As the old man sat down and began to play, I knew at once that I was witnessing talent burnished to an astonishing level. Even more than his brilliant technique, it was the ease with which the music flowed through him that revealed that he was a master. What could it be like to live with that ease? I hope, by the time I am his age, that I find out.
“Welcome to the Grief Club: the club that nobody asked to join, where membership is automatic after losing someone they love.” I had no idea I'd joined a club - let alone that it was the least exclusive club on the planet. We will all be members one day. That's a guarantee. Each of our stores begins with birth and will end with death. In between, in a billion different ways, we all love and we all lose. For 100% of us, the blessing of loving and being loved far outweighs the painful cost of loss that is the entry fee for joining the grief club.
Five years ago, I began to practice a pace of life that Matthew McConaughey calls a saunter. A slower pace and less jam-packed days feel a hundred times better than my whirling dervish of a busy life ever did. Living this way takes work, but it has been well worth the effort.
Death can feel like an eraser. Not only does it erase, but death changes everyone left behind. Because their lives and deaths changed us, our lost loved ones continue to make a mark on the world through us. Because we live on - laughing and crying, dancing and mourning - they live on in us.
For most of my life, worried about not being good at it or that people would think I'm goofy, I insisted that I didn't dance. Yet, at a wedding this weekend, I danced so much that I’m still hobbling around like an octogenarian - and smiling at how fun it is to "dance like nobody's watching."
This summer I've been distracted from both my garden and my yoga practice by the need to be present to my day to day life. It turns out that both are hardy enough to bear fruit even as I pour my attention elsewhere.
On the first anniversary of my mother's death, a beloved climbing hydrangea collapsed leaving a gaping hole in the landscape of my backyard. The poignant timing of this loss is a visceral reminder of the gaping hole left in the landscape of every family when a loved one dies. Like my family is doing, my yard will finding its way back to wholeness for a little while. It make look a little awkward while it does so, but it will get there. And so, I trust, will we.
When I was a girl, I remember sitting on the bed watching my grandmother get ready. She looked at her reflection and smiled. I suspect she was the same age that I am now. I want to be like her. I want to be friends with my body even as it goes through all the crazy changes involved with aging.
Relax. It's not just you. For millennia we humans have tended to stop doing the things that are good for us once the things that are good for us have made us feel better. Here's how to embrace the long-haul over the quick fix.