Resolutions

Since our peaceful, joyful, family Christmas day, I’ve spent some uncomfortable hours with the dull ache of disappointment and embarrassment, wondering how to make amends to my sister and brother-in-law for forgetting their invitation for my husband and me to share a special meal with them and our brother on the Friday between Christmas and New Year.

I’d looked forward for weeks to spending time with my siblings, but without checking my diary I’d invited another person to our house that evening. There’s no excuse. Not only did I hurt  people I love, but John and I also missed one of the highlights of our festive Christmas season.

When my sister rang to ask where we were, I confessed that I’d forgotten. As if that wasn’t bad enough, when I eventually looked in my diary I saw  that it was the birthday of one of my granddaughters. I’d bought and wrapped her present before Christmas, but I’d forgotten the day completely.

On one level, not checking my diary was a simple mistake, but not to use it or the calendar by the phone for a week? There’s something about this forgetful behaviour that disturbs me. My decision to make some changes takes effect from today.

It’s mere coincidence that it is almost the end of the year. New Year’s resolutions have never been part of my life. In the past couple of decades, each year on my birthday I have reviewed the previous year. A long time ago, a friend gave me an illustrated notebook with beautiful paper, and I’ve used that to record any past achievements and write to plans for the next twelve months.

A shelf full of old journals
A shelf full of old journals

One year, I worked through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. I began to write three pages in longhand every single morning, followed by a long walk.  That process changed my life as I allowed myself to become more creative across all dimensions.

The next year, I read Sarah Ban Breathnach’s Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy. In 365 little essays, one for each day of the year, Breathnach writes about ‘six practical, creative, and spiritual principles – gratitude, simplicity, order, harmony, beauty and joy’. It took some work to transpose meditations about seasons and celebrations applicable in the northern hemisphere to Australia, but the effort was worth every moment.

Much loved books
Much loved books

But over the past few years, some of the foundation elements that made up my well-ordered life have slipped. This is partly the result a dramatic change in life-style brought about by remarrying when I was almost seventy, after living alone for almost thirty-five years; and partly because I’ve become less physically robust as I’ve aged.

Since I sent the completed manuscript of a book to an agent three months ago, my life has been in the limbo of ongoing waiting for her verdict on my work. A writer of any age who isn’t writing can be very grumpy indeed, as well as disorganised and forgetful.

Diary 2014
Diary 2014
Calendar 2014
Calendar 2014
A three-pages-every-morning journal
A three-pages-every-morning journal

THREE TOOLS FOR AN ORGANISED LIFE

Now it is time to change, to return to the simple principles and practices that I love and that help to keep my life ordered, abundant and creative. I am a writer and I write! And I promise to use my diary regularly.

A desk waiting for a writer
A desk waiting for a writer

There’s a happy ending to the story of the meal with my siblings. Yesterday, our brother invited us to his place for dinner tonight. And my sister sent me a reminder message on Facebook, complete with exclamation marks. I’m loved and forgiven..

One hundred-and-one books

One hundred-and-one books make a reasonable reading list.

‘We could start a book club,’ my new friend said. ‘That way we’d get to read a lot of different books.’

‘Good idea,’ said another friend.

‘We could each invite one other person to join,’ I suggested. ‘That way we’d meet new people, too.’

That was eleven years and one hundred-and-one books ago. Continue reading “One hundred-and-one books”

Tribute to Doris Lessing

 

Doris Lessing, prize winning novelist and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature (2007), died in London on 17 November, 2013, aged 94. Her last novel was published in 2009.

Always a prolific writer, she clocked up over fifty books that included short stories, memoir, non-fiction, plays, essays and poetry. But she is best known, and loved, as a daring novelist who experimented with a variety of forms including realism, fantasy, science fiction, space fiction and even the paranormal.

Over her long life, she explored deeply a range of concepts and philosophies that included communism, socialism, psychology and psychoanalysis, Sufism and feminism. Attempts were made to brand her with descriptions which included eccentric, but she steadfastly rejected the labels with which people tried to saddle her.

Her writing reflects her many enthusiasms and passions; her versatility and depth won her a large following of dedicated readers, of which I am one.

One of Lessing’s perhaps less critically acclaimed novels, The Summer before the Dark, (1973), deeply affected my own life and writing. I still have the paperback copy, bought many years ago, for which I paid $2.95. Like most of the Lessing books on my shelves, it is well-loved – battered even. Today, when I picked it up, it fell apart in my hands. I remembered once before, in a hurry, crudely repairing it by pouring glue down the spine and pressing the pages into the mess.

Almost forty years ago, when I was newly divorced and struggling to support six children financially and emotionally, this book burst upon my consciousness with the force of a meteor. Until I read it, I had been only vaguely aware that a life different from the one I was living could be possible. Gender politics and feminism were for me still vague, unexplored notions.

The Summer before the Dark tells the story of a middle-aged woman, Kate Brown, who has been an exemplary wife and mother. With marriage and motherhood, she has acquired many virtues including adaptability to others needs and wants. But when the novel opens, her grown children and successful husband all have exciting engagements, and she will be home alone for months. She embarks on a summer of exploration, freedom and self-discovery.

The novel can be enjoyed on many levels, but Lessing uses a number of devices which add layers and depth to the story.  Over the summer, Kate has seven dreams of a large, black, wounded seal which she must carry over rocks to water. These psychoanalytic sequences that involve Kate’s personal bête noir (her helplessness and vulnerability) refer obliquely to the seven seals of the Apocalypse.

Lessing not only references the Bible, but also TS Elliot’s poem, ‘The Journey of the Magi’. In the poem, one of the travellers, now an old man, reflects on the difficult journey he undertook to see the Child Jesus in Bethlehem.  This man, like the heroine of The Summer before the Dark, was also in transition between one life and a new. He reflects on what he has seen on the journey – a white horse and a black one; men under the vines betting with thirty pieces of silver and three trees on a hillside, all images from the Book of Revelation.

What they have seen and experienced will be but faint memories when the travellers return home. But they are profoundly changed and so was I when I first read this book.

Thank you, Doris Lessing – an amazing woman and writer.

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Welcome!

Limoges - off to the shop - CopyCelebrating age

In recent years, I’ve enjoyed my first ride in a helicopter, learned to sail a yacht and spent a weekend helping in the sheep yards on a farm during shearing. At sixty-five,  I went back to university as a full-time student; another year, I published my first book, a memoir, Other People’s Country. At seventy, my best friend and I escaped from our respective families. We married in secret in a very lovely ceremony, and then honeymooned in Paris – my first trip to Europe.

This year, after a shaky start, I’m blogging.

A search for blogs about ‘ageing’, ‘old age’ and ‘growing older’ turned up sites devoted to residential aged care, dementia, incontinence and depression. It also found sites devoted to research into some of the more dismal aspects of old age. I know a bit about all of those through my work as a nurse in aged care facilities. As well as that, before my retirement from full-time work, I was the chief executive officer in a non-government agency that advocates for people who live in residential aged care, as well as those in danger from elder abuse.

There is another, better narrative about growing older. People in their late sixties and seventies are often still in the workforce. We travel; contribute generously to our families and communities; attend the theatre, concerts and festivals; vote; exercise our bodies and minds; learn and grow. We are indignant about the poor treatment sometimes meted out to older people, and not afraid to speak our minds.

Stories about ageing gracefully (and disgracefully) are the ones I hope to celebrate in my blog.

Thank you for visiting!

 

 

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