Grappling with Significance

An author's wrestling match with productivity and possibility

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I blame this post on a writer buddy who Voldemort-like Shall-Not-Be-Named but she asked me to report back this week on what I will stop doing at this midyear point.

Stop.

As in scale back, prioritize, focus on the important stuff.

I mean it’s midyear so maybe I have meandered for six months (somewhat), not gotten to drafting Book 2 (true) and haven’t achieved quite all my overzealous (OK unrealistic) to-do’s, but stop doing stuff?

I’m a busy girl. That’s who I am. A doer.

I work in simultaneous possibilities — market my current book, sell the anthology with my short story, write Book 2. Plus have a life with my husband, traveling, keeping up the house, grandkids, bookclubs, watching Netflix. . .

Does this sound familiar?

Voldemort’s notion to stop doing has me in a bit of a tailspin until Mom rode up on her white charger and laughed.

When my mom died

When my mom died in her one-bedroom apartment and my brother and sister-in-law and hospice nurses had left, and the dark-suited funeral home people had come to carefully carry away my mom’s blanket-covered body it was mid-afternoon.

July 31, 2021. Typical southern Illinois sticky hot day.

I didn’t want to go out to the car yet, drive home to relay the previous hours to my patient husband. Not yet. So, I sat on the floor in the silence of her small living room, leaned back against the pumpkin-color couch I’d sat side by side so many times with Mom, and let the tears fall.

It just felt right to linger. Like there was something unfinished I had to do.

In this low line of sight, my teary eyes came to rest on two stacked decorative boxes Mom had set alongside a low soft chair across from me. Decorated with periwinkle-blue pretty floral and garden illustrations, they had recently appeared as a cheerfully clever side table. She’d never opened them in front of me. Curious, I scooted over to take a look.

Inside — carefully wrapped in thin plastic sandwich bags —was a single row of letters. Maybe eighty, ninety? Yellowed by age.

Sliding them out of their envelopes, carefully labeled by Mom in her neat teacher handwriting, I discovered correspondence between my parents from 1951 - 53. Dad was age 21-23 at that time; Mom was a year younger. As I opened the envelopes one by one, I followed my parents through flirty first dates to gradual vulnerability to earnest declarations of love. The notes ended just a few giddy weeks before their wedding.

Of course I read with tears in my eyes.

Silly greeting cards. Mom’s delighted description of ducks in her yard. A nickname Dad gave Mom I’d never heard, “Curly” An atrocious bathing suit gift from an aunt. Fascination with flying saucers. A checkers challenge! Mom’s practice teaching at a local school. Dad’s tired scrawl past midnight after a late-night study session.

Then also sprinkled throughout: “We just can’t be grateful enough.” “I realize the responsibility and opportunity we have for happiness before us.” “I don’t think I’ve really lived yet.” until my favorite,” Let’s really try to make our life together a union of light.”

Sitting on that floor, reading the carefully preserved pages, I felt strangely suspended in time. For I knew what those two young people falling in love did not. What lay ahead. Something of the life they would go on to live. Four children, moves across the country, settling into southern Illinois, building a solar-paneled home, planting explosively thriving flowerbeds, adopting stray animals as devoted pets.

And as teachers they would leave gentle fingerprints on countless young lives —5-year-olds in my mom’s kindergarten classes, 20-year-olds in my dad’s college econ courses.

But in these pages, they don’t know this yet. They are earnest, urgent, filled with expectancy on a tidal wave of love.

My body hummed. Like I could feel a resonance. Their possibility.

Cosmic calendar ends in a blip

Recently I heard about the cosmic calendar. Astronomer Carl Sagan created the concept in 1977 in his book, The Dragons of Eden. Later, I believe he discussed it on his 1980 tv show, Cosmos, but I never saw it.

The Cosmic Calendar compresses the 13.8-billion-year history of the Universe into one Earth year. At this scale, there are 437.5 years per cosmic second, 1.575 million years per cosmic hour, and 37.8 million years per cosmic day.

Snap your fingers! There went about four hundred forty years!

Follow me with this: The calendar begins with the Big Bang taking place on the first second of January 1. The timeline captures major events: the Milky Way galaxy (August 5) and solar system formation (September 1); photosynthesis (October 1) and multi-cellular organisms (December 5); dinosaurs appearing (December 25) and going extinct (December 30), until finally, naturally late to the party, on December 31 at 11:53 pm we homo sapiens arrive seconds before midnight.

I stared at that damn calendar. That’s how teeny-tiny-itsy-bitsy insignificant I am?

Who am I on the cosmic calendar? A nano second? I was an English major. I can’t do that math, but this calendar is leaving a super disturbing impression of insignificance. Like it really doesn’t matter what I’m doing/not doing, or who I’m with, or even who I love.

No resonance buzz here

Impossible to see possibility.

I have a stake

So, my parents’ unpretentious lives are before me in one corner, Carl Sagan’s demo of insignificance squats opposite. It feels like a wrestling match. What does my drive to be productive matter when I’m a blink in time to the universe?

On the other hand, achieving everything on my to-do list also pales next to unforeseen sadness laying ahead for my tenderly young parents. Like the fearful months a son flew a fighter jet in Desert Storm. Mothers who died of dementia. And ultimately their own passing from cancer. My dad first, then fifteen years later, my mom.

And then it hit me.

I have a stake in this world. A stake in my family. A stake in the book I wrote about a woman and the artist she championed to be acknowledged and celebrated. A stake in my community. My country.

A stake in challenging and learning and reaching back to give a hand up because so many stand and walk before me clearing the path ahead.

Personal significance? The idea feels flimsy next to these earnest, heartfelt feelings.

“Do what you can with what you have, where you are.” said Teddy Roosevelt, the president who created our national parks system to preserve their pristine beauty for future generations he would never see.

Do the work that’s before me, in whatever way it comes to me to perform, using the talents Grace has given me.

Perhaps possibility then is holding space. Suspending judgement and attachment to specific outcomes. Showing up. It reminds me of the story of the actor Jim Carrey when he was a struggling actor.

At 19, Carrey headed to Hollywood - but like many young actors trying to make it in Tinseltown, he found that success was elusive. In 1985, a broke and depressed Carrey drove his old beat-up Toyota up the Hollywood hills. There, sitting overlooking Los Angeles, he daydreamed of success. To make himself feel better, Carrey wrote himself a check for $10 million for "acting services rendered," post-dated it 10 years and kept it in his wallet.

The check eventually crumbled, but it deteriorated as he worked and succeeded and failed and got up to work some more, until ultimately earning that $10 million and more.

So, for me, "holding space" is emerging as an alternative to the pressure of achieving specific outcomes. Instead, how about embracing the unknown and being open to new opportunities and then getting down to work.

Ah, Voldemort. I will take a few things off my list.

I’m here a very short time.

And I have possibilities to explore.

Appreciating you,

Book Recommendations on Valiant Women

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Order on Author Debra Borchert's website

Her Own War

Masterful, high-paced glorious romp (the enemies are wonderfully idiotic)

A masterful, high-paced glorious (and humorous!) romp through the dangerous chaos and rebellion swirling through post-monarchy France when the Royalists and Republicans were sworn, brutal enemies. We live the risks and intrigue through a classic love affair between vigneron Genevieve and her former courtier husband Louis. Bonaparte’s brutality and arrogance reflect the aftermath of courtesan Verseilles life lost via the guillotine. Our hero Genevieve is courageous but author Borchert insightfully draws her as anything but cool under pressure so that the reader whips through the pages on pins and needles feeling every insult, every swallowed retort, every breakthrough of cunning coming from Gen. Just when you think you’re turning the pages fast enough, Borchert ups the ante by splitting the story in two with Gen and Louis forced to outwit their enemies in two different settings, Gen from the massive family vineyard to Louis in the searing sands of Egypt under the horrible leadership of Bonaparte. Through it all tension, murder, espionage, delicious revenge. This is Book 3 of a trilogy and there are enough clever slips into past plot lines to tempt the reader back into Books 1 and 2 without disturbing the pace of this one as a standalone. Borchert’s impressively deep research is deftly applied so that the many historical details bring the scenes to life. Her warriors all are worth rooting for, her enemies are wonderfully idiotic. 

Order on Joyce Yarrow's website

Zahara and the Lost Books of Light

Time-traveling page turner

This beautiful, impressive story is a potent mix. On the one hand it’s a suspenseful thriller—murder and betrayal dog the protagonist Alienor Crespo’s steps when she travels to Spain to claim a newly discovered citizenship. Yet, on the other hand, it’s a tingling supernatural mystery—for forbidden clues come to light when Alienor slides gracefully into the bodies of past relatives through time-travel. This combination of a trip to Spain and her mental travels to the past thrust Alienor squarely into the crosshairs of a present-day murderous plot to destroy a secret library—and not just any collection of books--but the same rare religious texts her ancestors sequestered from the Inquisition. When present-day Alienor uncovers a plan to wipe out the rare religious works, she must confront the same enemies of blind ambition, greed and political power her ancestors outwitted. 

In and of itself, this fast-paced page-turner is a fun read. Author Joyce Yarrow cleverly presents the time-traveling as totally plausible, even though it’s not quite explained. A handy list of ancestors at the front of the book helped me keep Alienor’s relationships with her dead relatives straight. And Yarrow’s evocative settings provide just enough illustration to bring each historical period (the Middle Ages, World War II, and Franco’s rule in Spain) to life without slowing the narrative. It’s an impressive example of thorough scholarly research being applied with grace. 

But perhaps what I loved the most about this book is its factual foundation. The rare texts that fictional Alienor fights to preserve are from a true historical period called the Golden Age of  La Convivencia (“the Co-existence”), when Jews, Muslims and Christians lived in harmony up until the fifteenth century. Imagine! Our world’s three major religions lived in peaceful co-existence. I can’t help but imagine…could it be a present possibility?