When I turned 50, I decided to embark on a project to do podcast interviews with 50 women. The purpose is to ask them about their lives and for their advice for me going forward. The first interview is, of course, with my sister. It’s a half hour well spent, I think. We think we’re funny. More importantly, we think we can sing. You be the judge.
In Euclidean geometry, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. You probably remember an awesome math teacher teaching you that concept in junior high. “Awesome math teacher” is a bit of any oxymoron, in my experience, but 
I have been assured there’s one or two out there.
Sadly, poor Euclid was wrong. I know. I should storm the halls of academe and announce him for the fraud he clearly is. I’ll be carried over people’s shoulders, lauded by universities around the globe and given the Nobel prize! Well…okay…Euclid may have been right in the context of geometry, but in life his notion that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line just doesn’t hold water (I thought I’d bring Archimedes into the room for kicks).
Not so, Euclid, old chum. In fact, sometimes it’s the twists and turns, dead ends, long stretches of misdirection, and hopeless navigational sleights of hand that get us where we need to go the most expeditiously. In other words, we must be lost in order to be found.
Consider this: if we are standing in a cluttered room and are asked to find one small object, it can be very difficult if not impossible to spot it. Yes, we’re currently IN the room…the shortest distance to the object. But being in the room in not helpful. Everything around us is amorphous colour without definition. It’s the very reason we say, “Can’t see for looking.” In order to find the object, we may have to walk out of the room – get some distance – in order to return and discover what was right in front of us all along. Happens all the time.
How many times have you found what you were looking for right under your nose? It’s as though it was suddenly deposited by elves determined to compromise your confidence in your mental health. It was only went you stopped searching that you could discover. It was only when you walked away that you could come nearer to the thing you needed. Happens all the time. Euclid was wrong.
In life, the shortest distance between points is often the distance itself…if that doesn’t sound too esoteric. Distance (or ‘leaving the room,’ to go back to my analogy) allows the subconscious, as the brilliant Carmen Spagnola recently taught me, to ‘school’ the conscious mind. Our conscious minds tend to need a lot of remedial help if you ask me.
So, Euclid may have known a ton about geometry, but his ideas aren’t much use in life. Sorry, pal. At least Archimedes gave us the good sense to either get into the bath tub earlier or turn off the water sooner. Now THAT’s practical life advice!
Would we want to get from point A to point B in the shortest distance? I don’t think so. Not much fun or learning in that. It’s like any road trip: getting there is half the fun. And usually, after all the bumbling around, just as you’re ready to give up searching, you stand there incredulously…because, often, point A is point B. And your straight line is actually a circle. And when you return to where you started, you give the searchers’ universal cry: “There you are!”
“Where have you been?” you ask as the veil is lifted on the real purpose of your journey.
But by then, you already know the answer.
“I was right here.”
Euclid was wrong.
And still I dream [she’ll] come to me,
That we will live the years together,
But there are dreams that cannot be,
And there are storms we cannot weather….
That sad lyric comes, of course, from the heart wrenching “I dreamed a dream” from Les Miserables. Oh, don’t worry…things aren’t as bad for me as they were for poor, shorn Fantine. But I have bumped into what could be my first firsthand experience with the limitations of middle age: we lose the ability/willingness to change and with it lose the possibility of realizing the dreams that remain unfulfilled or, in my case, ungranted.
But when is it time to throw in the towel on a dream? Is hope toxic? Is hope the life support for dreams. It keeps them alive when there’s actually no chance of their fulfilment. Do I need to sign a DNR (do not resuscitate) order for my ability to hope?
Yet if we jettison our dreams, do our lives become, as MacBeth whimpered after the death of the vile Lady MacBeth, just “tales told by an Idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”?
I’ve been trying to write this post for weeks. Each time I’ve come to it, ready to soak you with a bucket of my despair, the same thing has pulled me away: Love. I’ve been a called away by love.
You see, the irony is that the point of this post was to lament love. Love is both my dream and my tormentor. I’m reminded of Nanci Griffith’s wonderful song Fields of Summer in which she writes:
Love has chased me down through the cities and the towns
Until I stood beside the road and let it pass me by
Like a fool I’ve missed the rain ’cause I was crying.
This post was intended to be my requiem for a dream (it may still be). I can’t bring myself to say it though. I can’t bring myself to surrender (maybe that’s my problem) to despair or even, more conservatively, to indifference. And, yes, I know time is ticking away. While friends my age celebrate 25 and even 30 year relationships, I celebrate getting all my laundry done for once.
In my darker moments, I wonder why I got left out. Was I forgotten by the Universe or was I simply unworthy? Did I accrue such a huge karmic debt from the errors and actions in the first half of my life that the bill in the second half of my life is so huge it must be paid in instalments of hope with disappointment as its compounding interest rate.
Rosa, my beloved psychologist whom I’ve mentioned before, once suggested I stay too long in bad relationships (I’ve improved in that department!). I’m wondering if the same is true for my relationship with hope. I wonder if it’s time for us to go our separate ways. Dear Hope: It’s not me. It’s you. No hard feelings (well, I have a few hard feelings.) Hope, at least in this area of my life, has accomplished nothing. It’s been about as effective as planting a pine tree and running out every summer morning to pick oranges from it.
When life seems so hell bent on keeping me from something, isn’t there point where I have to say, “Fine. I don’t want it.” UNCLE!!
I’m close to that point. Very, very close.
But, for reasons I likely related to stubbornness and utter stupidity, I’m not quite there yet.
Love isn’t here. Love isn’t here….but it’s somewhere.
~ Patty Griffin, I Don’t Ever Give Up
The Age of Sage 