Hi, everyone.
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This newsletter is evolving into a framework for realising our amazing and unlimited potential as we age towards becoming our best vision of ourselves. It includes lifestyle, art, culture, science, gardening, food, design and many other topics.
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I hope you are well and enjoying the early fall season (or spring season for those of you in the southern hemisphere).
I am inserting this random cuddling goat video from my walk yesterday for your viewing pleasure.
Last week I invested in a microphone for my iPhone with the big plan of creating podcasts. It’s a new toy and I need to get used to hearing my voice talking about big things!
I caught one of my plates on Instagram yesterday. This is a restaurant in Liguria called Umami - I made these plates last year. It’s always a kick seeing my creations randomly shared - especially with gorgeous food like this.
The weeks have been filled with making pottery for a restaurant client in Novello, Italy. They asked for two new designs. A good deal of work goes into making plates for commercial use that are durable (all my ceramics are high fire stoneware and can handle daily commercial washing), balanced and speak specifically to the design requirements of creative chefs.
We’ll be traveling to Italy in a couple of weeks and I’ll hand deliver the finished plates then.
I’ve also been creating a fruit tart each week, where I’ve used minimum amounts of added sugar (I’m using maximum 5 grams per serving of added sugar as a base guideline). This is the only added sugar we allow ourselves each week. I am diving into research on the impact of added sugar as we age and the facts are staggering.
That research, along with a myriad of other subjects regarding how we work toward the best version of ourselves with age are consuming good deal of my workday. In creating this new framework I’m ingesting so much knowledge, which is helping to keep my brain active and supple in my 67th year.
Here’s a short video I did on the subject last week:
Now to the subject of this week’s post… how allowing ourselves to grieve what hurts us can help us master our lives.
There is a false narrative about the later stages of human life, that our experiences mean we’ve mastered the game.
I’m here to say these later stages are about finally recognising what we have chosen to ignore.
Mastering life is practice that never finishes.
Advanced life stages are often marked by a waterfall of consequences resulting from unresolved issues. And while we do know that looking forward is far better for our health than living in the past and trying to figure it out by means of rumination, it’s just not that easy, is it?
It really doesn’t matter if we’re talking about physical wellness or our emotional state or our relationship with money. Whatever we haven’t dealt with over the years becomes bigger and more disruptive.
Right up to the point where knocks us right the hell over and lets us know it’s not going away until we finally LOOK AT IT for God’s sake.
Our young selves can’t articulate at what’s aching us, because life gives us so much else to think about. That’s intentional. By the time we get to perceiving things aren’t as they should be, we’re already trained to push all unpleasantries to the side in the form of
ok that’s life and everyone has shit
and then we just go on.
Here’s the thing. When we’re younger, we just get on with it; there’s really no choice. The roots of an inferno are already there, but they’re minuscule. Barely detectable. And who even cares?
We get out of school, get a job, work to establish credit which means we get into debt, which leads to us needing to establish more credit, which means we get into more debt, and we work harder just to keep the big wheel we didn’t even know we created, going.
Life in steroid-driven western capitalism teaches us that the most fundamental principles of life on earth being about accumulating and paying. They throw in religion as a distraction to make the whole mess seem morally justifiable.
This isn’t by chance. It’s a big fucking lie but one we’re highly trained to internalise as normal.
We get colds. Ear infections. We skip periods and lunch breaks. Our relationships are questionable. We attract drama in our private lives like bees to flowers. We’re all off balance and hurt - but not badly enough to stop. We spend a lot of money on nothing.
Because stopping? How? Why? To what end?
We’ve become so adept at pushing pain to the back burner out of necessity because there is only so much energy to go around. Quality time becomes our motto, although there really isn’t any. The Christmas tree gets put up and the turkey gets shoved in the oven and we go back to work the next day and think we’re doing it right. We say happy birthday and buy gifts we hope are big enough. We spend too much and we drink a lot of wine. Our bodies and our minds suffer.
Virtual reality promises us freedom but makes it very difficult to step out off the train and manifest meaningful change, even if we wanted to.
Our free time is spent consuming outright garbage and advertisements posing as information for hours on a screen because we’re so bored and exhausted with our own lives. We get two weeks off if we’re lucky and try to see the world as if it were Disneyland. Or we just go to Disneyland.
We let loose in unexpected flashes of anger, frustration, anxiety, sadness, judgement and shame. Our own rage and ability to lie and pretend everything’s fine shocks us. The hurt parts of us influence everything we do and everything we are but we don’t admit that - even to ourselves.
The emptiness and exhaustion the whole thing is built on goes on unfettered because the consequences of challenging it would be too huge. Because how we’re living is what happiness is supposed to look like.
Then something happens.
A death, a job loss, a birth, an illness, a divorce.
Even then, there’s a chance we’re going to try our best and keep the machinery going. There might be enough denial to keep us from hearing the internal fury that’s at our core. Or we just choose emotional deafness because, in the short run, it’s easier.
But maybe the trauma causes a change. If we’re lucky, we see it and seize the moment. Trauma might open a new path to living in alignment with ourselves.
Each of us is perched, precariously and bravely, on a matrix of tender bruises that create the magnificent moonscape of our soul.
We want to look forward.
No, we don’t want to ruminate. Yes, we want to appreciate today because we know how lucky we are to have it. No, we don’t want to piss this moment away.
More than anything, we want peace.
Which brings me back to mastering the game.
What if life isn’t really about that at all?
What if it’s about allowing the hurts that bind us to heal, so we can have the peace we so desperately need?
What if mastering our lives started with the ability to grieve? To love and forgive - others and ourselves?
Maybe the highest purpose of grief is to look, without judgment or shame, at the things that have been asking - begging - to be looked at for a long time. Possibly since we entered this planet, all naked and waxy.
If we can treat at these hurt parts of ourselves with love, make room to change what needs to be changed to set it right, and release them, maybe we can heal.
It seems to me it’s when we don’t allow these parts of ourselves to have a voice that we suffer the most. So why don’t we look, allow, grieve and release the best we can? What if we’ve done enough therapy and what if we’ve ruminated enough?
Wouldn’t that be a start?
The weight of these injured parts of ourselves get heavier as we get older, and we don’t have the capacity that we did when we were younger to partition off and ignore entire parts of us anymore.
Age always tends to break down walls, literally, figuratively, in all the ways.
Maybe mastery has to do with integrating all those parts of ourselves and allowing them to live in peace and tranquility with one another. At last.
Grief from this perspective seems really important, doesn’t it? We’re so scared of vulnerability. Of getting overwhelmed. That’s where age works in our favour, though, because we do know that, with time, all things pass. Even the strongest of emotions.
They all pass.
Grief, by its nature, is cyclical. It gives us the promise of peace at its end.
I wish the grieving little moonscape of hurt in me could see the grieving little moonscapes of hurt in everyone, because it would make me a better person.
I think I’ll work on that.
Love to you all.
Diana
I'm wondering if we can only come to terms with so many of our losses later in life because there just wasn't time when we were younger, because we had to keep the machinery going. Now that the machine doesn't need me in the ways it once did, I have some stillness in which to stop and see and feel. It's a little mind-boggling, to look around and go, "OH. Wow. Here I am. Wow. Where am I going now? Where can I go? Where do I want to go?" I loved seeing you in the video. It's always nice to put a voice and image with a writer's words.
Gosh there are so many wise words and nuances in this post. I am going to have to save it and re read with fresh eyes and fresh coffee in the morning to fully appreciate it all. As always thought provoking, thank you for sharing.