Incremental

The mantel corner this year

One of the boring (and probably annoying) things about me is that I've always had a lot of self-discipline. The trait got dinned into me early; it's a characteristic of my father, who was always trying to perfect a new table tennis shot, or build something in his self-built house that was absolutely level and true. But my mother, too, made it clear that half an hour of daily piano practice wasn't optional, nor was my homework, nor was picking up my room -- and she'd sit next to the piano with her knitting, talk over the schoolwork, or even sometimes lend a hand in my messy room, to encourage me. There was an expectation that once I'd committed to something, I would finish it, and give it my best effort. Quitting wasn't an option, so I had to learn perseverance and discipline.

In my public high school, nobody taught me how to study the way kids in prep schools learned it. I can remember feeling completely overwhelmed by the workload in university, especially at the ends of terms in my first two years (not for nothing do we still have those exam dreams!) and listening on the phone to my mother's patient advice: divide up the tasks into a schedule, concentrate on one at a time, and just bring them all along, bit by bit. Somehow the research got done, the books read, the papers got written, and the studying accomplished, and even if they didn't all result in excellent grades, I could see that I was making progress, and by my junior year, things fell into place.

The same was true in our design/communications business, where we were often responsible for large projects with significant budgets, lots of moving parts, and tight deadlines. Each had to be broken down into manageable sections and tasks, assigned and overseen, and put on a carefully-organized schedule so that the deadlines could be met. The responsibility for organizing these projects often fell to me.

Now, with those professional years behind me, it's still the way I tend to organize my time, but I also get distracted because although I finally have more time to do my own creative work, there are also more people around me with needs and desires which are important to me. So I find it's even more crucial, if I want to get anything done besides the daily tasks of ordinary life, to be intentional about certain areas: reading, music, language-learning, writing, making things, exercise. I don't make task lists, I don't have a daily schedule, and I don't make resolutions. I just have certain things I try to do every day (exercise, language practice, some reading, ongoing correspondence and/or journaling); some I do more or less weekly (write a blog post, for instance) and others that I just try to move forward incrementally, not necessarily all at the same time (drawing, knitting or sewing, piano/music, larger writing and publishing projects). Hopefully, there is also some unstructured time to dream, relax, think and meditate, and to be social.

The same, last year.

I've been thinking about all of this because of two things.

One: a friend asked me what I'm addicted to, and after thinking a bit, I answered "accomplishment." By that I didn't mean the sort of accomplishment that results in praise, but a sense of having done something with my time, having learned, having grown a little, and having contributed to others. If I don't feel that way, I can get discouraged, angry, even depressed.

Two: the pandemic has insisted that I see myself as the age that I actually am, and that age is no longer young. Mortality has been in my face, and in the face of everyone over 60, whether we like it or not. Regardless of how young and energetic I feel or appear, I've been forced to face the fact that life is finite, and my own time is running shorter.

So how does this penchant for accomplishment fit into that? What if a time comes when I can't work hard, maybe can't see or hear very well, maybe am diminished by illness or simply by old age, or, conversely, am in the role of care-giver -- and the ways I've organized my life and, yes, my mental well-being, don't work anymore? Will I be able to adapt?

Well, it's more likely if you think about it ahead of time. One example from the pandemic has been instructive: it used to be extremely hard for me to imagine not singing in a choir, as this is something I've done every Thursday night and every Sunday for most of my life. But I haven't been able to do it for almost two years, except for our "virtual choir" pieces during year one, and it now seems possible to me that I will never go back to it, certainly not at the intensity with which it once occupied a portion of my life. I had a hard time getting there, but now this prospect is surprisingly OK with me.

While there are dramatic events that sometimes change our lives practically overnight, most change is like this: incremental. It's another timeline broken down into small parts. There's a series of small relinquishments or substitutions; tasks that once might not have seemed important now are much more so, and vice versa; priorities shift. But for now, my intention is to keep at those central, core tasks that form my identity and have shaped my days for as long as it makes sense to do so, while keeping an openness and readiness in the back of my mind for whatever the future holds.

If you have also had thoughts on any of this, I would love to hear them.

Comments

[Duchesse]

I asked my Dad, who was also a highly-disciplined and achievement-oriented man how he adapted to the diminishment of age; he said, "Accept and adapt", a distilled version of your choir experience. But when I was growing up, both parents would never say something was "good enough" . Though demanding, they equipped me to make my way. I wonder if their approach was generational: one's children used every drop of their potential, there was little patience for "finding yourself".

At 73, even if I have the same desire to achieve, my body and now sometimes my brain no longer have the flexibility and capacity they once did. I've adapted by scaling back in terms of (now self-imposed) acceptable level of performance (one example is my yoga practice) but still requiring myself to summon attention and perseverance.

[am]

http://www.whatcomweaversguild.org/linda-rees.html

https://betweenandetc.com/product/nezhnie-weaver-innovative-artist-by-linda-rees/

After reading your post, I thought of a friend I knew for 47 years. She died a year ago in a memory care residence, under the care of our local hospice. She had a full rich life as a tapestry weaver, dancer, singer, married woman, mother, friend, divorced woman, lifelong volunteer in various capacities and writer. She was highly disciplined even after she had a stroke in 2014 at age 74, at which time she moved to Norway to live with her daughter, son-in-law and grandson. She accepted the diminishment of her ability to write and accepted that she was never going to learn Norwegian and made a decision to return to the U.S. to live near old friends, of whom I am one.

In her last years, as her team of friends, we witnessed both her frustration with her increasingly limited ability to weave and then her calm decision to sell her 50-year-old floor loom to a younger weaver. We witnessed her desire to remain as active as possible while her ability to function diminished incrementally.

She went from living independently in her own apartment to an assisted living situation and then to a memory care residence when she could no longer perform activities of daily living, although she was still able to speak and enjoy the company of friends and family and to make new friends with her fellow residents who also had memory loss issues. While living in the memory care residence, she welcomed her friends who came to visit, joined a singing group, took dance lessons, planned a final exhibit of her tapestries, went on outings, enjoyed her coffee, walked outside in the garden with her walker, listened to music, and made efforts to help those whose function had diminished more than hers.

Until the light went out of her eyes a few months before she died and she could no longer speak or laugh, she had a keen sense of humor, laughing easily.

All this to say that I witnessed the grace with which Linda let go and let go and finally let go.

Having turned 72 in 2021, I see myself defining my own "core central tasks" as an artist and writer, as a woman who practices yoga, as a reader, as a woman who plays the autoharp, as a friend, as a woman on a spiritual journey. I'm grateful to Linda for showing me how she remained true to her own core central tasks.

[Greg]

"True life begins where the tiny bit begins -- where what seems to us minute and infinitely small alterations take place. True life is not lived where great external changes take place -- where people move about, clash, fight, and slay one another -- it is lived only where these tiny, tiny, infinitesimally small changes occur."

Leo Tolstoy, from his 1890 essay, "Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?"