Question of the Day

Time, or at least the passage of it, does not alter my ability to be resilient. In fact, resilience is one of the qualities I most like about myself. And anyway, the alternative is too grim — witness Virginia. Last year, when I was a week away from turning in my book on New Orleans, our house was broken into and my laptop was stolen. Like an idiot, I’d backed up a grand total of one chapter, which meant I had to rewrite the whole thing again. All my writer friends especially said, “Oh my God, I wouldn’t have been able to go on.” I think they would have. Also, I am living in a place where in one awful day people lost their houses, their loved ones, their cats and dogs, their livelihoods. It’s a good place in which to keep your perspective — and a place in which it’s necessary to be resilient, time or no time.

I throw the pieces up in the air and see where they land. Sometimes it’s interesting and sometimes it’s a real mess.
This is probably why I never had children.

Time, or rather the shortage of it, doesn’t so much alter my ability to be resilient, but it makes spontaneity almost impossible.

Woolf’s comment seems a kind of variation on something CS Lewis said. He was often overwhelmed by the sheer demands of correspondence. He got a lot of letters. He hated having to give his off hours to responding to them. Then he thought, paraphrasing, ‘Maybe this is what God sent me today.’ So he did his best. We all have to. It’s a miracle when we do it happily.

Time: not enough of it. I want more — more days, more months, more years to try to figure the whole thing out. Anyway, poor Virginia. She cut it short so why give her the time — of day.

When people you love develop lingering terrible illnesses that you face with them, when your small world changes abruptly and you were not prepared because the changes were so unexpected, or when grace happens and you feel that and you act in concert with it and feel the love and warmth and joy of it, you learn. It can be beautiful to learn under many circumstances, even sad ones. If you can keep in balance with the many events you aren’t prepared for, you won’t lose your strength; you may get stronger.

Time gives you certain things you don’t really want, like painful arthritis, for example. So time has altered my leaping about like a gazelle on speed which was once my wont. However, as the brilliant Joan Ganz Cooney cautions for those of us over 50, “Slow down. Don’t hurry. That way you are less apt to hurt yourself.” So time has slowed me down – a little!

I think resiliency has a lot to do with how you face the facts. And I decided long ago not to face them. I’ve always believed that if you really faced the facts, you’d never get out of bed in the morning. There are too many people telling you what you can’t do, what you shouldn’t do. And some of them even proving it. So for me, I just put on my blinders and run my own race.