Figuring out Our Purpose in Life

Recently I was googling the phrase ‘wise words about life’ looking for a topic to write about that didn’t involve telling tales about my fellow residents here at the continuum care complex. I’ve never been a gossip in my off-line life and I’m not sure I like this new me that has emerged since moving here. I could tell myself I’m just doing my weak imitation of John Steinbeck or Mark Twain or other writers who are known for drawing memorable characters with their words. The difference is---aside from their superior talent---that I’m not just passing through this place. If someone should find my descriptions of them they could get their feelings hurt and I could get ostracized out of the cool kid’s club, so to speak. 

I thought I’d hit on a topic I could get into when I found the following quote supposedly said by Mark Twain: “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” Since it’s long been my worry that I’d die without figuring out why I was born or what I’ve contributed to the advancement of civilized society that quote spoke to me. But it only took one more google search to find out the phrase wasn’t Twain’s at all. It’s what a website called The Center for Mark Twain Studies calls an Apocryphal Twain quote. I guess there are a lot of them. If you want to know if Twain said this or that, just ask at this website and they’ll do a forensic search and figure it out. In this case, the phrase, “The two most important days in your life...” was first mis-attributed in 2011 when a stand-up comedian and radio personality, Steve Harvey, sent it out in a tweet.

Apparently a lot life coaches and people in cottage industries who make those cute little signs, memes, coffee cups, refrigerator magnets, and message pillows and other for-profit enterprises love to slap Twain quotes on their goods and they do so without first making sure they are attributing them to the right author. The Center for Mark Twain Studies says as a general rule: “If the aphorism in question indicates a sentimental, nostalgic, or otherwise optimistic attitude towards humanity, it probably didn’t come from Twain. As Louis Budd put is, Twain indulged a ‘lifelong suspicion that the mass of mankind is venal, doltish, feckless, and tyrannical, that the damn fools make up a majority anywhere.'”

So I found the meme with the mis-attributed quote on it first---and trust me they are all over the internet---and I got excited about using it for the kind of theme post I occasionally wrote back in my caregiver days that I called (tongue-in-cheek) my Sunday Sermon Series. But the internet being what the internet is I just had to cross-check the source of the quote which blew the topic off my writing table. Boo-hoo! Or did it? No matter who said that about the two most important days of our lives the message is still just as valid. Is it not? I had that revelation while watching a montage of Olympic athletics at the winter games. At some point in their early lives they must have had that Ah, Ha Moment that I’ve never experienced in my almost eighty years---that moment that told them, “This is my passion and gift to the world.” (I’ll bet I just broke The Word Olympic record for using nine ‘thats’ in this short paragraph. Using too many of that word has always been a writing tic I can’t seem to break. If I wasn’t in a lazy mood I’d go back and edit a few of them out.)

What does it feel like to have that Ah, Ha Moment? And maybe my search for the answer is why I’ve always loved movies and books about sports figures at the same time, hating to watch or follow sports. That dichotomy never made sense to me. What comes first? Being good at something and then dedicating your life to it or dedicating your life to something and then becoming good at it? In some cases like Tiger Woods, for example, parents push and bully a kid at a very early age in a direction they may or may not have gone if the choice had been entirely their own. 

When my dad was under Hospice care in the last seven months of his life I read every Tiger Woods article and book I could get my hands on to my dad. That was before his fall from grace and my dad was so proud of that guy for essentially being the Jackie Robinson of the golf world. Since my dad passed I kept on reading books by and about Tiger. While fame gave him a place in sports history it also robbed him on the other end of the human existence. From all indications he’s finally made peace with himself and is living his best life and it all gets down to the second half of Twain’s mis-quote of knowing why we’re all here. The important take-away in Tiger's story? We have to find that purpose on our own, no matter how much we’ve been pushed or pulled in one direction or another we have to know the goals we set are our own. And once we know that, we'll find our purpose whether we ultimately make it to the top of the mountain or we just enjoy the journey through the foothills of life. ©

Can’t Stop Thinking About a Dream

I’m at an age when I can’t remember whether or not people have died. So when I see a cousin or friend I haven’t seen in a long time I’m afraid to ask questions like, “How’s your dad doing?” or “Where’s your brother living these days?” even though I’m genuinely interested in knowing the answers. I had a dream a few nights ago that had me trying to remember if a person I’d known since birth was alive or dead. In recent years I’ve made good use of googling a person’s name plus the word “obituary” to get answers to the ‘dead or alive’ questions. As my mom used to say, “There’s more than one way to skin a kitty.” 

That phrase, by the way, first appeared in print in the mid eighteen hundreds when a man was brought before the courts of England in an animal crudity case. He was literally skinning cats alive. Such a gruesome image but since my mom didn’t sit around reading old court records from countries she’d where she’d never been, I have to believe she read it in a Mark Twain book. He used a variation of the phrase as a metaphor in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in 1889. “…She was wise, subtle, and knew more than one way to skin a cat, that is, more than one way to get what she wanted.” Mom had a related skin-the-kitty phrase she used often when I was growing up and even after her grandchildren came along. “Let’s skin the kitty,” she’d say as she helped us out of our pajama tops and sweatshirts. Heck, even I say it to Levi My Mighty Schnauzer when I peel his winter sweater off his body. And it just dawned on me why he takes off like he’s been shot out of a cannon when I’m finished with the task. The word “kitty” is an important noun in his life. “Is that kitty in the yard again?” “What’s that kitty doing back there?” “Stop barking at that kitty!” He’d probably thinks there’s a cat near-by when I mention skinning one.

Back to my the dream that had me wondering if an old friend---Al---was alive or dead. In the dream I was snuggling up to him and my husband walked by and said, “Well, I guess you’re with him now” and kept on walking. “I am?” I asked Al and he gave me the alpha male predator smile and pulled me tighter to his body. Al and I spent all our summers growing up just four cottages away from each other. Along with his younger sister and my older brother, we spent our days playing cowboys and Indians, hiking around the lake, camping in the woods and walking to the store several miles away for ice cream. As teenagers we played a lot of poker and Monopoly together on rainy days and long nights before TV was invented. And I never, ever had a romantic thought about him in all those years or since so the idea of snuggling with him in my dream shocked me awake. 

I couldn’t let go of the fact that I was dreaming about a person I hadn’t seen in probably twenty years. We’ve exchanged Christmas letters every year, though. He’s a good writer with a better memory than me so I always enjoyed reading the reminiscing he’d shared in his holiday letters. That dream and the fact that he didn’t send a letter this year had me searching the internet. The problem with that is there are fewer and fewer people choosing to put obituaries into a searchable format so the fact that I didn’t find an obituary for Al still leaves a slight doubt in my mind. We used to be able to check the phone book to see if someone is still listed. And if you are asking, “What’s a phone book?” you’re too young to be reading old people’s blogs.

I remember many of my dreams and often look them up in the Dream Moods online dictionary. Here’s what it said about seeing a childhood friend in a dream: It “…signifies regression into your past where you had no responsibilities. Things were much simpler and carefree. You may be wanting to escape the pressures and stresses of adulthood.” Not Shit Sherlock! Have you seen the news lately! But when figuring out the meaning of our dreams the so-called experts say the action in them is the most important part and about getting hugged, the dictionary says, “To dream that someone is hugging you suggests that you need to let down your guard and allow your true feelings to show." It could also mean “that you need to allow yourself to heal emotionally.” But the million dollar question is was it the hugging/snuggling the most important action in my dream or was it the fact that my husband was essentially abandoned me? I’m not sure if I really buy into dream analysis other that it’s a fun diversion but its spooky how often the interpretations fit. For abandonment the dictionary suggests that it may be time to leave past feelings behind and that “the fear of abandonment is part of the healing process after losing a loved one." ©

Note: The photo at the top is of the kids I spent all my summers with growing up. We were at a camp we built back in the woods behind our cottages. I'm the one holding back from watching a snake in the creek.