I believe I can safely say that many of us have reached the life stage: “If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”
I’ve personally gotten to the moment, at 76, where it’s easier (and better mentally) for me to enumerate the body parts that are working adequately versus the ones that have gone gimpy one way or another. For instance, I wouldn’t be writing this (and you wouldn’t be reading this) if at a minimum, our hearts weren’t still beating.
It seems like just yesterday that every routine test was just that—a no-brainer versus the nail-biter they’ve become. So what keeps the more resilient among us free-floating somewhere between peeved and intrigued, rather than stuck in despair?
In a previous blog, I wrote about Rick Steves, the travel guy, and his approach to travel. Per Steves, it is all part of the adventure of life—the flat tires, missed connections—taking whatever arises as it comes. Maybe you don’t have the trip you’d planned, but what you get instead turns into the quintessential essence of the adventure of discovery that drew you to travel in the first place.
A wise approach I have relied upon both in regards to travel and life’s challenges. But today, I take inspiration from one of my oldest friends from junior high, Nancy Meyer, stemming from her late-in-life unexpected passion: ceramics.
Nancy’s primary creative outlet before ceramics was writing but there came a time when life left her speechless. She just couldn’t find it in her to pick up a pen. Then, out of the blue, she stumbled onto working with clay at a local community center, trading the dependence on her left brain for digging her fingers in dirt. The fact that she discovered a remarkable talent as well as a community through ceramics is inspiration enough, but it’s her attitude about the creative process that holds the answer to the question of resilience for me today.
Nancy approaches life now as she does making a pot or plate. Even after 11 dedicated years, and museum quality pieces, she views every work as an experiment. Nancy shows us how to view the unexpected bits as simply part of the process. Whatever she would have previously thought of as a flaw or mistake, Nancy now takes whatever arises as it comes. She takes pleasure from the entire process, come what may, and feels affectionate regarding the results.
She celebrates the pieces that come out well—or often even better than intended—but she treats every one of her creations kindly, honoring even the experiments that somehow missed the mark with a place somewhere in her home.
Whether it’s a daunting creative challenge or an unwanted prognosis you are faced with, you have a choice how to respond. If you “Nancy It”, you call upon patience, creativity, and grace to work with, through, or around it as best you can and chalk it all up to being part of the experiment of life. It helps, too, if you can find it in yourself to laugh.
At some point you make a decision about how you are going to live. Are you going to wake every day in a self-protective stance? Or are you going to venture forth through whatever life throws at you as the mystics do, trembling not with fear but curiosity?
So, next time you find yourself faced with a potential nail-biter, “”Nancy It” through whatever patch of life you’re transiting, knowing that it’s not all just part of the journey. It is the journey. Whatever you are having to endure, even if not cause for celebration, is at the very least an occasion for kindness. The only way we can make the transition from dread to equanimity at our age and stage in life is to come to embrace it all.
