Adaptation - Embracing Change When Life Deals You An Unexpected Hand
Hope Infusion Newsletter - May 2022 Edition
Every Age I’ve Ever Been
I am 56 years young today. I’m also every age I’ve ever been.
Each year lived is an interlocking piece of the puzzle of my life. Each year lived has been a master class complete with its own custom syllabus.
I once lamented youthful indiscretions, ill timed decisions, and ill conceived plans. I once berated myself for past mistakes, missteps, and misjudgments. I no longer do.
Yesterday’s errors are fertile soil from which today’s wisdom blooms. I therefore treasure every feeling felt, pain endured, victory celebrated, sorrow mourned, plan failed, and insight gained!
I embrace EVERY age I have ever been, and draw wisdom from EVERY moment I have ever lived.
And that makes every trip around the sun of the 56 traveled to date, worthy of celebration!
Adapting to Change
My Memoir Workshop teacher challenged me to write about a time when life blindsided me with an unexpected change that forced me to adapt to a new way of living. I didn’t have to think long to recall a story that illustrated that theme. I’m living one right now! I share that story, a renowned & historic poem, and what I’m reading in today’s newsletter.
In the latter half of 2021, my photographic memory broke up with me. It abandoned me cold and without warning, ghosting me like a wayward lover.
That abandonment led to an insightful journey of adaptation. But the journey didn’t commence with 2021’s abandonment. To fully understand the context of what transpired, you need to travel back in time, to 1977…..
I stood before my 6th grade class and recited “The Creation” by James Weldon Johnson. My memorization — perfect! My delivery — flawless! My pacing and pauses — on point!
I was proud of myself!
I returned to my desk feeling ecstatic — wearing elation like an overcoat in winter, and satisfaction like an adorning scarf. I inhaled the applause I received in response, and exhaled the relief that accompanies a job well done.
But the thrill of accomplishment was short lived.
I earned an A+, and garnered the praise of my teacher. But I also earned resentment, and garnered the contempt of my classmates.
We’d been given 4 weeks to commit the poem to memory as a Black History month project, after which a day was designated for each student to come before the class to recite it. I don’t recall where I fell in the line up on recitation day. But I do recall that I was the only student in 6th grade who memorized the poem in its entirety.
My teacher was impressed, assuming I’d worked hard to successfully complete the assignment. My classmates were annoyed, assuming I’d worked hard to become “teacher’s pet”.
They were both wrong!
I exerted little effort to memorize the poem, and 4 weeks was far more time than I needed to do so. What I didn’t know then, that I know now is that my mind has a built in camera, a photographic feature that enables me to memorize with exceptional ease.
It served me well in academic pursuits, and enabled me to live life bolstered by an ability to visually record vast sums of information and store it in my brain’s internal hard drive for effortless retrieval.
For five decades my memory functioned like a well calibrated machine. I operated on cerebral auto-pilot and thought little of it because it was an innate part of my existence.
Until it wasn’t. Until everything changed. Suddenly. Drastically. Unexpectedly!
My memory began to fail in ways big and small as years of acute sleep deprivation took an exacting toll. The body cannot repair and restore without proper sleep, and chronic sleeplessness was a state in which I had languished for far too long.
The sudden lapse of recall was disorienting. I felt unmoored, untethered, adrift — like an unmanned vessel floating aimlessly in the open sea.
And so commenced my season of missing: missed due dates, missed payments, missed appointments, missed meetings, missed deadlines, missed order!
I pride myself on being timely, reliable, and dependable, yet found myself becoming UNtimely, UNreliable, and UNdependable.
Life is a paradoxical blend of brutal and beautiful. This experience has proven to be a bittersweet blend of both.
I’ve been physically exhausted and mentally exasperated — BRUTAL! Yet for reasons I don’t understand and can’t explain, my creativity and inspiration to write have bloomed exponentially — BEAUTIFUL!
It’s the height of irony that I’ve never slept less, but never created more, and that I do so effortlessly — often penning entire poems, stories or essays from direct downloads of spontaneous inspiration.
This disruption wreaked havoc on my everyday “normal”, and required my ADAPTATION to a new way of living, functioning, and being.
There comes a point in every life at which one must confront and deal with the hand they have been dealt, not the one they wish they had.
I adapted to life without the razor sharp memory that supported me for half a century. I adapted to reliance on a host of tools for which I previously had little use: e-calendars, to do lists, reminder notebooks, and digital alarms. Adaptation has been a humbling experience, but it produced a fertile humility that gave birth to profound empathy.
Empathy is the bridge of connection to another human’s suffering.
Empathy sees an individual in distress and says: “I understand your plight because I’ve lived a version of it.” It conveys the deeply compassionate sentiment that “you are not alone.”
I don’t enjoy suffering, abrupt change, or undesired disruptions — I don’t know that anyone does. But in my observation….pain, discomfort, and inconvenience are a trio of life’s greatest teachers.
Indifference to another’s struggles is softened when their suffering is filtered through the lens of my similar experience.
When any difficulty — physical or otherwise — ceases being about that which impacts “those people” afar off, and becomes about “these people” close and near — one’s perspective changes dramatically. Situations hit differently when it is our lives, or the lives of those we hold dear, that are upended.
I find myself able to say : “I understand”, and mean it with a heightened degree of sincerity.
I understand the frustration of a once facile mind betraying you in unexpected ways.
I understand exasperation that arises from an inability to fully trust your own recall.
I understand the surrender of ego required, to own and acknowledge a new shortcoming.
I’ve learned to pump the brakes and slow way down on the highway of presumption before judging how someone else handles a challenging issue I may know little or nothing about.
There’s nothing quite like LIVING a given challenge to evoke compassion for those likewise afflicted.
If empathy is a life lesson Divine Providence destined me to learn in this season, it’s been a lesson well taught and expertly illustrated. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
The exquisite wording with which James Weldon Johnson imagines The Creation Story made me fall in love anew with this classic poetic gem.
THE CREATION
And God stepped out on space,
And He looked around and said,
"I'm lonely —
I'll make me a world."
And far as the eye of God could see
Darkness covered everything,
Blacker than a hundred midnights
Down in a cypress swamp.
Then God smiled,
And the light broke,
And the darkness rolled up on one side,
And the light stood shining on the other,
And God said, "That's good!"
Then God reached out and took the light in His hands,
And God rolled the light around in His hands
Until He made the sun;
And He set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.
And the light that was left from making the sun
God gathered it up in a shining ball
And flung it against the darkness,
Spangling the night with the moon and stars.
Then down between
The darkness and the light
He hurled the world;
And God said, "That's good!"
Then God himself stepped down —
And the sun was on His right hand,
And the moon was on His left;
The stars were clustered about His head,
And the earth was under His feet.
And God walked, and where He trod
His footsteps hollowed the valleys out
And bulged the mountains up.
Then He stopped and looked and saw
That the earth was hot and barren.
So God stepped over to the edge of the world
And He spat out the seven seas;
He batted His eyes, and the lightnings flashed;
He clapped His hands, and the thunders rolled;
And the waters above the earth came down,
The cooling waters came down.
Then the green grass sprouted,
And the little red flowers blossomed,
The pine tree pointed his finger to the sky,
And the oak spread out his arms,
The lakes cuddled down in the hollows of the ground,
And the rivers ran down to the sea;
And God smiled again,
And the rainbow appeared,
And curled itself around His shoulder.
Then God raised His arm and He waved His hand
Over the sea and over the land,
And He said, "Bring forth! Bring forth!"
And quicker than God could drop His hand.
Fishes and fowls
And beasts and birds
Swam the rivers and the seas,
Roamed the forests and the woods,
And split the air with their wings.
And God said, "That's good!"
Then God walked around,
And God looked around
On all that He had made.
He looked at His sun,
And He looked at His moon,
And He looked at His little stars;
He looked on His world
With all its living things,
And God said, "I'm lonely still."
Then God sat down
On the side of a hill where He could think;
By a deep, wide river He sat down;
With His head in His hands,
God thought and thought,
Till He thought, "I'll make me a man!"
Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled Him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand;
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till He shaped it in His own image;
Then into it He blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul.
Amen. Amen.
What I’m Reading
Bittersweet is both the title of this newly released book and an apt description of the season of life in which I currently find myself. The book isn’t so much one that taught me something new, as it is one that eloquently gave voice to a reality I’ve both experienced and embraced as this quote by the author beautifully conveys:
“We live in a culture that often wants to only discuss what’s going well. Anything that’s not going well is seen as a detour from the main road. The truth is, pain is not a detour from the main road. Pain is part of the road we ALL walk as human beings.” ~Susan Cain
Description:
Susan Cain employees research, storytelling, and memoir to explore why we experience sorrow and longing, and how embracing the bittersweetness of life is the path to creativity, connection, and transcendence.
If we don’t acknowledge our own heartache, she says, we can end up inflicting it on others, but if we realize that all humans know—or will know—loss and suffering, we can turn toward one another.
At a time of profound discord and personal anxiety, Bittersweet brings us together in deep and unexpected ways.