, though and not in that place. The Vanderbilt campus walkways, I soon discovered, curved and meandered enough that, on at least three trips on that sweaty afternoon, I wound up at the wrong building in spite of the decorative campus maps posted prominently. I guess the designers felt students needed to be lost more often. At one point, after finding my campus mailbox, I followed a group who all said they were looking to get campus ID’s next. One by one we got pictures taken and laminated. Mine was a witness to my defeated state on that afternoon. Perspiration matted my hair and my cheeks were red from the heat. The bad news was no one would recognize me in that picture. Perhaps that’d be good news one day. My query about retaking the photo on another day was met with a glare. The clerk was spending her afternoon in the air conditioning, I thought. What’s her issue?

I moved along, aware a library card still needed to be acquired and a locker in the Divinity School building as well. If I could find the library, the Divinity School would be close, I reasoned, but the heat was getting to me. At one point, I stopped into the food court to find some lunch but found the choices bewildering and the process moved more quickly than I was prepared to navigate. Students who’d only recently attended undergraduate classes jostled me and moved around me and the hot food worker glared until I took my tray and moved to the salad bar. A few minutes later, I stabbed at my salad and wiped the sweat off my forehead trying to unstick my bangs. As I dabbed at my sweaty forehead with a napkin, another worker, a woman, stopped at my table and put her hand down and said, “You look like you need to put your head on the shelf now, dear.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Put your head on a shelf. Take a break? Stop thinking for the day, you know.”

I frowned.

“Rest your mind, sweetie,” she said and she moved on. Words of wisdom from a stranger, but I didn’t have time to rest yet; that’d come years later.

On my way back to the library, my phone pinged to tell me I was late for an orientation I’d completely forgotten about, and I stopped and looked around me, lost again. I felt old. I felt like I wasn’t going to be able to keep up. How would I manage classes and single parenting and being the pastor and preaching and visiting and paying for all those books and driving? It was too much. What was I thinking? The next day I’d be signing papers to buy a house on a part-time salary and school loans. The students around me were twenty and thirty years younger and most were accustomed to the changes on college campuses that threw me, like salad bars in the cafeteria and computer charging stations everywhere. Those students didn’t seem lost.

I sat down on a bench, defeated. I would have just quit right then and there, if I could have found the damn Divinity School building. Obscenity doesn’t count if no one hears you, right? I would be walking into the orientation with the other 60-plus students who would be in my cohort for three to four years. Only I’d be late, sweaty, disheveled and feeling defeated. I sat on a stone bench and looked at the backpack I had been steadily filling with more and more, mostly because I couldn’t figure out how to make the locker work in order to leave some of the many required books in there. Tears filled my eyes as I began to pray.

“I can’t do this, Lord. It’s too hard. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was foolish to even consider I could manage. I still had a house to close on and God knows that process never made sense to me. How am I gonna manage that AND Divinity school? I can’t even find the damn school.” I was trying not to just start sobbing.

I took a breath and looked up at the elderly and majestic magnolia tree shading me, one that had been planted with a couple of hundred other southern magnolias in 1895 by Bishop McTyeire, one of the bishops buried near the Divinity School. I squinted to look through the dark leaves at the sun shimmering and the cross…. Wait. What?

There was a cross on top of that building.

Suddenly, I was laughing as I cried. Of course, there was a cross on the top of the Divinity School Building! My guess is that everyone else knew that, except those of us sitting in our self-pity piles. Geez. Yeah, I’ll cop to a tendency to self-pity, fueled by a glass half full mentality. Sometimes I’ve wondered how I ever got anything done, but, then again, I’ve always been teachable. I wasn’t alone like I felt I was either, but there’s seldom been room for or recognition of any company in my self-pity dinghy.

In that moment, sitting on that concrete bench, though, laughing at the shiny cross against the blue sky, I kicked myself. Had I taken a moment to look up and to seek God in the midst of my exhausting week, I would’ve seen it. Like on the steeple of a Christian church in most places, shiny and bright, that cross topped the Divinity School building, there to guide us all day back home, like the North Star. I would have seen it if I had just looked up, if I had started my days with an awareness of God’s presence.

The rest of the week would be mostly a blur, but by time I stepped back into the pulpit that next Sunday, I would have “celebrated” or “survived” three momentous life changes in the course of one week. I was living in a new home, divorced, and a seminary student, but I was still standing, gratefully. I shared with my congregation about looking up and seeing the cross and realizing it had been there all along waiting for me to notice. I also shared the image of putting my head on a shelf. Both would carry me through the next four years of school as well as the decades I’d spend in ministry, reminders of who brought me to that moment and who would guide me through all the struggles, if I would pay attention.

Commit = Finding My Nerve Again.

Good news this week from Papa Luie: You are never too old to learn something new! Papa Luie is the conga player who encouraged me to learn congas so I could make music with the Saturday morning music group playing at the St Augustine Farmers Market.

Actually, he said, “Learn conga or washboard. We need both.”

I chose conga, though I was more than a little intimidated. Now he’s teaching me and making a place for me to play music too. The lessons last week centered around some new patterns to practice, as well as three rules: 1) there are no rules for playing; 2) you’re never too old to learn; and 3) ya gotta commit. Papa Louie, whose age I will no longer try to guess, took up playing conga when he was 75. Yeah. Now he’s like my own personal Yoda and that is not because he is a head shorter than me. “There is no try. Only do. Commit… or go home to your recliner,” he said.

Commitment is the theme of the week: commit to not backing away, commit to not being timid but rather putting your back into the return of the ball in a volley, commit to the drive, commit to the first few notes of a verse. Commit or go home.

Photo Courtesy of Doug Mackenzie, Mackenzie Images, 2023

Commitment

Actually, commitment was this week’s lesson ad nauseum. From traffic, bluegrass music, pickleball, and life in general, I heard: Do not back away from what you want to or need to do.

The time is now to speed up a bit more when you enter traffic, to move forward, not backwards when you see the ball coming at you, and to sing out rather than wait for another chance.

Commit = speed up or move over?

As it was, the insistence of several noisy and angry drivers behind me was not so gentle after all, though. I confess they were justified in their angry gestures and (likely)rude comments; I was, in my mind, still driving in Monteagle, our bucolic and peaceful mountain (of course) town and summer home, where rush hour” means six cars, the speed limit on many roads is whatever you want it to be, and meandering drivers share the gravel roads with speeders. We don’t even have a stop light in Monteagle. That’s actually for safety’s sake. Besides the deer, the biggest danger for drivers in Monteagle is fog. We live at about 2000 feet elevation there, and the fog comes in and sets for a spell, has a cup of coffee and lingers far too long in the winter. Uninvited, the fog seems to camp out on our front lawn most of the winter, and, while it is pretty if you’re sitting by the fire looking out, driving in the fog is nerve-wracking for those of us who are already more timid drivers.

Ghost ship in the fog off California Coast
Photo Courtesy of Doug Mackenzie, Mackenzie Images.

The advice they give you for driving in the fog doesn’t help, either: “Roll down your window because you’ll hear the other cars before you see them.”

Driving in the fog 101: “Roll down your window because you’ll hear the other cars before you see them.”

Such dangerous driving conditions separate the timid drivers from the more aggressive ones; some drivers seem to see the fog as a reason to hit the accelerator. Wisdom dictates then that putting a stop light in downtown so some of us might be waiting to start or turn when another driver barrels through would be a foolish and short-lived experiment. Driving in Monteagle, though, usually allows me to meander, to notice who’s at the Piggly Wiggly when I drive by or decide if the line at the pharmacy is too long and I can wait to get those meds tomorrow. Driving in Florida, where we are “wintering,” however, does not tolerate, invite or accept any lack of commitment when I turn onto the road. Meander onto the Beach Highway at your own risk.

Wait, you might wonder: doesn’t being at the beach encourage you to meander?

That’s the rub, as they say. (Pass the Coppertone.) So many folks now want to live where they can meander that others move to the beach to serve them beers and crab legs, to sell them big beach houses or to build newer, even bigger ones. All those folks are in a hurry; they have zero patience for meandering. The many interactions between those two groups of beach dwellers as well as the struggle many visitors have with being able to slow down while on vacation combine to create what is the social ebb and flow of today’s beach life. Meander onto the Beach highway then at your own peril. You have to commit, to turn onto the road and be ready to accelerate immediately, not after you’ve checked the sidewalks for neighbors out walking dogs. They’re out there dodging traffic themselves as they make their way to the quiet of the actual beach, where we all have permission not to commit to much of anything except meandering.

Commit = Don’t Back Away

“Commit.” Be ready to accelerate. Be ready to hit that ball when it comes your way on the pickleball court or accept being in the losing team most of the time. “Don’t back away,” Steve, my partner in several games yesterday, encouraged me. “It [the ball] won’t hurt you,” he said. (Actually it does sting, but not as badly as always losing or worse being the one person no one wants to play with because you let the ball go by too often.) “Stand your ground,” he said, gently, but with some insistence. “You’re not here to watch, right?” Steve is older than I am, slender and wiry, clearly someone who has always been athletic. He sports a neatly-trimmed beard and is the kind of consistent player I’d like to be. “You didn’t start playing this game to watch the ball go by,” he says. Steve makes it look so easy to keep the ball in play without being aggressive. I find his coaching to be so much more compelling precisely because he isn’t one of the “Every shot is a kill shot” players. Those guys tell me not to back up and watch the ball go by as well but, in my thinking, they are suspect because their response to aggressive play is more aggressive play. “If the ball is hit hard, hit it back even harder.” Steve, though, is himself trying to navigate the game by being assertive rather than aggressive, and I really appreciate the distinction.

Assertive Does Not Equal Aggressive

Coaches and Instructors have shown me how to practice returning those more aggressive volleys, they’ve shown me how to use my torso to garner greater strength myself, they’ve even taught me, at my request, how to slow down someone else’s aggressive volley. That takes a lot of practice. And commitment. We haven’t talked, though, about the struggles of those of us who have been intimidated around more aggressive folks all our lives. Easily half the pickleball players out there struggle when facing more aggressive players, which can be especially disappointing in light of the fact that many players take up the sport as much for the social outlet as for the workout or the competition. We’ve wondered more than a few times if this was really our game since we don’t want to be aggressive ourselves and so many players seem to embrace the aggressive potential of the pickleball.

I’m grateful I realized, though, that the encouragement from Steve was not whether to be aggressive but whether or not to stand my ground as best I could, to take my place as one of the players on the court for that particular game, or simply to give it up. Instead, his encouragement was just that: encouraging. He was suggesting I needed to see how it feels to claim my space. That’s not the same as being aggressive. Aggressive players want their space and mine. I have the option of walking away and letting aggressive players have my space, or, I have the option of standing my ground and that, Steve was trying to tell me, is satisfying and even empowering and is why many of us play. I’m actually okay( with not winning all the time. Well, most of the time.) I’m good so long as matches are close games and include lots of good volleys and points. I don’t like getting “pickled” (losing 11-0) any more than the next player, but, mostly, the fun comes when the games are fairly evenly matched. A game where one server simply aces every serve bores most of us. Like most every other player, I’m here on the court to try to improve my skills, to compete, and to play. “You gotta commit,though,” Steve said. “You aren’t out here to watch the ball go by.”

Commit = Sing Out

That message seems to be everywhere right now. The next step in my joining in with the Saturday morning jam session at the St. Augustine Farmers Market (see previous post about setting goals) is being allowed to sing a song or two, and I’ve been practicing to meet that goal. I’ve been studying bluegrass singing techniques, practicing finding the tenor or baritone line above or below the melody and learning lyrics to old bluegrass songs.

“Commit,” Annie said. Annie took up banjo later in life also and she gets my hesitation but she knows hesitation is not a singer’s friend. “You gotta hit that note or it’Il sound like you’re being strangled,” she says.

At a session in the near future, I’m gonna have to ask to sing lead but first they need to hear me harmonize and so I’ve been joining on Mondays with a smaller group to harmonize and offer percussion.

Talking about singing won’t get me anywhere, though; they need to hear me sing. So, this week I jumped in with that smaller group and, while I’m not sure my tenor line wasn’t flat, I committed. I sang loudly enough to be heard or so I thought. Let’s just say the invitations to sing did not come flying in, though, and it was clear heading into the larger jam session this week that I would have to work that much harder at overcoming my timidity. My desire to participate needed to outweigh the tendency to shrink back into the wings, to stay on the fringe, not risk being bad at this.

My desire to participate needed to outweigh the tendency to shrink back into the wings, to stay on the fringe, not risk being bad at this.

I used to have nerve until…

I’m pretty sure I was considerably more self-assured, bolder even, when I was younger. I did not hesitate to enter the flow of traffic using only peripheral vision to scan lanes while I pedaled a ten-speed bicycle into city traffic. I didn’t think twice about riding at night through town or riding alone even in the dark. That, though, was before I realized I was mortal.

Perhaps realizing you will not actually live forever is something most folks don’t realize until they are “up in years” as my grandmother used to say, or declining in health or strength. Some of us can point to a moment when we lost at least some of our nerve, though, because we suddenly realized, “Hey, we could die.” Until that time, many of us had ridden or skated or raced through life, jumped trestles, run stop signs and woven through traffic like our favorite friend of Mario. Life – or at least the possibility of it ending – first slapped me upside the head when I was about eighteen. I was biking to a college class, weaving in and out of city traffic and, of course, wearing no helmet. No one wore them back then. I stopped at a light next to a semi. The light changed and I started pedaling just as the truck turned my way, dragging me and my ten-speed along the road. Another driver evidently alerted him to the bicycle and rider he had been trying to crush, and, thank God, he stopped. I remember thinking, as I was being dragged, that those big rigs looked even more menacing from underneath. When the dragging stopped, I laid my head on the pavement for a moment, grateful that my bike had protected me from the truck’s tires. I phoned home and got a ride to my classes.

…that moment when I realized I am mortal after all.

Maybe realizing I could die, that I was not going to live forever, ought to have compelled me to trade up from my ten-speed to something more substantial—a small tank, for instance—but mine and my parents’ response at the time was to get me a motorcycle. Maybe we figured I’d be able to outrun the big rigs. I got a couple of lessons from the guy at the dealership, then the salesman said I was good to go and so I went. I had to get to work and school, and, with two adults and three driving teens in the family, we simply could not afford a car just for me.

Like so much else, the motorcycle worked for a while, right up until I woke up in the back of an ambulance. Thing is, I wasn’t driving that motorcycle when we wrecked; my mother and I had decided together that she ought to learn to drive the motorcycle as well. Yes, my mother was driving and no, she had not taken the lessons. In retrospect, that was not exactly a shining moment for either mother or daughter. I have long regretted climbing on the back of that little Yamaha 250 to share with my mother my vast experience handling a motorcycle. In our defense, we lived on a small road where the only regular traffic consisted of neighbors pulling into their driveways. The road did, however, dump out onto a busier road so while Mom did well driving down our road away from calamity, the trip back required she remember how to apply the brakes and, well, that didn’t happen. It was a bonafide miracle that we ran into the side of that car; if we’d been going another mile per hour faster, he likely would have hit us full on and shoved us into ongoing traffic. As it was, I was thrown backwards onto our road. Thank God we were wearing helmets. Mine was cracked; that’ll tell you something about impact. I woke up in the ambulance the first time, looked at the EMT and asked him what day it was. He got flustered and couldn’t tell me and I remember thinking that, if the EMT didn’t know what day it was, what chance did I have to figure it out? A nurse told me when I awoke again later in the hospital that I had upset the EMT. Poor guy, he was not much older than I was, and it had been his first day. I would like to be able to tell you that he wore the uniform well or that he visited me in the ER and I found his blue eyes haunting. Instead, I wonder to this day if he had any personal thoughts about mortality when he saw a girl his age lying next to her mother on the pavement unconscious.

The physical effects for both my mother and me were miraculously minor. We each had a concussion and lots of scrapes but those injuries were far less memorable than the tension and strain of living in our home for the next few weeks. I did apologize several times over the next few weeks to my father without much effect. He couldn’t speak to me or my mother for several weeks even though neither of us were injured worse than we were. He didn’t even lecture me when he showed up in a used car for me to drive from then on.

I can show you the scars on my legs nearly five decades later, but the greater impact of those two incidents was that I was no longer confident about much of anything and my go-to response for anything coming at me fast was to curl up like an armadillo and hope whatever it was would bounce off me. This is the red carpet of trauma I have been trying to unfurl now for years and lately, life has been saying in so many ways, it’s time.

…lately, life has been saying in so many ways, it’s time for me to find my nerve again.

Everywhere I turn in the past few months, weeks, days, I see or hear encouragement to commit, to overcome the tendency to sit back and let the ball go by or miss my chance to make music. Yesterday, Annie, who gets my hesitation, took matters into her own hands and shoved me up front to where the microphone was so I could sing that tenor line on “Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms.” It’s apparently time. Being thrown onto the pavement was neither the beginning nor the end of trauma for me; but, after decades of watching too much of my life go by, it seems the universe is urging me to accelerate back into the midst of life’s flow, to not just sit and watch the ball go by, to risk being the one making music and to not simply stay on the sidelines any more.

“There is no try. Only do. Commit… or go home to your recliner.”
Papa Luie

Quitters, Goals and Macrame, Oh My!

On Saturday, December 31, 2022, I achieved one of my biggest goals. . .for 2022. Just in the nick of time, right? The goal was to sit in and play some kind of percussion with a group that plays every Saturday morning at the local Farmer’s Market. Anyone is invited to join in but it took several steps to get there, including: several scouting expeditions to see they really were inviting and open to new folks; lessons to learn the Congas because that’s what one of their drummers suggested; and, oh yeah, a new set of Congas provided expressly to encourage me to meet this goal.

**Playing at the Farmer’s Market December 31.** They were welcoming but they needed to see if I could really play that drum. Next goals: working my way into the group by slowly, steadily building their trust and showing I can keep a beat and add to the music.

Working to get comfortable bringing a drum to the jam and sitting in required several more steps, actually, including sitting in with another “drop-in” jamming group where I already knew some folks. Completing the final step of this goal took several months and there were even more steps beforehand, including taking drumming lessons in general for some time, years actually. Sitting in with this well-established group whose regular jam is a performance for an audience was the final step to complete that goal and I did that on December 31. Actually that it was completed just as the year ended didn’t occur to me until a couple of days into the new year, partly because I was feeling so good about meeting the goal. I just love checking items off my list of goals.

Yes, I keep a list of goals. Specific goals, in fact. Some of them have taken years and several steps to achieve; others are quicker or easier. Full disclosure: I am a list maker and a goal setter. I have been making lists – and being made fun of for it – for years. Don’t care. I started making lists before anyone ever suggested I might have some sort of attention disorder; I just realized early on that I was easily distracted and, if I wanted to remember to do something of a day, a week or a year, I’d better write it down. I’m gonna pat myself a bit on the back here and say the practice has served me well. I’ve been asked more than a few times how I have gotten so much done and making lists has been one of my most successful tools.

Of course, the idea of setting goals is appropriate for New Year’s in general. We’ve all likely seen or heard a lot about setting goals in the past few weeks; plenty of products are being advertised on all forms of media as being willing to help us “meet our goals.” Sadly, as new tools and programs are promsing to help us finally lose weight, start exercising, further our education or learn macrame, we generally listen while surrounded by the remnants of past goals abandoned, like the macrame plant hangers on that never-used exercise bike; or worse, we consume those cigarettes or sugar or french fries while we listen to the experts tell us how to stop it now.

Sometimes it’s good to be a quitter.

One of the toughest goals I ever managed – finally- to achieve was quitting smoking. I almost wrote, “one of the biggest goals I ever managed to meet.” Ever thought about why we say we “meet” goals? I have. Other synonyms are match, satisfy, answer, comply, discharge, execute, fit, fufill and so on. To meet, though, makes me think of encountering, of running into someone on a narrow pathway and then needing to decide whether or not to hug, to join hands, to negotiate getting around one another or to bail, to jump off the path entirely to avoid the other, that goal. What if we thought of our goals as other life companions we hope one day to fully embrace, to welcome, to love and hold? How do we get to the place where we do not think of these goals as adverseries, enemies, unreachable or unloveable?

I began smoking on the rifle range in Army basic training. That’s a story in itself. Maybe that really set up this goal of NOT smoking as an adversary? While I had never found cigarettes even tolerable before the day my company stepped onto that range with live ammunition in our rifles, I smoked half a pack of Marlboros before the day was out and then I was hooked. Smoking actually was more attractive in Basic Training for another reason. When the company took a break, the Drill Sergeants often barked: “Smok’em if you gottem! If ya don’t, you can police the area. ” (“Policing the area” meant picking up cigarette butts left by smokers who had not yet learned to field strip their cigs. Hmm…smoke…or pick up someone else’s cigarette butts. Hmm.) That was in ’78.

I smoked until 1985. July 1, 1985, to be exact. I had wanted to quit for a couple of years before that. I had even managed to ease back from a pack of regular Marlboros a day to the light version and then even managed to be able to ration them, to limit them. For a year, I smoked five or fewer cigarettes a day, but I could not let them go completely. My husband at the time and I both smoked and we had both entertained quitting but neither of us was willing to create a concrete goal at New Year’s or any other time of the year that we knew we wouldn’t achieve. Why set ourselves up for failure, we figured? Still, while I knew I wanted to be not smoking before having children, the desire to quit not as strong as the urge to have one more after supper or before bed or whenever I saw someone else light up.

Out of the mouths of babes….

We needed some help and prodding to accomplish this goal; we just didn’t know it. Perhaps the most powerful deterrent to lighting up came from a four-year-old we knew who, while we were lighting up one day at her house, asked us point-blank, “Why do you want to die?” I’m pretty sure that at the time I shrugged it off or walked outside but her question followed me everywhere. I couldn’t answer her. Neither my husband nor I could answer her because we realized this child might in fact love us more than we loved ourselves.

Neither my husband nor I could answer her because we realized she might in fact love us more than we loved ourselves.

We carried that question for weeks with no answer until we were surprised to be confronted by another couple, good friends. They wanted to know when we would stop. “You have told us before you’re gonna stop smoking. When? We’d like to know!” We were so surprised by that full-frontal assault that we threw out a date that seemed far far away. July 1, 1985, we said. Conversation over. They seemed happy. Everyone was happy.

Until July 1, 1985. Actually, June something or other. We were at their home and they reminded us of our promise months earlier. Dammit. Now we had to choose. Lose the nasty habit or lose the friends. How sad is it that too often we hold onto the nasty habit? We didn’t, though. We looked at each other and decided to go for it. It still wasn’t easy. July 1 was going to be a Monday. On Sunday around noon, we ran out of cigarettes. I argued that we had one more day. I knew I’d only have one or two more smokes before the deadline hit and that I’d have no trouble trashing the others but my husband argued we’d be too tempted to keep smoking til that pack, then the next and the next were gone. We needed to simply stop, he insisted. Really ticked me off at the time. But we quit. I took up knitting in hopes that it would help to keep my hands busy when I was sitting and agitated or bored; today it irks me to remember that I smoked sometimes out of boredom!

Quitters

We stayed quitters even after moving away to Japan where, it seemed, everyone smoked, and there weren’t even any non-smoking areas in restaurants or on trains. That was a test of our resolve. By that time, though, we had another incentive: while it had been tough to stop, it had with time become tougher to decide to start. We were not ready to tick the box that said “Smoker” again. Turns out, that’s a great way to succeed in goals – make it so you have to choose openly, publicly, to go against your goal. Or disincentivize it. Make a bet with someone that will cost real money; one suggestion I heard was make it so that you have to give money to a cause you hate if you slip and start smoking again.

I have found that not having some goals, not knowing where I’d like to be next year, next decade even, means it’ll be a surprise and often a disappointment where I am when those days arrive. There WILL be regrets. Here’s to no regrets!!

Strangely, much of what has served me well, especially as I have sought direction in life, I learned in Al-Anon, the family counterpart to Alcoholics Anonymous. I joined when I was nineteen at the suggestion of a friend. I was feeling quite lost at the time, adrift, at the mercy of the storms of those around me who were miserable and who definitely wanted some company in that. I couldn’t tell you at the time what rules or concepts or guidelines I lived by other than trying to follow the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule.

No Regrets.

Other than that, all I could tell you was that I wanted to reach the end of my life with no regrets. It was clear at the time though that I needed more because I was so easily distracted from my personal goals and that led to regrets. I needed to know where I wanted to go, what I wanted to do with my life in general and specifically each day. I needed some worthwhile, meaningful goals and I needed to have some general life guidelines that would help me achieve those goals.

Al-Anon’s teachings suggested several really important concepts for me, like the power of having support while you learn new behaviors, (my husband I quit smoking together but goals are far more attainable when you have someone who is willing to be your support person or persons) and the importance of removing the temptations (we agreed to no cigarettes in the house and managed for a long while not to frequent places where people smoked). Perhaps the toughest concept to ingest but the most important one for me sends us back to the idea of “meeting” our goals.

What if we thought of our goals as life companions we hope one day to fully embrace, to welcome, to love and hold? How might we then see them and figure out how to embrace them? Maybe we would no longer see goals like eating healthy or quitting smoking as something keeping us from fun but rather as ways of living that help us carve out time or keep us healthy enough to do what truly brings us joy. I love walking on the beach and dancing and playing pickleball and all of those would be infinitely more difficult (or I might not even have attempted them) had I kept smoking.

Whatever goals you set or changes you make, make them for the right reasons. Make them because you love yourself as much as you love others and others as much as you love yourself. Recognize the two go hand in hand and you can’t have one without the other; if you think you can, you’ve been deceived. Make your goals because you are recognizing and honoring the fact that others love you. Make them with the understanding that your goals and life changes are companions who hope to help you live life joyfully and reach the next year and the next with fewer and fewer regrets. You can do it!