Roadmap to My Evolution

As I approach a milestone birthday, I realize that one of the advantages of getting older is that you have a roadmap to your own evolution. You have enough history to understand who you are and the confluence of events that has led to the you of today. Often you find there are major themes that consistently drove your decisions, be it in careers, partners, or interests.  You may have had a glimmer of that earlier in your life, but hindsight has a way of underlining it with a head slapping Duh! I think this is what they mean when they say older and wiser. 

As I revisit my history, I recognize my parents within me and how fundamental their influence was. I also am surprised by my younger self. How did she know that I wonder as I view my former self at arm’s length. I’m a bit awed at this somewhat foreign creature I see in the rear-view mirror. I think more and more that we start out with a package of skills that we hone over time, but it is all there earlier than we realize. We really don't change much; we just get more comfortable in our own skin.

Usually, we are relying on memory as we assess our past. Of course, memory can polish up many a failing, but sometimes we have the benefit of documented memory.  Recently I had the opportunity to revisit former self at less than half my age. It came about in a rather unexpected way.
A local history museum recently promoted their Memory Lab. The lab allows you to digitize media that is now obsolete, such as VHS tapes. I knew I had a drawer full of videos that had been languishing for many years and there was one that I had always wanted to digitize. This tape was of my mother with my aunts. It was at a time, when my parents used to travel down to Florida to visit my mother's sisters. I had prepared a list of questions about family history and asked my mother to pose those questions to her siblings. My father was enlisted to video the discussion. My mother diligently posed her questions as the conversation rapidly spun out of control. She fruitlessly tried to coax her unruly sisters back to their assignment.

I took the VHS tape into the lab and was surprised to see that the date on it was 1992, ten years before I really did a deep dive into family history. It was a time when I was doing oral histories, which sparked my interest in this effort. I also realized that 1992 was ten years past the maximum period (10-20 years) before a tape starts to degrade. While not in perfect condition, it was usable, and there was my mother a few years younger than I am today. I felt a yearning to leap into that video and ask her thoughts on getting older, a topic that I often discuss with contemporaries, one of which she suddenly appeared to be.
 
I was delighted to have that tape and began to gather other tapes to digitize. Next on my list was a tape that dated back to the 1980s when I had made a career change from running nonprofits to banking. I had finished an MBA in finance, and by then had spent a few years as a lender at a large bank. The bank was known for a controversial contemporary art collection that was unusual in the corporate world of that time. I had been interviewed in 1987 about my perception of that project and its impact on employees, but also my view of the workplace and my place within it. I set the tape aside with the intention to digitize it when time allowed. 
 
The Universe soon kicked into gear in a surprising way, one that makes you wonder who’s pulling the strings. Two weeks after I located that tape, I received an email from the co-founder of a nonprofit working with exhibitions of contemporary public art in Los Angeles. His email harkened back to the visual arts program at the bank where I had worked so long ago. He had received a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation to explore that project and learned that I had been interviewed by a videographer as part of a series of interviews. He expressed interest in my recollections of the program and that video project from thirty-six years earlier. That old video had been elevated to archival status. Should I agree to share it, it would be the first one to which he had access. 
 
“You’re a good researcher to track me down,” I replied. I went on to explain the unusual fact that I had that tape, newly unearthed, sitting on my table to digitize. I agreed to consider sharing it after I viewed it.
 
It was a shock to see my younger self, complete with those 1980's shoulder pads, emerge from that video. My first thought was that I hoped I didn't embarrass myself saying anything stupid now that I had an interested audience. I was relieved to find that former self passed my scrutiny. I liked that she considered each question carefully and pushed back on conclusions with which she didn't agree. I regarded her with almost a maternal eye, as if she were a unique being with a connection to me, and yet, not me. 
 
On the tape I spoke of my decision to go into finance a few years prior, when I had been approaching the much earlier milestone birthday of thirty. After a degree in social work and experience running nonprofit organizations, I had been weighing my next step. I explained that I had chosen finance because I had encountered a financial person who I felt was skewing the facts, manipulating the numbers to their benefit. Ultimately, I went into finance to protect myself, to be able to challenge with knowledge and authority. And I wanted credibility in the world, that for women often comes with degrees in “hard” subjects–– all uniquely female motivations. 
 
Both my choice of finance and my later choice of banking were driven by the same desire for options, both were broad areas that would offer a range of future paths. Control and choice, big themes that repeat in my decisions. Once I arrived in banking, I found I was rather ambivalent about being a banker. It was a very different world than what I had done previously and the culture that surrounded me seemed quite foreign to me. I spoke to the interviewer of a duality in me, what I would today call my analytic and creative sides, both well developed and sometimes competing for my time and attention. My friendships and interests outside of banking fed my more creative side. I knew clearly even then that I would never fit well into a narrow track.
 
I went on to explain the bargain that I felt I had struck with the bank. “It’s like I don't buy wall to wall carpeting in my home, I have rugs, I'm coming to the bank, I give the bank certain things, certain skills that I have to offer. And I hope that when I leave the bank, I can roll up the rugs and take them with me. I'm developing certain skills that I will carry away with me. But I'm not setting up residency here.”
 
Thirty-six years later I look back at a time when I didn't know what would come next but was carefully charting my path. Something that resonated with me was a comment I made about banking being a job which didn't absorb all my energies. I went on to reflect on an early job running a nonprofit which I had created that did absorb all my energies. I noted that I liked that in many ways. . . And missed that. . . And I wouldn't mind being in that again, I added, but I wasn’t sure about the stress that accompanied it.  Today I seem to have come full circle, working with several organizations and projects that do absorb my energies, embracing the stress and finding the engagement of that effort satisfying once again. 

Of course, former self knew that long ago.


And by request, here is a brief excerpt from the interview.

A Runway of Time

I woke this morning to an open calendar. No outside commitments, meetings or obligations, a full day to fill as I wish. I scroll up and down just to make sure I haven’t missed anything. A blessedly blank page. I wallow in the unexpected luxury of a runway of time.

Now that doesn’t mean I don’t have plenty to fill it with, just that no one else gets to fill it for me. Next stop, my to do list. There I find several tasks that truly demand a runway of time. This is not just an hour or two gap in my schedule. A runway of time allows me the time necessary to settle into an idea,  to work on a painting in a way that requires contemplation before I can even begin, to write in the meandering way that writing often requires or to take on a time consuming video project with transcription and editing. It allows time for process and thought, not merely squeezing in one more thing in that eternal quest for productivity that I am so prone to.

These are the type of projects that fall to the bottom of my list where they languish if no deadline forces my attention. Video projects in particular, form the bottom layer in my archaeological dig of to dos. And so I decide to tackle the backlog that has sat there for years. 

So what composes this layer? Mostly old women. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I have several interviews with women in their 90s and older who I wanted to record while I still could. They include the then 101 year old grandmother of a family member. Her recent death at 106 forced my attention back to the partial transcript I had left abandoned.  Apparently you have to die to get my attention. I also do the website on the former Jewish community of the Polish town from which my grandfather came. I document family histories of people from that community. I have several interviews with Holocaust survivors from there, all needing transcription and editing. One who recently passed away knew my family in Poland and with this fresh commitment  I am eager to revisit that recording. My friend Dora, in her 90s, also from my ancestral town, reminds me that we have some recordings to do and we don’t have forever.  

The software has changed since my last stint of editing and I have to relearn how to work with it. It is slow back and forth work with occasional gems to reward me. One recording takes me back in time, placing me in dialogue once again with my interviewee, but with five years of perspective on aging. Now I am approaching an age milestone myself and it makes me reflect on how someone views aging when they have blown through all those milestones. My 101 year old interviewee talked of the party her friends threw her at 99. “I don’t think they thought I would make it to 100,” she laughed. “Well you showed them,” I had replied. And then some, I think now.

I think about the questions I sometimes ask elders in interviews, the meaty ones. What were the challenges you faced? What gives your life meaning? Perhaps it’s too early for me to know my final answers. More challenges, more meaning yet to come.  I discuss those questions with my friend Dora. Dora has often told me that you have to find younger friends as your age group shrinks. I’m one of them for her. I know her well enough to anticipate her answers to these questions. We talk about how life is such a surprise, how we are a surprise.  So many unexpected things can happen and isn’t that wonderful? We are both optimists. I am well aware that I am in a sweet spot of life, a time of discovery and meaning. Past youth and middle age, but not yet “old.” “Old” is always someone else.

I begin to notice the increasing ratio of grey heads in our yoga classes, just an occasional tattooed woman in her twenties to remind us of true flexibility. The ratio increases for classes during the work day.  I think back to my yoga classes when I was that young woman, minus the tattoos and flexibility. I remember visiting my aunts in Florida not so many years ago and them admiring my slim waist. Now I know they were mourning their own once youthful figures as I too notice younger and slimmer forms. I slip between ages, suddenly seeing with clarity what I viewed with a myopic gaze when young. Every age comes with its benefits and detriments. There is some freedom in no longer focusing so much energy on appearance, now I care more about function than form. I glance at my husband on the adjoining yoga mat, a trim and handsome graying man. I don’t think of him as “old” either, part of my bubble of people of like age to whom I grant immunity in my perception of aging.

 Now I am free to focus on the things that matter to me and let life unspool in often unexpected ways. There is a growing awareness that life is finite, reinforced when parents die, then the occasional high school classmate. That one time sense of immunity has been pierced. My personal runway of time is shrinking and infinitely precious.

Be Grateful

I am participating in a writing group and as part of our weekly session we work with writing prompts. This past session we read a piece on advice to the author's 22 year old self and we were then asked to write our advice to who we were at that age.

It is an interesting exercise. Many advised their youthful self to appreciate the package of youth that they took for granted. Others cautioned about upcoming bad relationships. I thought what I wrote was interesting in what I left out as much as what I put in and I began to consider what I omitted and why. For some reason I didn't pick up on the appearance aspect although I have often been surprised as I look at photos of that pretty girl I barely recognize. And it is not that I didn't have my share of bad relationships in which I stayed too long. I am a bit older than many in the group and I think that might color my perspective. I've had more time to come to terms with my history and the changes we go through as we age.

I am someone who needs to find things out for herself and I think I needed those relationships to learn lessons I needed to know. To wish them away might leave a lesson unfinished, me unfinished. I also have found getting older freeing. There is a certain sass that one has when you are young and look good and know it. You have a sense of power, but you find that it doesn't stand up well under pressure. The problem is you still care too much about what other people think, especially men. Your power is predicated on their approval of something over which you have little control. There is so much more power in no longer caring what people think and that comes with age.

A little background...When I was 22 I was newly married in what proved to be a starter marriage. I had kept my own name at a time when people didn't and I chaffed at the idea of restrictions on my independence. Balancing independence with marriage was a tough balancing act. I was in my first real job and reveling in it, discovering talents I didn't know I possessed. And yes, I was a little full of myself.

So this is what I wrote.

I think back to you, that twenty-two year old, newly married, struggling to preserve your independence, delighting in the discovery of your own power and creativity. What I would tell you has much to do with preserving who you are today. Surprisingly, it is easy to forget when the world begins to impinge. Right now you have nothing to lose so you can take risks. You don't know the things you can't do so you do them anyway. Those are enormous gifts. Soon you will worry about looking foolish, about whether you know enough. You will become fearful and constrained.

Don't let those fears gain a foothold. Take risks, don't impose limits, trust your gut. Don't let anyone else control you and your choices. Believe that all is possible if you put one foot in front of the other. An amazing amount will be. Remember that work should be entertaining. When you look in the mirror in the morning and wonder if you will always delight in your work as you do in this moment, know that it is possible. Maybe not with the pure joy that comes with newness, but with the deep pleasure of using your talents and making a difference in your piece of the world. Take that piece of the world and make it shine.

There are some things you don't yet know. The world is not black and white. Your father will tell you one day when you fail that "It was about time you landed on your ass, you were entirely too smug". He will be right.You will succeed and you will fail and out of loss will come insight and understanding and compassion. The world will become much more gray. You will become kinder and less judgmental.

Get out of your own way. Don't be afraid of failing, don't be afraid of the world. Just move forward and say yes to the unknown. It will open up opportunities you could never imagine. Don't tell yourself you are too busy as an excuse for not welcoming something new. Use your time wisely, but leave space for surprises. Don't plan so much order into your life that you don't leave a doorway for the unknown.

Love your mother and let her know it. She won't always be there. You are very fortunate to have such a wise woman as a guide in life. Pay attention. Live your life so that you have no regrets. You will find a capacity for love in giving to another, something you don't yet know. It will bring a richness into your life.

Use your creative talents and imagination throughout your life, read, write, paint. Those talents will be your old friends when others are wondering what to do in the next phase of life. Be grateful. You have so much: talents, choices, time. Be grateful.

 

Posted with Blogsy