Night Lights
Solstice is an astronomical event, a phenomenon occurring biannually which marks two extremes: the shortest day of the year (today) and the longest day of the year. Its meaning derives from the Latin: sol for sun of course and stice meaning standing still in that the sun stops before it reverses its direction. All cultures in the world have noted or somehow marked the occurrence of the solstice, but each has historically come away with different forms of its observance.
I’m writing about solstice today for a couple reasons I suppose. One is its reminder of constant change in our natural world. There is always some movement in this life – a lengthening and a shortening, a moving toward and a moving away from, but it often seems that many of us would rather insist on holding onto something a bit more concrete, that we can touch, hold or identify as familiar. Most of us do not welcome change with open arms because it represent the unknown, about which we can never be too certain.
In the coming months I will be writing more about a favorite theme of mine – the denial of death. This denial of death which we endorse and glorify in our culture, often unwittingly, is essentially a denial of life. We can’t have one without the other. So how do we manage this uncertainty which often presents as anxiety – either on a personal or collective level? Many of us will simply choose to react, to prepare for what we think is inevitable in our minds – as if we can predict the future. Of course many of us can predict the future in that the narrowness of our ability to see the world in front of us is such that our field of vision is limited to only those things which we want to see.
This closing up, this denial of what we don’t want to accept, what we are not willing to see and what we have told ourselves we would never accept is in many ways like a solstice. Our world shrinks down to what is manageable under the circumstances, the mystery and uncertainty of what we can’t control is simply too much for many of us. But what if the unknown, the uncertainty is our best teacher? How might we respond to it? I think of a favorite quote of David Steindl-Rast:
The root of joy is gratefulness…It is not joy that makes us grateful;
it is gratitude that makes us joyful.
You can watch Brother David’s Ted Talk here.
I have written about gratitude and gratefulness a number of times. In our culture, we tend to be focused almost exclusively on the personal losses faced in elderhood: the loss of autonomy as a result of physical, mental or emotional difficulties or challenges; the loss of purpose in that many of us no longer feel we are contributing members of a community; and the loss of engagement in life. I believe that successful elderhood is possible and desirable, amidst all the difficulties, pessimism and “conventional wisdom” (or insanity, depending on your point of view) – perhaps even as a result of all these challenges. This is what I will be writing more about in 2017. I am grateful for this opportunity to write about this, for each of you that reads a post of mine and particularly to those who comment or send me an email about a post. Happy solstice day today and may your days be lengthened in joy and deepened in purpose.
© Barbara E. Cashman 2016 www.DenverElderLaw.org