Loving well

So there I was, trying to tiptoe unobtrusively among the mathematically-aligned rows of desks (and failing dismally if the fretful swishing of pony-tails was anything to go by), favouring the foot with the squeaking shoe, and counting the minutes until I would be released from my torment….  Invigilation. It tends to make me nervous which, in turn, makes me melodramatic. It’s something about being penned up in a small room dominated by the sounds of adenoidal sniffing, the scuffle of scribbling, and the gnawing of pens. And the smell of fear. Did I mention the boredom factor?

Anyway, there I was, eyes dutifully sweeping the room like searchlights, when my brain suddenly registered that there was a recurring theme in the classroom décor upon which I had been gazing blankly for the past half hour. I stopped pacing mid-stride, setting off a silent Mexican wave of anxiety along the row of candidates in front of me. But I was no longer interested in their troubles. I had just discovered that there was a whole lot of love in the room.

I can confidently assert that I have never before seen so many declarations, exhortations, and celebrations of love in one place at one time. From the artfully-aged wooden carvings to the pastel posters and the hordes of hearts in all shapes and sizes, this place was the Full Monty in the Cabaret of Lurve.  And it was nice. It really was. My borderline hyperventilation slowed and I felt a surge of the warm fuzzies that took me right to the brink of the Zen zone. Love can do that. (Of course it can also push you right over the edge into the Hot Place but I guess every coin has a flip side.)

So I fell to pondering this crazy little thing called love and it stayed with me long after I had left the building. And this is what I thought…

The word ‘love’ can be both a noun and a verb. The love I feel is an abstract noun. It’s all about me. It feels good (which is not bad in itself) but it’s really not much use to anybody but me - unless I choose to share it with someone else. Then it becomes a verb. The danger lies in focussing too much on getting love and not enough on giving it. That’s the Sparks Notes version but if you will humour me, I will elaborate a little.

My daughter-in-law’s family use an expression that pretty much says it all and then some: they speak of loving someone well. That not only covers the noun vs verb balance but it further refines the concept by qualifying the verb with that deceptively simple little word ‘well’.

When we do something ‘well’, it implies that we’re trying to do it right. Moreover, ‘wellness’ carries connotations of wholeness and health, which would seem to rule out selfishness. And lastly, a well is by definition a self-replenishing source of life-giving sustenance rather than a stagnant pond. The analogy is fairly obvious.

History and literature (to say nothing of the social media!) offer an abundance of cautionary tales depicting the disastrous results of loving selfishly with no regard to the wellness of others – including the object of that love – whether it be of the agape, éros, philía or storgē variety.

While we all need love (although love is not ALL we need!), loving well doesn’t come naturally to us. It is an act of the will, requiring self-sacrifice. Ouch.

John 15:13 observes that ‘Greater love has no-one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.’ Jesus went one further and laid down his life for us before we were his friends.

I guess that’s what one would really call loving well.

Living loud

The American writer and philosopher, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), wrote: 'The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.' I can never read that sentence without suppressing a slight shiver; it is such a bleak statement expressing a depressingly dismal view of this thing we call life. And yet how many of us, in truth, believe that our lives will have lasting significance? How many of us even care? Most of us will be satisfied with getting through our time on earth as comfortably as we can, hurting as few people as possible along the way, and probably leaving a couple of kids and their progeny behind to carry on the genetic line.  Don't get me wrong: I am not knocking it and that is certainly the shape of my life thus far. A life for which I am profoundly grateful. But every time I read those words 'quiet desperation', I am suddenly desperate for more.  More meaning. More significance. More purpose. 

Realistically, we can't all make life-changing discoveries that place mankind on a new (and hopefully improved) trajectory, so where does that leave Adam Average and Olga Ordinary? Doomed to lead lacklustre lives of quiet desperation? I think not.

We can all live loud - even in our small corners.  

'Live loud' is just the sort of catchy cliché that I love to appropriate - it is even alliterative, which would be my literary Achilles heel were I so deluded as to cherish such aspirations. But what does living loud actually mean? Well, for a start, I don't think it has anything to do with actual decibel levels; it certainly doesn't mean merely adding to society's ceaseless cacophony! I tend to be talkative so 'Empty barrels make the most noise' is an aphorism that I heard many times when I was growing up. (Most people are too polite to put it quite so bluntly now that I am theoretically grown-up but I know what they are thinking! Learning to watch my words, both in quantity and quality, is my lifelong challenge.) Given my natural  verbosity, I harbour a sneaking skepticism about that other well-known adage, much beloved by my husband,'Actions speak louder than words',  but in this context I fully subscribe to it: you can live loud without saying a word. 
Living loud is knowing who you are and what you believe - and then living it out unashamedly, day in and day out, in both big and small ways. It's a walk first and a talk if you have to. Living loud is living with purpose because it is intentional and, more often than not, entails a sacrifice as it demands that we abandon the suffocating safety of life lived under the radar and come out of our comfortable closets to stand or fall by what we value. You can't live loud unnoticed. Not everyone will agree with you; not everyone will like you. But they are more likely to accord you the respect of thinking about what your life is saying.  
Of course, living loud is no guarantee of goodness: Hitler lived just about as loud as one can, on every level, but people were in no doubt about what he stood for! But there is a kind of honesty in living loud, even for those with dubious intentions. What living loud does guarantee, at worst, is an escape from a life of quiet desperation and, at best, the chance to leave your footprint on someone else's life. 
I think I could live with that.

I 'selfie' therefore I am...

A couple of Sundays ago, the self-proclaimed long-suffering spouse and I took our three-year-old grandson to the beach. The general idea was to encourage the little lad (who, while lively, is not naturally adventurous) to get up-close and personal with the gritty stuff and then introduce him to the delirious delights of frolicking in the waves. Nana even donned a dubious pair of technicoloured boardshorts for the occasion and Buppy sported a super-sized sunhat - perhaps by way of disguise, given my apparel, although I was not silly enough to go there.
The car-trip to the beach was uneventful; Sammy is a good traveller who derives immense satisfaction from pointing out all the wheeled objects en route, so there was plenty to please him along the way. And last but not least, we had cleverly orchestrated an early departure as Sammy is not a lover of crowds, his preference tending towards all things mechanical. 
So there we were: sunhats, sunglasses and sunscreen - check. Excavation equipment - check. Beach-towels and bathers - check. Juice and jellybeans - check. In short, we felt we'd covered all our bases for a successful expedition and allowed ourselves a small, smug smirk apiece as we prepared to emerge from the seclusion of our chariot. 
It was about then that we noticed the buses. Battalions of buses. If one bus can carry 60 passengers, then multiply that by.... Let's just say that there were a lot more bodies on that beach than we had bargained for. Now I consider myself a reasonably sociable being and indeed had to endure recurring complaints throughout my school career about what my teachers dubbed 'a tendency to talkativeness' but which I regarded as practising my talent for verbal communication. One should not wilfully neglect one's talents, particularly when one has very few. But I will freely confess that I have never understood what compels so many supposedly-sane people to pay the equivalent of the GDP of an emerging economy for the privilege of lining up, side-by-side like sardines squashed in a tiny tin, alongside a ridiculously-large percentage of the world's population on any beach, especially one on the French Riviera among the fab and famous. However, I am also aware that I am considered peculiar by numerous folk, including several of my nearest and dearest, so I am willing to forgo the point. In any event, this outing was designed to be an adventure so we bravely girded up our collective loins and ventured forth, Sammy wisely wearing his sunglasses as a protective barrier between him and the crowds. We found a small patch of unclaimed sand and boldly annexed it; having a toddler on our team proved to be an unexpected asset when it came to repelling would-be encroachers - particularly when he embarked on an energetic excavation programme. And so we sat, a slightly-more-than-middle-aged couple and a toddler, marooned in the midst of a seething mass of teenagers, each equipped with what appeared to be the latest thing in digital devices. Fortunately, Sammy seemed set to dig Down Under, so I was free to give my fascination full reign and stare in a manner that would have earned me a robust rebuke from my mother. 
I do not live under a toadstool. Indeed, I am semi-gainfully employed at an all-girls' high school and so am fully cognizant of the modern obsession with social media in general and the phenomenon known as the 'selfie' in particular. I have even been known to take (and inflict on my cyber-friends) a 'selfie' - regrettably not with President Obama or even Prince Wills but with the express purpose of publicly humiliating myself for a good cause. It seemed like a good thing to do at the time. So I do, to some extent, 'get' the whole cyber-graffiti thing - a kind of pictorial 'Kilroy was here'. And anyway, humanity has been busily documenting itself and its antics for millennia, from the earliest stick-art of the cave-dwellers to the elaborate portraits of the Renaissance and on into the digital age.  Of course, there is nothing wrong with recording memories, be they verbal or visual, but what struck me about the techno-throngs at the beach that morning was that they were more interested in their 'selfies' than in their surroundings. There they were, on a beautiful stretch of beach, with the sunlight sparkling on the waves and a cloudless sky of breathless blue above their heads and all they saw (through the lens of their smartphone cameras) were close-ups of their own and their friends' faces, contorted into a variety of grins and grimaces. If it wasn't for the location app on their devices, they could just as well have been at home or at the local shopping centre. They were not immortalizing memories of an expedition or an experience but simply recording themselves... which I confess I found vaguely disturbing. 
Rene Descartes famously argued: 'I think, therefore I am'. Whatever one's personal view of that as a philosophical proposition, we should surely guard against adopting as our existential truth: 'I 'selfie', therefore I am'. 

So I was watching 'Jungle Junction' on Disney TV this morning (don't ask....sometimes it's Mickey Mouse Clubhouse - the thrill of anticipation is what gets me out of bed each day!) and the zebra-with-the-enormous-spectacles found an amazing pink and purple flower with zooty orange stripes (an object of rare beauty in Jungle Junction Land, let me tell you!) which, to her horror, kept disappearing just when she'd fetched the locals to admire her discovery. Of course, I figured out it was a butterfly and not a flower LONG before the cute pink-pig-on-wheels and his faithful fellow flower hunter, the mauve elephant-also-on-wheels, did but as I am roughly a half-century older than the target audience I guess I shouldn't hold my breath for the accolades. The thing is - and there IS a point to these humiliating revelations about my prime-time viewing - the butterfly could not be contained but needed the freedom to fly from flower to flower, doing whatever butterflies do to keep the planet's plant ecology in business. To imprison it would, at best, prevent it from fulfilling its unique purpose and, at worst, destroy it. I know this because when I was about 9 years old I kept a praying mantis (Yes, I did. His name was 'Manty' and I loved that six-legged sucker) in a carefully perforated shoe-box, which I filled with all his favourite leaves. Despite all the love I lavished on him, both leaves and Manty shrivelled up and died within a shockingly short space of time, leaving me desolate and with a nagging suspicion that I might just have screwed up somewhere.

When I was a teenager (long before FB, Twitter and Instagram took the mystery out of adolescent romance) there was a popular mantra that went something along the lines of 'If you love him, set him free - if he returns, he's yours. If he doesn't, he never was'. Lame as the legendary crippled snake and about as trite as 'Love means never having to say you're sorry' (Erich Segal, WHAT were you thinking??) but it softened the blow of rejection for a whole generation of teenage girls when we were dumped (again) by the fickle flirts of the sterner sex. But, as with most cliches, there is an element of truth floundering in all that saccharine syrup: it is never a good idea to keep anyone or thing imprisoned (other than serial human rights abusers and the like, of course.) Even when the prison bars are made of love.

Which brings me to the perennial problem of parenting: how do you let someone whom you love more than life itself go - to the end of the road on a rickety tricycle... to the school disco with a toad that you KNOW is going to break his or her heart... to boarding school....to university in another city... to work in a foreign land... to live, in love, with another person who is now more essential to his or her happiness than you are...to set him or her free to soar (or crash) and wave bravely from the sidelines? 

The answer lies in the flip-side of the same emotion that makes us yearn to keep them safe, if stifled, in a soft cocoon: love, only this time the selfless variety. A successful parent is no longer needed but still wanted - and the only way to achieve that is to first let them fly free. 

Sjoe! So much deep-speak from one episode of Jungle Junction. Just think what profound philosophical truths might be gleaned from the antics of a certain Purple Dinosaur!

Watch this space...

Look for your dreams in day-to-day life

There was a time when my mother nurtured a (supposedly secret) dream of reclining gracefully on a chaise lounge, surrounded by a bevy of adoring grandchildren who would address her (with straight faces!) as 'Mama Inez'. Fast forward a decade or two and you will find my mum sitting on the floor between two grubby, but undoubtedly adoring, great-grandchildren, engrossed in the gripping escapades of Thomas and Friends or (wo)manfully struggling to follow their first steps into cyberspace as they prod - rather more enthusiastically than skilfully! - the iPad touchscreen, all the while piping 'Look GanGan!' at ear-piercing pitch. Does she hanker after her Doyenne of the Deep South dream? I have no idea - after all, I am not supposed to know about it! But I do know this: she is never happier than when she is getting down and dirty with the rugrats of both this generation and the last, all of whom have called her GanGan from the get-go.

The thing is, we all have a One Day List of things to do, places to go, and people to meet and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that! Living without dreams is like driving at night without headlights. It's just that life has a predictable way of being totally unpredictable and there is a real danger of focusing all our energy on yearning after the as-yet unfulfilled List while we miss out on the joy that is in our midst. Allow me to give you a rather humdrum example of this principle in action...

Yesterday it fell to me to take my 18-month-old granddaughter to visit the family doctor. My daughter was unable to get away from work and it was my early afternoon so off I set, happily planning a 'girls' afternoon' at the Mall after we'd paid calls with the medico, where we would fill the inevitable prescription and then reward ourselves with a spot of retail therapy and perhaps an age-appropriate beverage - it's never too soon to start instilling bad habits. Of course, real life got in the way of my plans and somewhere between Musgrave and Adelaide Tambo Roads my humble chariot was transformed into the Vomit Comet and I came close to setting a new record for the trip as the essence of Eau de Vom filled the air...did I mention that the mercury hovered at the 36 degree mark all day yesterday? It was a pale and tight-lipped Nana who pulled into the parking-lot at the doctor's rooms, flung open her door and greedily sucked in a lungful of fresh air. Having (narrowly) avoided adding to the digestive disaster, I turned my attention to my darling granddaughter who sat patiently in a bucket seat that was somewhat fuller than it had been when we started out. A packet of wet wipes later, she was visibly cleaner and marginally more fragrant and I was the reverse. At that point I wistfully surrendered any hope of accomplishing the projected plan for the rest of the afternoon. There were larger issues at stake - like whether we would be permitted to enter the doctor's rooms, redolent as we were of semi-digested dairy products. Then I felt a small hand slip into mine and a pair of large blue eyes looked trustingly up at me over a button nose that was steadily producing a glistening trail that any snail would be proud to own. And I knew without a shadow of a doubt that there was nowhere in the whole wide world that I would rather be. So we put up our chins and swept into that waiting room, loftily ignoring the wide berth we were given by the other occupants. Who says girls' afternoons have to happen at the Mall anyway?

I still believe in dreams - the bigger the better! It's just that sometimes we're already living them without realising it.