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. ©

The Church Tours

I’ve told the story of why my dad left the Catholic Church before but I’m going to tell it again. Back in the 1920s when Dad was eight years old a priest, while teaching Sunday school, accused my dad of throwing a spitball. If you don’t know what a spitball is, it’s a piece of paper that’s been chewed and shaped into a ball. Dad always claimed he didn’t do it but that didn’t stop the priest from opening the door on a potbelly stove, picking my dad up by the seat of his pants and the collar of his shirt and pretend he was going to throw Dad inside to teach him about the fires of hell where bad boys go. After that, my dad refused to go back to Sunday school and while his siblings continued growing up Catholic my dad was sent off to the only other church in town, a Methodist.

I was grade school, too, when I had a life-changing ‘church’ event of my own. Less dramatic but just as hurtful and long-lasting. I can still see myself with long pigtails and wearing a pink print dress standing on the playground during recess and being told by a classmate that she couldn’t play with me anymore because I was a “heathen who didn’t go to church.” The day before, I had gone home with her after school to play and her mother had given me the third degree. “What church to you go to?” Blah, blah, blah. It was after that when my parents had my brother and me start walking up to one of the four churches close-by for Sunday school and it didn’t matter which one. Our choice. At one of those churches I learned that God was an image cut out of a book, pasted to a piece of flannel and slapped above a flannel-backed cloud in the sky where He overlooked a field full of cows. 

Oddly enough, my date for the junior prom was the son of a dairy farmer. A deeply religious farmer who beat his son for dating a girl outside of their church---that would be me in case you’re having a Dense Dianna Day. My friend ran away from home after that beating but he didn’t stay away long enough for his black and blue marks to fade. He told me that farming was in his blood and if he didn’t break up with me, his father would disinherit him and give the family farm to his cousin. I got over the breakup quick enough but I spent the ‘60s trying to figure out why God encouraged his followers to abuse little boys with spitballs, polite little girls with pigtails and a nearly grown boy who thought I was special enough to introduce me to his parents. 

Being brought up in what was known as the "city of churches" I learned the art of avoiding the topic of religion early on in life. I have a master’s degree in avoidance so imagine my surprise when I signed up for a senior hall tour of a church denomination that’s only been in town for ten years: The Unitarian Universal Church. Why did I want to learn more about this church? Because several (holier than thou) people I know think the place is the devil’s spawn and by contrast, one of my favorite and most admired bloggers is a member of the UUC. So I dusted off my eggshell walking shoes and hoped my seatmate on the bus didn’t want to talk Christian doctrine. She didn’t. The church tour series goes to two different churches every month and the other church on our agenda Thursday was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, another controversial church according to some. 

The local UUC church actually holds its services in a Jewish Temple and has been doing so since its inception which seemed weird until I learned that the UUC’s logo---a flaming chalice---has ties to an underground group during WWII that helped Unitarians and Jews escape Nazi persecution. Sometimes we’re so busy looking at the differences between people and groups that we overlook their similarities and where their histories intertwine. I was impressed by the minister saying they are an inclusive community that celebrates theological diversity. She is free, for example, to base her services on readings from scripture, Buddha, the Torah, Maya Angelou or wherever else she finds inspiration. A recent sermon of hers I found online was inspired by Donald Trump saying he doesn’t have time to be politically correct. Another thing that sets them apart from some other churches---if I'm understanding it right---is they consider Jesus to be a high prophet but not God, not part of a holy Trinity.

The other church we toured, the LDS, was everything I would not like in a church but the hour and a half we spent there was certainly interesting. If you’ve ever had two of their missionaries stand on your porch steps you’ll get the picture of the tag team that walked us through the workings of their church, throwing in a heavy dose of evangelizing for good measure. 

Tour or no tour, I do occasionally wonder if I’m still searching for that enlightenment I think I found in my twenties. Will I wake up one day with a desire to start attending church? If so, the UUC is probably the only place I could feel like I belonged. Life would be less complicated if I had a church here in the city of churches. A church comes with a social life and that would be nice, too. But I’d feel like a hypocrite if I took up a religion like the LDS that personifies the meaning of God as I have come to know God---that combined goodness of mankind, a force for and of goodness. Can you believe it, in one of the class rooms at the LDS they even had a cut-out silhouette of God/Jesus standing on cut-out clouds. The more things change the more they stay the same. Not since college have I seen so many prints of Jesus in one place. There must have been over fifty in the building.

When I was an art major in college, we studied a lot of religious works of art because throughout man’s early history anyone with an artistic talent was basically enslaved by the church for the express purpose of personifying God. And while many religious philosophies of the world used artists to do pictorials to teach spiritual concepts and lessons to the masses who could not read, the Christians were the most prolific, especially during the reigns of Sixtus IV and Pope Julius II. Fast forward a few centuries when the depicted messengers became more important than the message---how do you put that Jeanie back in the bottle? How do you embrace God if you think of God as something separate and outside of yourself, outside of your own ability to create goodness and love? How can a person claim to know God yet carry out actions rooted in hate? I guess that's a diploma for those who do it to explain because try as I might over the decades, I haven't figured it out.

I apologize to anyone still reading this super-sized blog post. I usually don’t post things longer than 900 words but try as I might I couldn’t edit down my thoughts and anecdotes any more than what I’ve shared above. I even cut a whole passage about drum circles, Christian hymns and wailing walls that I particularly liked. If I’ve inadvertently said anything unflattering or untrue about your religious beliefs, I’m sorry. Please feel free to correct any errors or misrepresentations I may have made. ©

Books, Illusions and Change

Recently I got it into my head that I should start reading (or in some cases re-reading) the classics. I started with Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again. Weighing just a few ounces under two pounds I was shocked when it dawned on me I’m getting too old to read books like that. War and Peace? Forget it! Ya, ya, I know I could have ordered the Kindle versions, but I wanted to be able to underline passages that I knew would be elegantly written and worth going back to from time and time. And e-readers don’t feel as good in your hands. My poor, aging hands! Have I mentioned lately how much I hate seeing my once perfect fingers start mutating and conforming to the wanton will of arthritis? I’m not a vain person but when I see my three crooked fingers and the blue veins on the backs of my hands, so characteristic of the elderly, I can’t help but be annoyed by how we get time-stamped as we age. 

In this 1940 Wolfe novel he wrote: “The voice of forest water in the night, a woman's laughter in the dark, the clean, hard rattle of raked gravel, the cricketing stitch of midday in hot meadows, the delicate web of children's voices in bright air---these things will never change.”  I read that and then I got lost trying to figure out what the heck does a “cricketing stitch of midday” mean. A Google search can usually help me figure out what my own brain can’t crack, but with ‘cricketing stitch’ I came back from the hunt more confused than when I started. Does it have to do with the game of cricket or the sounds of insects or something else? I wish I’d been born with a silver spoon in one hand and an Oxford dictionary in the other! Or better yet, be born with a brain that doesn’t give a wild fig in the forest about figuring out the mystery of words. Maybe in 1940 ‘cricketing stitch’ was a common term that got lost in time like ‘rottenlogging’ and ‘canoodling’ which, by the way, pretty much mean the same thing.

The meaning of words and how they change over time always brings me to my favorite quote of all time. It’s from John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. It comes half way through the book when three of the characters are discussing the fourth chapter of Genesis and how the differences in the way a single word was translated effected the various directions religion took. "'Don’t you see’, he [Lee] cried. ‘The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in the ‘thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel---‘Thou mayest’---that give a choice. It may be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’”

Another book that should go on my quest to read/reread the classics is anything written by Virginia Woolf. Can you believe a self-described feminist like me is even admitting that I’ve never read her? But to quote screenwriter and director, Quentin Tarantino, “Every writer should have a little voice inside of you saying, tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here.” So between this revelation and the one about me hating my aging hands, I’ve revealed my quota of secrets for today. I have more hidden under the carpeting which is probably why I’m afraid to get hardwood floors installed. Yes, now I’m just getting downright silly. 

Back to books: I’ll also admit that I’ve never even read Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (That title, by the way, he supposedly got off a public bathroom mirror, scrawled in soap and it wouldn’t leave his mind. Reportedly it's meant to be a metaphor for being afraid to live a life without false illusions.) I do know the answer to that title if taken literally. I'm afraid to read Virginia Woolf which is why I haven’t done so. I should care about her place in the history of womankind, but I just don't. I just care that we gotten as far as we've come. That title taken metaphorically, however---well, aren’t we all afraid of living without our false illusions? If illusions were teddy bears, I'd squeeze the stuffing out of mine and their button eyes would fall off.

And that brings me to a quote of Orson Welles: “We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendships can we create the illusion for the moment that we are not alone.” I think widows, especially, hear a ring of truth in that statement. When the illusions comes down and we have to reinvent ourselves without our life partners we flounder at first, then we start taking baby steps toward accepting our aloneness (not to be confused with loneliness). Aloneness in time becomes like pair of comfortable old shoes. People might even tell us we need new shoes, that we’re not meant to be alone. Even Mother Nature tells us that---sorry Orson---and that’s when a good book comes in handy. The characters come alive and while we’re reading that book we’re invested in their pursuit of whatever will make them happy. And as they search we learn things about ourselves. We learn that we create our own stories and if we want anything to change, we are the only ones who can make that happen---illusions to the contrary, or not. ©

We're Born and Then we Die---What's the in Between all About?

A good friend of my niece’s just passed away this week while on a trip to Hawaii. He was only 65. I knew him slightly back when he was a college student working part-time at a large wholesale/retail flower shop and greenhouse where, at the time, I was working full time. But over the years I’d read and heard a lot about him as his career path took him from being a fourth grade teacher to a district reading coordinator to the principal of the elementary school where he and my niece both recently retired from. He was also active in the Michigan Elementary Principals Association but the kids at his school, perhaps, will best remember him as Zero the Hero, a red tights and swim goggles wearing guy who was passionate about getting each and every child in his school fired up about reading. It’s hard to lose a good friend. I could be wrong but I think this is the first time my niece is experiencing that unwelcome life experience. He was the best man at her wedding, a golf buddy to her husband, a fellow member of their long-standing poker club and far more than just her principal.

Other than my husband, I can’t even say that I’ve experiencing losing a close friend and especially to something as unexpected as a lethal heart attack. Before Don died, I had occasionally wondered who would be the first in my circle of friends to die and I even recall thinking after he passed that I didn’t need to wonder anymore. It was Don. He was my first friend to die. We are acclimated to losing older members of our families and can console ourselves that the person who died lived a long life filled with many blessings or joys. Widows in my age bracket can even console ourselves by saying the same thing about our spouses. With a person like Zero the Hero I know many will be consoled by his life-long history of giving his all to his passion projects. At his retirement party Zero the Hero said of his school, "I feel like I've taken more than I've given with this job. You just can't have a down day here. There's just too much positive energy all the time." But from what I hear tell, he wasn’t giving himself enough credit for having created and maintained that positive energy for so many years.

When someone we respect dies and the dust settles, even someone we mostly knew through someone else or through the media we can’t help looking at our own lives and taking stock of what we’re contributing to the world. Have we fulfilled our legacy, made our tiny piece of the world a better place? Have we accomplished enough things on our Bucket Lists? Have we had enough fun, given enough, loved enough? And I keep coming back to the sentiments expressed by Burt Bacharach’s song: “What's it all about, Alfie? Is it just for the moment we live? What's it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?” Theologians have been working on that for centuries and think they have all the answers, and perhaps they do. We grow up learning about good versus evil, free will, the concept of God, the soul and the afterlife. And we like to think we are a part of something bigger than just waking up every morning to a new day, a new start. What is that something bigger than ourselves? A minister once told me: “The secret is there is no secret. Life is about love. You can interchange the word ‘love’ for ‘God’ and ‘God for ‘love’ and that’s all there is to it. We are here to love one another.” If that's true, then people like Zero the Hero left this world full-filling his mission. He was loved deeply and he loved deeply. 

I can’t image what it’s like growing up not knowing love. As a widow and a person who lost both my parents I still struggle with feeling like there is no one left on earth who loves me. Intellectually, I know that isn’t true but in my heart I miss hearing the words. I have one niece-in-law who never misses saying it at the end of a visit or phone call but that’s all. I have friends who have a pact with their spouses to say “I love you” at the end of every phone call. Something about wanting that to be the last words the other hears if one should die while they’re apart. It seems strange, sometimes, to hear one side of a phone call where heated or tense words are being exchanged but they still end their call with, “I love you.” But then again, maybe that’s exactly the right time to say it. I’ve read a few widow blogs where the writers were racked with guilt because they’d been fighting just before their spouses passed away and they wish they'd gotten the chance to say, "I love you." I got to say that to Don a few minutes before he died and to hear him say back, “love” which was the very best his aphasic brain could do and that was enough. I hope Zero the Hero’s family also got to hear the three most important words in the English language. Note to anyone still reading this, please say them today to someone you love. ©