Posts Tagged ‘Meaning’
Allaying Grief Through Books
Photo: Antonio Mantero/Flickr
FOR three years after the death of her adored eldest sister, Anne-Marie, Nina Sankovitch mourned by staying relentlessly busy. She felt a guilt-strafed survivor’s obligation to live life enough for two.
The mother of four sons, she signed up for PTA committees, coached soccer and a Lego robotics team, taught art appreciation classes to elementary school students, took Pilates classes and parenting classes, joined a book group and a tennis group, began kayaking, started a theater group for children in her basement and a Web site for trading books, gardened ferociously and wrote a novel (unpublished).
But in her increasingly frantic efforts to taste joy for herself and her sister, she tasted only ashes. She would still wake in the night, sobbing.
Finally, she jettisoned almost all her commitments in favor of the one pursuit that had always given her special pleasure. She committed herself to reading a book a day for an entire year.
“After years of chasing after joy, I finally sat down and let it come to me,” Ms. Sankovitch, 48, a tall, tennis-vibrant woman, said over coffee at her kitchen table in Westport, Conn. A photo triptych of Anne-Marie in thick reading glasses, posing in merry solidarity with Ms. Sankovitch’s son Peter, wearing his first pair, gleams from a rosewood frame nearby.
On Oct. 28, 2008, her 46th birthday, Ms. Sankovitch began the project, dedicating it to Anne-Marie, who died four months after receiving a diagnosis of bile-duct cancer, a week shy of turning 47. That last day, driving home from an encouraging visit with her sister in the hospital, Ms. Sankovitch got the phone call, pulled her car to the side of the road and screamed.
In the resulting memoir, “Tolstoy and the Purple Chair” (Harper Collins), whose title alludes to her reading armchair of cat-clawed, faded purple brocade, Ms. Sankovitch writes about that redemptive year of contemplation. The book is also an account of her family traumas: not only the death of Anne-Marie but also the World War II murders of three of her father’s siblings. It is a meditation on grief and healing, on values held sacred by her family and the life well lived. It is, of course, a paean to reading.
“I was looking to books for more than just escape and pleasure,” said Ms. Sankovitch, an accomplished environmental lawyer who gradually gave up practicing after she had children. Now she was seeking answers about “how to live with sorrow and how to find my place in the world.”
While the mechanics of the project could occasionally be daunting, Ms. Sankovitch found the solace she yearned for. Books like “The Laws of Evening,” the short story collection by Mary Yukari Waters, taught her about addressing loss. “The characters were past the denial stage, past anger,” she said. “They were figuring out how to go on living with loss. Everyone’s solution was different, but many used memory to cope, as proof that good things will come again.”
Diana Athill reinforced that lesson. “Somewhere Towards the End” is a memoir she published at 91. “Every day is still a new day for her,” Ms. Sankovitch said.
Sitting in Ms. Sankovitch’s sunny kitchen, as her sons, ages 10 through 17, tromp in and out of the house, and talking books with her can be just plain fun. As she trades ideas about characters, her blue eyes sparkle. She opens a worn notepad to jot down unfamiliar titles.
“I do read a Kindle on the exercise bike, but I love a real book, especially from the library or a used one,” she said. “I like knowing that other people have held it. I like reading what others have scribbled in the margins. I’ve even seen people make little grammar-correcting marks.”
Seeking safe haven in reading was natural for a woman who grew up in a family of book worshippers. Her middle sister, Natasha, had been a comparative literature professor (later a lawyer); her Belgian mother, Tilde, taught French literature at Northwestern. The year her Belarusian father, Anatole, now a retired surgeon, spent in a sanatorium for tuberculosis, he and another patient read novels aloud to each other. The books Ms. Sankovitch read to her young sons, all passionate readers, include volumes of poetry she had written for them.
Reading was a means of communication for her close-knit family, with its European formality. “My parents are private people,” Ms. Sankovitch said. “Americans are raised to ask personal questions. But I feel that if something isn’t my business, I won’t pry. Books are a shield and a way to get closer to those questions, so you can talk about taboo subjects. You can have those intimate conversations without prying.”
Anne-Marie was an art historian who loved the written word, and the sisters, unlike in many ways, often found common ground through books. “She was smarter than me and more beautiful,” Ms. Sankovitch said sadly, recalling her sister. “But I was more fearless and socially adept. She didn’t suffer fools. I’d been at dinner parties where she would up and leave if she was bored. But she was a saint to me.”
In “Tolstoy and the Purple Chair,” she describes how she and other family members would bring books to Anne-Marie’s sickbed. The visits often included book chats. After her death, the family dedicated a bench in her memory in the Conservatory Garden in Central Park, where passers-by can sit, contemplate the surrounding blooming beauty and read.
During her reading year, Ms. Sankovitch received recommendations for books from readers of a blog she had started (readallday.org), where she posted short reviews of each book. She also drew inspiration from the deep, eclectic collection in the Westport Public Library.
“My year would have been different with a different library, in a different town,” she said. She discovered new stacks, exploring genres outside her comfort zone of novels: essays, plays, science fiction, travel.
Typically reading 70 pages an hour, she’d try to finish each book in about four hours. She still did the laundry and carpooling, reading while the boys were in school, percolating at night, posting in the morning.
She described her reviews as “a public diary.”
“They’re not intellectual dismemberment,” she continued, “but more of my emotional response to the book.”
About “Little Bee,” the devastating novel by Chris Cleave, she wrote: “We connect to those we can see and touch; we protect the ones we can. But even then, a sister can die, and you won’t even know it until you get the phone call driving home over the Henry Hudson Bridge after what you thought was a very good day.”
The quixotic intensity of the project did not surprise those who know Ms. Sankovitch: she seems hard-wired for the full-bore experience. When tennis elbow threatened to forfeit her daily match with her husband, Jack Menz, a Manhattan lawyer (their home sits on two acres, including a clay court), she switched to her left hand, playing poorly but gamely. As a young associate at a Manhattan firm, a position demanding 16-hour days, she was focused and efficient, largely because other priorities called, including books. She would skip lunch and close her door to read for pleasure.
Once, while biking, recalled Stephanie Young, a friend from Harvard Law School, Ms. Sankovitch mentioned that her father advised “everything in moderation.”
At that, Ms. Young laughed. “Nina doesn’t do anything in moderation,” she said. “While she was telling us this, she was eating her sixth FrozFruit bar.”
As Ms. Sankovitch began to emerge from grief during her year of reading, her husband said the impact on the entire family was salutary.
“Nina had such a serenity,” Mr. Menz said. “And part of it was that the pace of her life was just slower than everyone else’s. We had fun dinners, because you’d not only hear about what our guys did during the day, but Nina would talk about the new characters she had just read. I’d watch Giants games with our son Michael, and she’d be there, but reading. We just gave her that space.”
Now, Ms. Sankovitch’s own readers have written her, saying that her memoir has become their handbook about how to read through grief.
“I am so happy that what I found in books, someone else might have found in mine,” Ms. Sankovitch said. “It’s all back to Anne-Marie, what a tribute to her.” She is thinking of writing a new book, based on letters from the late 19th century that she found in the family’s former Upper West Side brownstone.
And she is still reading. Last November, she proposed that she and her husband tackle “War and Peace” together. He somehow set it aside.
Naturally, Ms. Sankovitch finished. But not until January.
Some books are just not meant to be read in a day.
~Jan Hoffman
The Most Important Thing In Life
Photo: Kelly Vaclavek/Flickr
Lots of people have hobbies. Some people collect old coins or foreign stamps, some do needlework, others spend most of their spare time on a particular sport.
A lot of people enjoy reading. But reading tastes differ widely. Some people only read newspapers or comics, some like reading novels, while others prefer books on astronomy, wildlife, or technological discoveries. If I happen to be interested in horses or precious stones, I cannot expect everyone else to share my enthusiasm.
If I watch all the sports programs on TV with great pleasure, I must put up with the fact that other people find sports boring. Is there nothing that interests us all? Is there nothing that concerns everyone—no matter who they are or where they live in the world? Yes… there are questions that certainly should interest everyone. They are precisely the questions this course is about.
What is the most important thing in life? If we ask someone living on the edge of starvation, the answer is food. If we ask someone dying of cold, the answer is warmth. If we put the same question to someone who feels lonely and isolated, the answer will probably be the company of other people.
But when these basic needs have been satisfied—will there still be something that everybody needs? Philosophers think so. They believe that man cannot live by bread alone. Of course everyone needs food. And everyone needs love and care. But there is something else—apart from that—which everyone needs, and that is to figure out who we are and why we are here.
Being interested in why we are here is not a “casual” interest like collecting stamps. People who ask such questions are taking part in a debate that has gone on as long as man has lived on this planet. How the universe, the earth, and life came into being is a bigger and more important question than who won the most gold medals in the last Olympics.
The best way of approaching philosophy is to ask a few philosophical questions: How was the world created? Is there any will or meaning behind what happens? Is there a life after death? How can we answer these questions? And most important, how ought we to live? People have been asking these questions throughout the ages. We know of no culture which has not concerned itself with what man is and where the world came from.
Basically there are not many philosophical questions to ask. We have already asked some of the most important ones. But history presents us with many different answers to each question. So it is easier to ask philosophical questions than to answer them.
Today as well each individual has to discover his own answer to these same questions. You cannot find out whether there is a God or whether there is life after death by looking in an encyclopedia. Nor does the encyclopedia tell us how we ought to live. However, reading what other people have believed can help us formulate our own view of life.
Philosophers’ search for the truth resembles a detective story. Some think Andersen was the murderer, others think it was Nielsen or Jensen. The police are sometimes able to solve a real crime. But it is equally possible that they never get to the bottom of it, although there is a solution somewhere. So even if it is difficult to answer a question, there may be one—and only one—right answer. Either there is a kind of existence after death—or there is not.
A lot of age-old enigmas have now been explained by science. What the dark side of the moon looks like was once shrouded in mystery. It was not the kind of thing that could be solved by discussion, it was left to the imagination of the individual. But today we know exactly what the dark side of the moon looks like, and no one can “believe” any longer in the Man in the Moon, or that the moon is made of green cheese.
A Greek philosopher who lived more than two thousand years ago believed that philosophy had its origin in man’s sense of wonder. Man thought it was so astonishing to be alive that philosophical questions arose of their own accord.
It is like watching a magic trick. We cannot understand how it is done. So we ask: how can the magician change a couple of white silk scarves into a live rabbit?
A lot of people experience the world with the same incredulity as when a magician suddenly pulls a rabbit out of a hat which has just been shown to them empty.
In the case of the rabbit, we know the magician has tricked us. What we would like to know is just how he did it. But when it comes to the world it’s somewhat different. We know that the world is not all sleight of hand and deception because here we are in it, we are part of it. Actually, we are the white rabbit being pulled out of the hat. The only difference between us and the white rabbit is that the rabbit does not realize it is taking part in a magic trick. Unlike us. We feel we are part of something mysterious and we would like to know how it all works.
~Jostien Gaarder
The Hunt For Approval
Photo: Stephane Photographie/Flickr
It is a good idea to look at how much we keep looking for recognition altogether. It can be embarrassing, but often, as soon as we do anything of note, it is as if we were little children at a playground shouting. “Watch me, mama! Look at me! Look what I can do!” And when whatever we have done is not acknowledged or recognized, how quickly we get puffy and upset.
This gives us a chance to examine our whole relationship to approval and recognition, even fame. The idea is not that recognition in itself is a bad thing, or that we should not encourage or recognize others. It can be inspiring to see the kinds of creative works, intellectual insights, ingenious problem solving, and acts of heroism and kindness that people have accomplished: it can inspire us to do similar things. Especially in a world dominated by bad news and focus on the many problems we face, it is good to applaud people who do good. The problem arises when we expect our actions to be rewarded.
It is surprising how quickly our expectations trigger emotions such as anger, jealousy, righteous indignation, and self-pity. Instead of being able to appreciate what comes our way, we fester about how we didn’t get the praise or recognition we rightfully deserved. And if what we are doing is all about being seen, when we are not seen, the wind goes out of our sails and we founder.
Another problem with the hunt for approval is that to gain approval you must buy in to the dominant values of the society around you. If what gets approval is getting rich, that is what you strive for; if it is beauty, that is what you obsess about; if it is power over others, that is what you focus on. The desperation for outer rewards goes hand-in-hand with an increasing sense of inner poverty. If you are successful in your quest for recognition, you may be able to ignore what you have given up to achieve it. If you are unsuccessful, you may simply blame the system. But in either case, since you have given over our power to others, you are left empty.
When you notice you are expecting applause, explore what lies behind that expectation. Notice the subtle shift between when you have done something and when you begin to look around you for recognition.
~Judy Lief
Never sell your soul to the Man…
Photo: Hitesh Sheladiya/Flickr
I tell my students, “Never sell your soul to the Man.” By that I mean, be your own person and never, ever let someone else own you, or control your life. The danger, of course, is that you get on a slippery slope where you enjoy the money, power, and recognition for what you’re doing, but it doesn’t stir your passions.
If you follow that course, you may wake up some day and find yourself so far away from the real you – and what you really want to do with your life – that you feel trapped, in a box, and don’t have the courage to give it all up and do what you want to do. Ten years later, you ask whatever happened to the person who dreamed the impossible dream?
I’ve dreamed that impossible dream many times in completely different situations. At first, I feel like I am climbing through solid rock; but if I stay the course, the dream not only comes true but goes far beyond anything I ever imagined. . .
~ Bill George
Books…
The mark of a good book is it changes every time you read it.
- Anderson Cooper
The Seed of Faith
I am with you always.
Matthew 28:20
A few days ago I read this excerpt from the writings of a scientist:
“For me, and probably for all of us, the concept of a personal, interested god can be appealing, often deeply so. In times of sorrow or despair, I often wonder what it would be like to be able to pray to God… and believe that I was heard, believe that my petition might be answered. When I sing the hymns of faith in Jesus’ love, I am drawn by their intimacy, their allure, their poetry. But in the end such faith is simply not available to me. I can’t do it.”
I felt sad that, although she realized how faith could be a powerful resource in her life, she concluded: “…in the end such faith is simply not available to me. I can’t do it.”
Although I personally struggle with certain aspects of my faith, I am grateful that the seed of faith has been planted in my heart.
My faith has taught me that there is a purpose for everything that happens in my life.
My faith has given me the strength to cope with the difficulties and challenges of life.
My faith has given me the courage to go on during the darkest moments of my life.
Thank you, Lord, for the gift of faith. Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.
- Matt
What About Gross National Happiness?
When Jigme Singye Wangchuck was crowned king of the Himalayan nation of Bhutan in 1972, he declared he was more concerned with Gross National Happiness than with Gross Domestic Product. This probably didn’t come as a surprise to the forest-laden country’s 810,000 to 2.2 million (estimates vary greatly) residents, most of whom are poor subsistence farmers. Bhutan s GDP is a mere $2.7 billion, but Wangchuck still maintains that economic growth does not necessarily lead to contentment, and instead focuses on the four pillars of GNH: economic self-reliance, a pristine environment, the preservation and promotion of Bhutan’s culture, and good governance in the form of a democracy.
King Wangchuck’s idea that public policy should be more closely tied to wellbeing – how people feel about their lives – is catching on. There is a growing interest in some policymaking circles in looking at these measures, says Richard Easterlin, economics professor at the University of Southern California. We have been misguided in dismissing what people say about how happy they are and simply assuming that if they are consuming more apples and buying more cars they are better off. There are efforts to devise a new economic index that would measure wellbeing gauged by things like satisfaction with personal relationships, employment, and meaning and purpose in life, as well as, for example, the extent new drugs and technology improve standards of living.
The independent London-based think tank New Economics Foundation is pushing the implementation of a set of national wellbeing accounts that would tote up life satisfaction and personal development as well as issues such as trust and engagement. The accounts would also include liabilities, such as stress and depression. The logistics won’t be hard, says Hetan Shah of NEF, because much of the data is already captured by the government. In 2002, the Strategy Unit, an internal government think tank that reports to Prime Minister Tony Blair, conducted a seminar on life satisfaction and its public policy implications. Shah says Germany, Italy and France are also looking into the issue, one he predicts will become increasingly important as people continue to seek the good life.
- Nadia Mustafa
This article was originally posted in www.time.com
Our Lady’s Juggler
The story is simply this. Many centuries ago, as written by Anatole France, there lived a man by the name of Barnaby.
He was a juggler who lived from day to day on the small donations he received. He went from town to town and he would take knives or balls and juggle them. And that is all that he could do. He felt embarrassed over his lack of talent. He almost felt totally useless. People in the town in which he juggled would be involved in their business work. Some would run small little shops. Some were doctors and teachers. And Barnaby would see all these people working every day and be more discouraged with each passing day.
One day on his travels he was passing a huge monastery and he started to think and pray. Maybe if they let me enter this monastery I could do the most menial tasks, do something positive and save my soul and have more meaning and happiness in my life.
He knocked on the monastery door and was greeted by the brother who was in charge of all the monastic duties. Barnaby told him he would perform the most menial tasks for just a place to sleep and a little something to eat. He was admitted and was given a small place in which to live and told when meal time was to happen. He did this for months and seemed to find more meaning and happiness to his life. But then his sense of meaning and happiness started to lessen. He knew all around him that the brothers were preparing for Christmas. One brother was writing a new musical score for the midnight Mass. Another brother was making special bread to be given to the poor on Christmas Day. Another brother was making a beautiful Christmas crib for the birth of the Christ Child. Barnaby, in seeing what was done by others so talented, felt more inadequate than ever. His sense of his own inferiority became more painful than ever. Christmas was coming closer. And what was he doing but the most menial jobs in the monastery. He went to bed each night heartbroken.
But then one night, and no explanation has been found for this, he took his small little blanket and his eight juggling balls and went to the chapel. He stood in front of the statue of Our Blessed Mother and gave her the only talent he had, the art of juggling. At that moment something extraordinary happened. The statue of Our Blessed Mother almost came alive with radiance that Barnaby had never seen before. The brothers of the monastery seeing how the chapel was becoming filled with this new light rushed in thinking that something tragic had taken place. The Abbot was there and as all of them came into the Chapel they saw Barnaby juggling with joy and happiness. The statue of Mary, whether it took on new life to others, took on new life to him. This man who thought he had so little talent had brought joy to Mary, the Mother of Christ, at Christmas time.
The lessons from the story of Barnaby, the juggler of Our Lady, has application to everyone who thinks that he is untalented and that he does not matter. The story is a reminder to all of us that each one has a talent that, if used, can light up the life of many people.
The story of Barnaby, the juggler, the individual who though he was nothing in anyone’s eyes, teaching us that God has given to each one gifts and talents that if used can bring greater joy and meaning into each one’s life. The story of Barnaby, the juggler of Our Lady, teaches each one that you have a purpose, a value, a meaning that will become clearer when you daily use the talent that God has given you.
- Rev. Mark Connolly
Rick Warren: Living a Life of Purpose
Pastor, philanthropist and author Rick Warren reflects on how the success of his book The Purpose-Driven Life triggered his own crisis of purpose. What should he do with this unanticipated wealth and attention? Warren uses his own story to explain the central tenet of his teaching: that the antidote to spiritual emptiness is recognizing what we have been given — wealth, creativity, talent — and using those gifts to make the world a better place.
