Skiing offers many hours for discussion; if you include the rides to and from the resort in addition to hours on the lift and minutes perched procrastinating at the top of steep runs you can accumulate several valuable hours of talk therapy. We spent some of this time last Sunday discussing roads not traveled in life, or roads we traveled that had unexpected twists and turns which defied our expectations. The ultimate question being: through making imperfect choices and spending time in so-called ‘dead ends’ did we waste precious years of life and somehow miss the speedy quad chair to the point we want to be in life?
To answer that question one must first define the goal. Where do I want to be in life? I still cannot answer that question, despite several decades of wondering. I do feel that I have not arrived yet, that I am still a work in progress and have yet to help all the people I can help while using my uncertain abilities as best as possible. I get the sense, though, that we are all hurrying to get “there,” which recalls the anxious feeling of madly scribbling away in blue books for college exams. As if life is somehow like a blue book exam in which we race to finish in the time allotted, finally looking up triumphantly at all the poor bums still madly scribbling as if to say “I made it! (so sad for you).
I don’t know much, but I know that life is not a college blue-book exam. Life is an infinite number of questions to ask and answer, no grade (though there is a time limit), and more about what we feel than what we know. The journey does not seem to be linear – more circular or spiral – and the further we go the more we learn about ourselves. (For me personally this internal trajectory often feels like Conrad’s into the ‘heart of darkness’). If I am honest, my mistakes (and wow – they are many) have taught me much more about myself and what I do and don’t want out of life than the “good” decisions I have made. I struggle to be grateful for these mistakes, to recognize them for blessings and not roadblocks.
I read a story yesterday that really brought home the lesson of patience. Greg Mortenson tells the story of Nasreen Baig in his new book Stones Into Schools (http://www.ikat.org/). Nasreen was a gifted student at one of the first coeducational schools in the north of Pakistan. She had to leave school in 1992 at the age of 13 to care for her father and four siblings when her mother died. Later on her father remarried and she had to study at night because her stepmother’s did not approve of education for girls. After earning a high school certificate, Nasreen was offered a scholarship to attend a two-year course and obtain a rural medical assistant degree – her dream. Unfortunately, the council of elders in her village forbade her to accept the scholarship and she married instead. Let me quote: “During the ten years that followed this decision, Nasreen toiled twelve- to sixteen- hour days tending goats and sheep in the mountains, tilling her family’s potato fields, hauling water in metal jerricans, and gathering up eighty-pound bags of firewood and moist patties of yak dung. . . During this time she also gave birth to three babies and suffered two miscarriages, all without the assistance of a maternal health-care worker.” In 2008 she finally was allowed to take up her scholarship. Mortenson notes, “As for her ‘lost years’ Nasreen harbors no bitterness whatsoever, mainly because she is convinced that her experiences imparted some essential insights. ‘Allah taught me the lesson of patience while also giving me the tools to truly understand what it means to live in poverty,’ she says. ‘I do not regret the wait.’”
Ten years of waiting in poverty and servitude – no bitterness. I have a lot to learn from this persistent woman in Pakistan, though if our journeys are into the heart of ourselves they are - each one - entirely original. We cannot compare our course to that of anyone else. No need to compare, no need to race, just a requirement to be careful to notice our lives and be grateful for the places they take us.
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