"Never apologize, never explain." I heard somebody say that once and took it on as not a half-bad maxim for going through life. For a while. Eventually I decided it was not the best rule to live by and there were times when flexibility made a lot more sense than following rigid principles. Nuanced thinking beats ideological commitment.
I turn 86 in a few weeks. That means I am now closer to 90 years of age than I am to the already-really-old age of 80, and I find that a seriously sobering thought. And I am aware that the corrolary to "never apologize, never explain" also needs to go: that is, "live life without regrets." Much as I would like to think I played my cards to the best of my ability as I faced one challenge after another, as I look back now I find myself overwhelmed by the realization that if I could live life over again I would do a whole lot of things differently.
Right off the top, if I had known I was going to live twenty-four years of my life in Japan, I would have studied Japanese far more seriously right from the start. I would have practiced my Czerny finger exercises on the piano, I would have learned to play soccer and spent a whole lot more time getting physical exercise.
I had a friend - her name was Gretchen - who said to me once, when I asked her if she had any regrets in life, "No. There's nothing I would do over again because I like who I am today and if I had lived life differently I wouldn't be that person." Then she added, "Of course, I would have spent less time doing some of those things."
I woke up with an ear-worm this morning of a song from the Weimar Republic days. Don't know why it should show up out of nowhere; it just did. It's one of my favorite pieces of music. It begins, "Das gibt's nur einmal (It only happens once), [English lyrics; Seven language version] and is a pitch for enjoying things while you can, while they still are there to enjoy. It has the wonderful line in it, "...denn jeder Frühling hat nur einen Mai (because every springtime has only one month of May)."
One of the best things I ever did was to take my junior year of college in Germany. I went to Munich, one of the world's best cities, I'm convinced, and got, at the age of twenty, my first taste of the big city, the theaters, the opera and concert halls, museums, all manner of types of people, endless intellectual challenges. At the university I got to take a course in the history of the Third Reich taught by Germans who had lived through it and could give perspective I could not have gotten in my own country. One thing that has stuck with me was that it gave me a lens through which to understand the dangers of MAGA authoritarianism. It helped me see our manipulator-in-chief, Donald Trump, as an "out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the fire" solution to the failure of American capitalism and its toxic Ayn Rand-like worship of individual rights at the expense of communal welfare.
Americans, I am convinced, routinely fail to prioritize equity. We have built a national cultural structure in which some of us have been able to become super rich while so many others of us get left behind. We (a critical mass of us) have persuaded ourselves that working collectively for the common welfare is socialist - and we have made that a bad word. Isn't wealth the sign of God's favor? Aren't rich people smarter than poor people? Trump and his opportunistic enablers are the outcome of this folly.
I know that even hinting at a comparison between Trump and Hitler is a good way to make a fool of yourself - Hitler's Germany lacked the institutional strength that America is beginning to show at long last. But the parallels - the scapegoating, trolling, ghosting, blatant lying - are there and they are sobering to consider even in their paler versions.
* * *
On Christmas Eve I fell getting out of the car in front of my house and broke my hip. More precisely, I broke the femur in my left leg. I have mentioned elsewhere that they sent an ambulance (and two fire engines, of course) to haul me off to the hospital where on Christmas Day they put a rod through the marrow in the bone from hip to knee, setting me off on the journey of learning to walk again. And the challenge of learning how not to burn my supremely dutiful husband out from exhaustion. He's already totally transformed the house by putting in a chair lift and grab bars everywhere and he hounds me to follow the exercise plan the physical therapists have set out for me. There's a bit of friction there. He, unlike me, still lives in the future and wants me to repair sooner rather than later. I'm content to go into rest mode and let the body take the time it needs. I am now working on getting up and down the stairs (strong leg up first going up, weak leg down first going down) and am already getting quite efficient at frying eggs and making toast without assistance. It only took me a week to figure out that I could avoid spilling the tea if I brought the cup, the milk and the teapot to the table separately instead of carrying the full cup on the tray on the walker across the kitchen.
To return to that song, "Das gibt's nur einmal (It only happens once), for a minute... It has an illustrious history. Originally from the 1931 German film Der Kongreß tanzt - Congress Dances - the song became wildly popular and was translated into many languages. It was outlawed by the Nazis and became a form of resistance to the Third Reich. I love the fact that I was born in May - the merry merry month of May, April showers bring May flowers and all that. And all the folks - I'm thinking of Thich Nhat Hanh, the "master of mindfulness" and Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now. All sorts of people have stressed the wisdom of seizing the present moment. Every springtime has only one month of May! Don't blow it. Enjoy it to the fullest.
My leg still pains me; it will be some time before that pain is no more. Donald Trump's enablers pain me; it will be some time before the pain is no more. But the month of May is almost here, and that's cause for rejoicing.
Both/and - not either/or. I spoke earlier of living by nuanced flexibility rather than by rigid principles. Flooded as I am these days with memories of the past and sadness over loved ones who have passed on before me, I am working pretty much full time trying to both live every present moment to the fullest and at the same time allowing myself to surrender to the nostalgia of treasured memories.
So this is what it's like to be old!? Not all that bad.
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