serene living

by

We’re all QuietKeepers now

When I started this blog, living a more serene life was largely a choice involving a move to a more rural area and other intentional lifestyle changes. But thanks to the coronavirus and the imposition of stay-at-home orders, it looks like we’re all QuietKeepers now.

Although I’ve heard many positive reactions from people who are finding some enjoyment in more scaled-down lives, there have been plenty of negative ones related to boredom, isolation, and depression setting in. In offering my thoughts here, I should be clear that my own immersion into quietude has not been free of struggle and at times a longing for more activity and interaction with others. This was especially true at first when I missed my former proximity to an interstate highway along with the stimulation of the newsroom where I had spent most of my career. But even after I had mostly adjusted and began to write this blog, another change presented new challenges.

December sunset

For the last five years, my husband and I have had to limit our travel to attend to his elderly parents, both of whom have since died – the last in December. During that season of caregiving, as we were experiencing a mode of “sheltering in,” most of our friends and other family members were vacationing and “enjoying life,” often sharing with us their photos, experiences, plans, and delights.

As this pattern continued, my husband often said, “If we don’t learn anything from this and we don’t make changes in our lives as a result, then we will have lost an opportunity.” Those words helped me eventually to stop yearning for the way things used to be and get on with what needed to be done, staying alert to what I could draw from the experience. Although it still could be difficult watching friends and family breeze through lives that seemed ruled by fun, I found that by cooperating with my circumstances and duties, I began to change.

Now that restricted movement and enforced isolation are upon all of us, I can say that, although I haven’t welcomed these new circumstances, I was at least somewhat prepared for them by what I had gleaned from the last few years.

As I pondered my own situation during that period, I recalled something a woman who had known many a lean season once told me about how she sought to “live large,” even in reduced circumstances. Because she had an eye for beauty and was determined to make room in her life for it, she had a way of making a simple meal seem elegant in the way she prepared and served it. In her hands, a modest home or wardrobe could appear stylish because of a few well-chosen accents. Her way was inspiring, not because she filled her life with stuff and activity, but because she created space for what was truly valuable to her and so lived with an attitude of abundance.

I began to think about ways to follow her lead interiorly in the midst of boundaries that had been pulled in, plans that had been postponed, and dreams that were starting to fade. And so I no longer lived for the day when I would be free to do this or that, but chose to look for and enjoy what was already around me. Sometimes, it would be something as simple as allowing a constellation in the night sky to illuminate the inner darkness that awakened me in the wee hours. Or, letting the song and sight of a Dickcissel cheer me on a spring walk. In winter, while traversing a desolate landscape, I could feel heartened by a Northern Harrier coursing over a field in its hunt for food. And, at the close of a day filled with missteps and mishaps, I could sense that all was well for the moment in a sunset of brilliant color infused by light.

Dickcissel singing

Then, I read this in Interior Freedom by Jacques Philippe: “ . . . even in the most unfavorable outward circumstances we possess within ourselves a space of freedom that nobody can take away . . . without this discovery we will always be restricted in some way, and will never taste true happiness.”

Philippe offers as “a witness for our times” Etty Hillesum, who died at Auschwitz in 1943. In the diary she began keeping when the Nazis were systematically stripping Jews in the Netherlands of their exterior freedoms, Hillesum could write of “enjoying the broad sweep of the sky at the edge of the city, breathing in the fresh, unrationed air.” While acknowledging the reality of persecution and its effects, she insisted, “They can’t do anything to us, they really can’t. They can harass us, they can rob us of our material goods, of our freedom of movement, but we ourselves forfeit our greatest assets by our misguided compliance. By our feelings of being persecuted, humiliated, oppressed. By our own hatred.” Because Hillesum believed she had the power to determine her reactions to her circumstances, she could say, “I find life beautiful, and I feel free. The sky within me is as wide as the one stretching above my head.”

For Philippe – as for Hillesum – God is the source and guarantee of the inner freedom we all can possess if we learn to let it unfold. “. . . Then, even though many things may well cause us to suffer,” Philippe writes, “nothing will really be able to oppress or crush us.”

This is clearly a difficult time in our nation and our world and many are suffering from even more than limitations on our freedom. But during these days, I’d like to think that we will not just get through them, as one state official suggested, by “snuggling up to Netflix,” but that we will seize the opportunity to “live large” amid the restrictions and find true freedom within them. If we do that, perhaps when and if this period of sheltering-in ends, we will have discovered a new way to live – one that reflects what truly matters.

by

Otherwise engaged


“I’m so sorry, but I am engaged tonight.”

With that simple expression of regret, Mary Lindsay, the lead character in Elizabeth Goudge’s novel, The Scent of Water, gracefully – and successfully – declines a dinner invitation from Mrs. Hepplewhite, the neighborhood social maven.

Goudge’s story, which takes place in England in an earlier, more genteel time, leaves me wishing that we in our day had such a lovely and acceptable way of responding to similar overtures. But in our “so busy” culture, it seems we are expected to either recite a litany of activity to justify our regrets or, better still, find a way to wedge one more gathering into an already full schedule.

On the night of Mrs. Hepplewhite’s invitation, Mary Lindsay had planned to pore over the old diaries she had found in the house inherited from Cousin Mary. To her credit, she kept to her plan, held her hostess at bay, and went home to have aP1040537n early supper, light a fire “for the sake of company and loveliness,” and sit beside it with the diaries piled nearby.

Had Mary lived in our time and place, I wonder if she wouldn’t have thought to herself, “Darn, I was going to page through Cousin Mary’s diaries tonight, but, oh well, I guess I can do that another time – or maybe look at a few when I get home.” Thankfully, though, in Goudge’s imagination, Mary stands her ground and lives on to inspire me – and other kindred spirits.

Like most people of our day, I have become deft at tweaking schedules and rearranging the time to meet a myriad of obligations – even if I arrive at them late or breathless. But as part of my quest to incorporate more quiet – and sanity – into my life, I’ve been trying to shed the practice of “wedging” in favor of weaving some breathing room into each day, whether it’s to stay home and garden or catch up with the laundry and mail. This means saying “no” to more invitations and “yes” to a few, remembering, as one friend has pointed out, that other people can’t see our calendars.

I’ve also learned, though, that the world in which we live is largely made up of Mrs. Hepplewhites who cannot imagine why someone would prefer staying home to any organized activity or social gathering. As a result, few of us have the wherewithal to say we are “engaged” when we have planned – and perhaps need – an evening at home with a good book.

Yet that is precisely what Goudge’s Mary Lindsay did. Would Mrs. Hepplewhite have understood if Mary had been more forthcoming about her plans? Unlikely. Which is why I sometimes wish for a world that permits and accepts “otherwise engaged” and does not pry into what that might mean.

Thankfully, I have among my friends a few Mary Lindsays who would understand if I said I needed some unscheduled time to recover from a packed calendar, or who are trying themselves to infuse their lives with a little more serenity and sanity.

Recently, one such friend and I made plans to see an art show and scheduled it around an afternoon party she already had agreed to attend. When we discovered that the art show was starting later than we had thought, I suggested we abandon the plan so that my friend could go to her party without having to rush. Kind and accommodating soul that she is, she wanted to “make it work” by having us get to the art show a little earlier, perhaps catching the artists as they were opening their booths.

I reminded her of a conversation we had had a few weeks earlier about building enough time into our schedules to get to where we are going, instead of rushing. That particular day, she had multiple commitments in wide-ranging locations and she later told me that the afternoon of seemingly nonstop driving had been exhausting.

After she finally agreed to skip the art show and let me go alone, she wrote: “You’re right. I’ve been trying to make my life more peaceful, which means not doing everything I’d like to.”

It took fortitude – for both of us – to come to that decision and to resist social messages that urge us to keep moving and to collect as many pleasures and diversions as we can – even if they’re not very enjoyable in the long run because they’ve left us tired, ill, or just plain irritable.

Doing one thing on a Sunday afternoon is not easy when everyone else is doing – and talking about – three or more. It can feel, at first, like you’re missing out or, perhaps worse, not as important as all those people with crowded calendars. Our world, after all, values activity – and the more of it the better. It loves the biblical Martha who was busy in the kitchen while her sister, Mary, sat at Jesus’s feet, seemingly oblivious to the work that had to be done.

We are told, however, that Mary has chosen “the better part.” And when I follow her example and that of Mary Lindsay, so have I.