Where is your work coming from? Why are you doing it?
What is it you see? These are questions pioneering photographer Jerome Leibling,
who died last week at the age of 87, continually asked his students, one of
whom was documentary filmmaker Ken Burns.
In a 2006 NYT interview, Burns said about Leibling: “You wanted to be like him. You wanted to tell the truth.
You’d go out to take pictures with him, and we all saw the same things he did,
and then we’d come back, and he’d put up his prints, and you’d put up yours,
and you were devastated.”
What does all this have to do with defying gravity? More than you might think. To overcome the weight of
societal expectations of age and gender, to overcome the weight of family
history, to overcome the weight of our ideas of ourselves—in other words, to be
truly authentic—these are precisely the questions one needs to ask.
That’s the question I posed at a speech I gave last week to some spouses of top executives at a Fortune 500 corporation. “What else do you want to experience with whatever time you have left?” I said to the group. “What more do you have inside to give?”
Reasonable questions for baby boomers to ask themselves, right? Especially since we’re living longer and longer.
But what if one’s spouse or partner has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo?
Occasionally, my blog postings are republished on Vibrant Nation, a wonderful website where women 50+ exchange ideas and join in smart conversation. In one such exchange prompted by my Jan. 27th posting (which Vibrant Nation re-titled "What Quote or Poem Inspires You?"), a woman shared the following:
CHOICES By Nikki Giovanni
if i can't do
what i want to do
then my job is to not
do what i don't want
to do
The daughter of a friend of mine was rejected last week from both her first and second-choice law schools. She was wait-listed from the third and hasn’t heard yet from the fourth. Understandably, she was demoralized. She’d been dreaming of living in Chicago next year and eventually, law degree in hand, working for the FBI.
Her dad asked me to give her a call, so I did. First, I commiserated. Then I tried to buoy her with platitudes. (“When one door closes, another opens,” I said.) But I have to admit that other than assuring her that she’s loved no matter whether she gets into law school or not, I doubt I helped much.
A few days later I was chatting with another mom who had also contacted my friend’s daughter. This woman had a radically different approach. She said to the girl, “What’s your game plan? How are you going to move forward?” The woman then suggested that the girl contact the one school she was wait-listed from and ask what she could do to increase her chances of acceptance. She also advised being proactive and writing a letter to the school she hadn’t heard from yet, updating the admissions committee on any accomplishments she’d had and awards she’d earned between when she’d originally applied and now. And finally, the woman said, “Look at your alternatives."
The inauguration of America's first black President on the heels of Martin Luther King Day attests to the fact that no matter how far our economy sinks, how difficult our lives become, our noblest hopes and dreams will continue--as they always have--to try and steer humanity to a brighter future.
Five years after publishing Defying Gravity, I still stand by these words from my introduction:
"Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account." --John W. Gardner (1912-2002)
As president of the Carnegie Corporation, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Johnson, founder of Common Cause, and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, John Gardner was a leader in every sense of the word. The above quotation comes from a speech he gave at an executive conference in Kona, Hawaii in April of 1993 titled The Road to Self-Renewal, subsequently published in the March 1994 issue of Stanford alumni magazine.
If you're not in good health, it's difficult to focus on achieving your dreams.
Take my dad. He smoked three packs of unfiltered Camels a day and drank like a fish. Tray upon cardboard tray stacked with empty cans of Shaeffer ("the one beer to have when you're having more than one") piled up in our garage each week for the garbage man to haul away. By the time he was in his 60's, my father's arteries were so clogged and his lungs so weak that he could barely walk a city block without stopping to rest. He died at 71.
My 85-year old mom is the opposite. She walks almost every day, gardens seven months a year, and has eaten well her whole life. Her sense of balance is a little iffy and her hearing is shot, but she's still agile and active.
The other night, someone asked me what I think I'll be doing at age 75. "Gosh, I hope I'll be writing my third or fourth novel," I said.
There are no guarantees I'll still be healthy at that age; but like my mom, I take care of myself. I exercise faithfully, cook by color, eat low on the food chain, and generally avoid unpronounceable ingredients. In other words, I'm trying to increase my odds.
As Jane Brody writes in a recent NY Times Personal Health column I highly recommend titled Living Longer, in Good Health to the End, "[H]ow people live accounts for more than half the difference in how hale and hearty they will remain. . . ."
Note: Although my friend Ann two years ago gave me the skirt I'm wearing above, this week is the first time I've been able to fit into it. I haven't gained or lost any significant weight since I was last pregnant in 1983, but I recently stepped up my home exercise routine to combat the effects of menopause on my waistline. I should knock on wood (health, after all, is influenced in part by genetics), but I feel great.
Oh, and just for fun, here's one of those old Shaefer ads:
This morning I'm off to Cuttyhunk, a small island seven miles off the coast of Martha's Vineyard. My fifth major trip this summer. I know it seems like I have a wonderful life, and I do. But I'm exhausted. I have to remind myself that these trips are my choice and that I've had a good reason for each. Sometimes just acknowledging this simple fact--that even when we think we don't have a choice, we do--is all it takes to get re-energized. (I need to hear this today.)
Note: The photos above and at right were taken last week in Tahoe at my husband's triennial family reunion. This year over 60 people attended. Pictured at right are Mike's mom (far right) and her five living sisters. I'm near the middle of the top photo. Yes, I really am that short. A five-foot two midget among a family of giants.
