Smith What Seasoned Women Have That Everyone Needs

Celebrating and Learning from Wisdom and Grace
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5439-3858-6
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 102 Seiten

This short book is, before anything else, a celebration of the Seasoned Woman. She is a treasure of wisdom and grace who needs to be observed for her beauty and for the abundance of sagacity and benevolence she has quietly demonstrated to those willing to open their eyes and observe. It is she and her students who have kept humanity's careening ship, often manned by drunken sailors, afloat. It is she who has historically been most responsible for the proper nurturing of the hearts, minds, and spirits of both males and females as they have grown and evolved in a world fraught with physical, intellectual, and moral dangers. Of course, the book generalizes. Not every word applies to every seasoned female on the planet. But the model and the true examples are familiar to all of us because the Seasoned Woman has been our mother, grandmother, sister, lover, or friend. We are arguably living in the most dangerous time in human history. We are destroying the earth that sustains us, ignoring the pollutants and microbes that may decimate us, building the machines that have the capability to extinct us, and reveling in the societal and political animosities that harden our hearts and souls to it all. Frankly, most of this is the legacy of a ubiquitous succession of patriarchies that have produced a rather prickly world for most of it's human inhabitants and an existentially dangerous world for all of us. So now, in a time when women of all ages are asserting themselves with increasing power and are being listened to in ways that are long overdue, this short book offers a heartfelt, often poetic celebration of who the Seasoned Woman has been and is and the place she ought to take in our hearts, minds, and spirits - and the exigencies of our daily lives.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Smith, Brian

Leseproben

Chapter One:

What Do We See?

What Do You See?

A 2009 study at the University of New Mexico Anderson School of Management found that, not surprisingly, most men feel that their bosses underestimate their job performance, while most women feel that their bosses overestimate theirs.

How do you see yourself?

A few years ago I was in a restaurant and while waiting for my meal I struck up a conversation with a woman sitting at the next table. She had hung something up on the wall in her bedroom, I don’t remember what. But I remember what she said. “It’s helping me to accept with grace my body becoming disgraced.”

She was a Seasoned Woman and was neither disgraceful nor disgraced in any eyes other than her own and those of the blind leading and following the blind, but I could see in the most powerful way how she had been absolutely convinced of her lack of beauty and grace.

And I was angry. Not at her, but at the forces which could so color perceptions of her, including her own. The forces that would attempt to convince all of us that signs of aging such as wrinkles are disgraceful. Because what I saw when I looked at her was a beautiful woman with wrinkles – and grace.

What Do I See?

A woman I know told me of a time when she had worked in a nursing home. The patients were separated into wards by circumstances of health, ambulation, etc.

In one ward lived a man and a woman – they were both very elderly. They had met in the nursing home several years earlier and had developed a beautiful, loving relationship.

Both the man and the woman were in reasonably good health, both physically and mentally. But neither had family available to give them the care they needed.

They were lovers, conversing, taking their meals, and participating together in whatever activities were available. They were, in a word, inseparable.

But the time came when the institution decided that, for whatever reasons, they must be separated. It scheduled him to move. She would remain where she was. Perhaps this was necessary. As my friend described it, it was not.

They were both absolutely heartbroken, distraught. They felt, I am sure, as husbands and wives of slave families must have felt in the pre-Civil War South. My friend spoke to the man one day, trying to console him in his grief.

He said, “My Little Bird and I have been in love for years. It’s not love like at twenty, but it’s tenderness and it’s just as big and just as strong. And now they want to separate us.”

I would contend that their love was not only “just as big and just as strong,” but very likely richer and wider and deeper. In each of their cases they brought to the other multiple decades of living, learning, laughing, and loving along the long, winding paths of their lives, sharing qualities and experiences that manifest themselves not just in spirit, but in the embodiment of that spirit.

So when they met they each brought all of this to the table. She could still bring him wonderful pleasure, as a companion and as a woman, and she could still see him not only as a human being but as a lover, because they both looked less at the wrinkles and more at the grace.

Yet how many of us would laugh at their antics together and call them “cute”? And more, how many of us would truly see and appreciate and respect this beautiful love for what it was? Or would we dismiss it as the whims of a couple of decrepit old husks waiting to blow away in the drying winds?

At what age do we become less than human, mere sentient creatures to whom the young can condescend with such insidious humor? How heedlessly arrogant perceptions can be.

Surely this couple’s understanding of love deserves as much attention as that of a young couple sitting next to one another before a movie in the cinema, filling the time by playing video games on their cell phones.

Some time ago I was traveling to New York by train. I like the train because I can spend a great deal of the trip in the dining car writing. I was alone at a table. All of the other tables were occupied. A rather tall woman approached me with a smile.

“May I join you?”

“Sure,” I replied.

Of course, my work session was over. We introduced ourselves, complete with thumbnail bios. Small talk led to philosophical musings.

The lady was energetic, focused, accessible, and probing. Her bright, blue eyes sparkled as she spoke.

“What are you writing about?”

“Well, I don’t like to talk much about what I’m working on, but it’s about women and aging.”

“Very interesting! How do you pick a topic like that?”

“I don’t know. I’ve always been very interested in women. They seem to approach the world in ways that surprise me sometimes. Ways I don’t really understand. So I thought it would be a challenge to explore some things and try to express them from a man’s perspective. And I have the bonus of writing about something I’ve always loved and appreciated. Honestly, females have always awed me – scared me a bit, I guess. So there’s always a little tension and excitement talking to them, doing the research – trying to figure things out.”

She laughed. “So, you want to write a book that you’re not qualified to write.”

I replied, laughing also. “No, I want to state a carefully considered opinion about something I think is very, very important.”

“Fair enough.” Her eyes were smiling, and she was listening.

“And I get tired of reading articles and books that contain the hidden or explicit assumption that the writers have ‘proven’ something because they’ve included a lot of references and footnotes and terminally precious argumentation. I’m not a congressman or a pundit or an academic. Okay, I’m intelligent and well-educated – but I prefer to be smart and to use some common sense.”

“So that’s what you bring to this book – common sense?”

“And my heart.”

“So what does your heart see?”

“Well, for one thing, I think the aging process is harder for women than it is for men. It’s something everybody has to deal with, but I think we’ve had a pretty long history of making everything harder on women.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for example, to use a cliché, I think women really are like fine wine – they improve with age. But our society doesn’t see it that way.”

“Absolutely. But why do you think that is?”

“Well, sociologically and anthropologically speaking, I would say that it’s because quite a lot of the time people are really stupid.”

She laughed. “Okay. So how do women improve with age?”

“I said I don’t like to talk too much about my writing. If I do it seems to go away – or I lose the passion – or something. So I guess you’ll have to read the book. Besides, you already know the answer to your question better than I do anyway. The book is just to present my perspective.”

“I understand. We need to hear things from as many voices as we can.”

“That’s it.”

“Well, if you do it right, giving your perspective might be worth a lot.”

“I hope so. Thank you.”

“For me, I just turned eighty but I feel ageless. I had a career in psychiatric nursing, and I think I learned a lot. It’s all a matter of consciousness – body, mind, spirit, soul. We spend a lot of time walking in someone else’s light, not our own. We have to ask ourselves who we are. There is something in us that’s eternal. We have to find it. If we find it and bring it to the now, we can find our aura, our energy. We won’t get distorted by negativity.”

We continued our conversation until we were asked to return to our seats because a major stop was coming up. As I sat down I began to muse on this brief, chance encounter. I had been, as so many times before, presented with gems of wisdom from a beautiful Seasoned Woman.

But what was even more important to me was her spirit, her energy, her optimism, her plans, and her dreams – undiminished by her sure knowledge that this was the last chapter in her life.

I was reminded of a serene, almost glowing bishop I had once spoken to. We were discussing life and death and fate and the speed at which light passes and how we dream and plan as though it never ends.

“Do you know what I would do if God told me I would die tomorrow?” he asked with a quietly encompassing smile and an uncondescendingly interrogative twinkle.

My curious expression duly noted, he said, simply, “I would plant a tree.”

I heard him, and I thought I understood, but the beautiful lady on the train seemed to me to be living the idea that the Bishop had tried so gently but fervently...