Reflections
"To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven...." The wisdom of Ecclesiastes resonates through the centuries but seems particularly appropriate to the changing seasons from summer to fall. We move from the natural splendor of flowers that brighten our lives for a short time to the deeper glow of autumn color, so often preparing us for the darkness of winter,.
This shift in time should be expected, even in the strange climate that El Nino and La Nina accorded us. Yet, I feel a yearning to hold on to the warmth of September and October, for change leaves us vulnerable and anxious about the months and years to come. Here we are barreling toward a new century, everyone concerned about technology. There is in this concern a deeper reason for introspection, an understanding that for many of us enormous changes in medicine, in government and even in human relationships will occur.
In my personal life, I am acutely aware of change that has already taken place. I no longer work for Stanford. After five great years, I have moved away from my early teaching experience dealing with high school to a new one: adult education. Just as the warmth of summer acts as a transition into autumn, my years of teaching experience help me to make the interesting move to helping adult writers hone their considerable talents. A positive change!
This month I await the expected publication of my book with trepidation tempered by happiness. This experience can be compared to childbirth, painful but fulfilling, since the subtitle of the fictionalized memoir is " a mixed blessing." The birthing took far longer than the traditional nine months! What creature on earth has a gestation period of four years?
There are other autumnal changes that darken my vision. My son's marriage has dissolved, and little Jeremy says, "Grandma, I just don't get it." Neither do I, my darling grandson.... Another concern: health as one ages becomes a necessary preoccupation, attested to by all the articles I dutifully clip and try to commit to memory: should I take the latest supplement that trumpets forth its claims to miraculous recovery? (I confess to buying slippers with magnets, but don't tell anybody.) On a far more serious note, we have lost good friends, and our concern with our own mortality burrows its way into our thoughts in the dim hours before dawn.
What is the other side of the coin? What creates happiness in this autumn of our lives? A young man eating his fast food next to me in a food mall asks, "What is the most important goal in your life?" I didn't quite choke on my chow mein, but I wondered if I should be worried. I answered shortly, "Happiness." When he embarked on his spiel, I realized that he was after my soul. On my ride home, I tried to define happiness in my own terms. From red light to red light, I remembered the joy I felt when we watched "Kids Say the Darndest Things." I wanted to adopt every one of them. I should have told that young man that children alone bring immortality into my future.
I know, too, the feeling of deep love when I'm with old friends. We meet for lunch and share the pleasures and pains of our lives. Unspoken love warms our hearts as we notice the impact of the passing years.
Most of all, my husband fulfills my definition of marital happiness: the capacity to lose the self in order to enter the mind and soul of this closest and most complex of all relationships. So farewell summer and welcome to the warmth and promise of autumn.
Charlotte K. Jarmy , a Los Altos resident, is a longtime free-lance writer for the Town Crier.