Instead of working on my literature review for my dissertation, I have been reading a book called A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L'Engle. It is absolutely delicious. It is a journal-type book in which she reflects on middle adulthood and the challenges of raising her children and maintaining her career as an author. It has been wonderful to hear a voice that may foreshadow my own in twenty-five years. Hearing an older woman reflect on being fifty-something with joy, maturity, confidence and a deep sense of her own beauty, makes me feel hopeful that life will not always be as chaotic as it has felt recently. There will be times when I am more settled, when I can look back at the rich blessings of life with some of the blanks filled in. Youth is so idealized in our culture, but tonight I told Rob and I am looking forward to being fifty and knowing more and caring less.
Here are some tasty morsels-
about aging:
"So the challenge I face with children is the redemption of adulthood. We must make it evident that maturity is the fulfillment of childhood and adolescence, not a diminishing; that it is an affirmation of life, not a denial; that it is entering fully into our essential selves" (p. 106).
about caring (for me, about becoming a therapist):
"It takes a tremendous maturity, a maturity I don't possess, to strike a balance of immovableness/detachment which makes us creatively useful, able to be compassionate, to be involved in the other person's suffering rath than in our own response to it. False compassion, or sentimentality, always leads us to escape by withdrawing, by becoming cold and impassive and wouding" (p. 118).
I like the line about being creatively useful.
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