It Takes All Kinds

It’s not easy to be on an even keel these days. Maybe like me, you are in the doldrums. I mistakenly thought this term from meteorology and navigation meant a period when there was no wind and therefore no movement, a period of stagnation. But the actual doldrums is a place, “an equatorial region of the Atlantic Ocean with calms, sudden storms, and light unpredictable winds.” It is a place where equanimity does not obtain, where one minute you feel serene and the next minute you are filled with foreboding. 

Photo by marina on Unsplash

Some people’s demeanor is fairly constant from one day to the next. One friend is characteristically upbeat and does not seem to be porous to the darkness of this moment in history. She knows it’s there but she doesn’t empower it. This woman is a world class laugher. You don’t run across many people with that gift any more. It may be a lost art like medieval manuscript illumination. I can remember lapsing into hysterics regularly as a child, peeing in my pants, struggling to breathe, choking on my tuna on rye. Now, I generally require the services of a professional comedian. Unless I’m around this friend. It takes a willingness to welcome the absurd and to poke fun at yourself which is an act of grace. We could all benefit from not taking ourselves so seriously.

Some people describe themselves as being sensitive to the frequency of sadness. It registers on them where for others it would get lost in the static and commotion of modern life. This propensity is not always a reference to particular tragedies like the wars in Gaza and Ukraine or the climate catastrophe. It’s a tendency to identify a primal sadness that’s associated with impermanence, mortality. Some people naturally vibrate at that wavelength whereas other people who are uncomfortable there sometimes get squeamish around artists who are inclined towards the sadness. Recently, one of the readers of seventysomething expressed concern that everything seemed to be worrying me terribly. But for me, the waves of despair rise and fall while the whole of the ocean of life goes on and meets the horizon. There are days when all I see are the gulls flying overhead and the whales breaching the surface. I was fascinated by the response I got to a comment on Shalom Auslander’s Substack, The Fetal Position. Auslander had speculated that birdsong and the music of children laughing was becoming more difficult to hear as it was drowned out by the noise of rage and partisanship. I commented that we all heard the birds at an increased volume during the terrible time of the pandemic and a surprising number of people seemed to share that memory. We have that in us, even though there are days when all we experience in the ocean is the undertow.

Additionally, we can only play the hand we’ve been dealt. This is the simplest of  truths that somehow needs to be learned over and over again every day. Some people are deep sea divers, plunging into the riverbed of experience to find the sunken treasure of who they are. Alas, I am much too lazy for that approach. I don’t want to go looking for it. I want it to come looking for me. Hubris, I know. I prefer to hang like a piece of flypaper in the attic to see what might stick. For example, I took John Le Carré’s last novel Silverview out of the St. Louis Park library. Written when he was in his late eighties, I marveled at Le Carré’s late-stage fluency in the spy genre, reading for several days before I noticed a bookmark that seemed to appear out of nowhere. On the face of the bookmark was a quote from Lao Tzu, “At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.”

That unveiling gives me a fleeting glimpse of the equanimity I think I’m supposed to manifest. It’s not stasis. It’s not anaesthesia. It’s watching the surf climb up on the sand and cover the feet of the little girl wiggling her toes and giggling at the sensation of being tickled by the vast, indescribable ocean. 

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. In June, seventysomething/Many Voices will be enjoying a far-ranging conversation with visual artist and poet Rosemary Starace about Art, Healing and the Memory of Wholeness. All subscribers are now welcome to read Many Voices posts.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.