An open letter …
On how life can lead us in unexpected directions
Twice this week just gone she’s sprung to mind. She was my friend’s mother — we were 10, our friendship brief, deliciously intense — and I imagine she was oblivious to the ways in which she was shaping me. But when she cooked stroganoff, full of the mushrooms we never ate at home because my own mother hated them, I decided this must be what sophistication tasted like. And when she cleaned her house fast and furiously, Bruce Springsteen blasting through the doors to where we played in the overgrown backyard, I decided this must be what liberation sounded like. Last Saturday at Mt Smart, seeing Springsteen live for the first time, the inhibition that has crept up on me with age threatened, and I thought of her, dancing while she dusted, and instead got down and dirty. And when, on Wednesday, I went to a new Russian restaurant and there was stroganoff on the menu, a dish not fashionable since the 80s, I washed it down with several cocktails and hoped I was the woman I imagined I’d be.
Mostly we are ignorant of what we will become. I spent much of my teens and 20s studiously exposing and subjecting myself to what I deemed would be life-changing, character-building. Plays, poetryreadings, dance parties. Dating men I didn’t really fancy but thought I should. And mostly what I learnt is I’m not one for live theatre, house music or pseudointellectuals. That in the end you don’t actually choose who or what will impact upon you. That while you might hang off every word to roll from your romance languages lecturer’s tongue, it’s your boss from your part-time job at McDonalds who you actually quote at your first professional interview. That as the existential psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom says, “It’s the interpretation of our experience that matters rather than the experience itself.” That although you might come back from that two-day tramp raving about nature’s transformative powers, the next guy just got a bunch of mosquito bites.
“Look,” said my friend, walking past the local tennis club the other day. I looked and I saw a group of women our age enthusiastically whacking a ball. “My 16-year-old-self would never forgive me,” she said, “if I’d ended up doing that.” I could think of worse waysw tto spend d a sunny morning,i b butt I got t what sh he meant. The younger we are the more ex xacting we tend to be when we conjure up our futures. And while in many waysw I’m not who I thought I’d be (t the high-powered life and soul of thet party), I hope my younge r self wouldn’t be too disappo ointed either. That though she mig ght sneer at the cliche, she’d appreciate how increasingly I find myself drawn to goodness. That now I understand there is beauty if you look.
Our seats at the concert the other night were located behind the area for people with disabilities and I tried not to stare at a young man. Prostrate, his head supported by a brace, he appeared completely paralysed, his only means of communication a small screen attached to the arm of his chair. He was accompanied by a middle-aged couple I took to be his parents, and I was struck by how attentive the woman was to his needs; putting a hat on his head, a blanket over his legs, taking it off again. I don’t know whether he was born that way or a terrible accident or illness had befallen him. But I thought about how whatever that woman had imagined herself to be, sheh couldn’tld ’t haveh i imaginedi d this.thi And how despite, or perhaps because of, their hardsh hip, there was a unity and a closeness to the three of th hem you could search a lifetime for.
FOLLOWING ON
Last week I wrote about life when your partner is away, not anticipating what mmy words would mean to some. Several readers saidd they could relate to what I described, but for themm the aloneness was more permanent. Kath bbecame a widow four months ago, somethinng, she says, she had never really considdered. “So here I am, this new me, sittiing on the couch, not only as widoww, but another new label, ‘solo mum’ to our three boy men, anda in your words, ‘contemplatiing the loneliness of a new day withw a reluctance to impose on oothers’. What I would give to have him come through the arrival dooors one more time. To hold me. To be home.”
Th he younger we e are the e more exa acting we ten nd to be wh hen we con njure up ourr futures.