Flourishing Undramatically in Everyday Ramblings

I love the shape of this tree. We are having a lot of rain but there are breaks where one can get out and see blooming and blossoming and budding.

Last Monday I read a poem in class to my students by Carl Phillips, To Be Worn Openly at the Wrist or at the Chest and Hidden. There is a line in it, “I flourished undramatically, to no apparent purpose, like pretty much everyone.”

(I was teaching the chest and the heart all week and was trying to choose poems that were about the heart.)

In our brief discussion afterwards, I said that this was an ideal for me, flourishing without drama and Mrs. Sherlock begged to differ. No so much about me, but about the idea of living without drama. She had taken a hiking friend to the vet to put down her dog the day before, a friend who is already pretty seriously depressed and Mrs. Sherlock wanted to know where the wailing was, the howling, the letting it all out.

Mrs. Sherlock likes flamboyance. Her parlor room walls are painted red, and her dining room walls are orange. She likes big sweeping gestures and radical kindness. Later in the week I read a poem to the class called Medusa on Sansome and Pine about a woman who has broken through the boundaries of normalcy and propriety and is in her own way free. And how the workers scurrying by might be secretly envious.

By this time Mrs. Sherlock had the blues. I asked her about it privately. We made a pact back in November to focus on losing a modest amount of weight. I was hoping to lose 15 pounds and lost 7, she didn’t lose any. Recently she had a soft tissue injury to her foot and ankle. She was helping one of her tenants move something upstairs. Mrs. Sherlock will be 75 in September.

She told me yesterday as we were driving out to the fancy west side suburbs to go to a big (new to me) nursery that she was sick of being overweight and getting injured. I told her, whoa, hold up, your weight is not what is contributing to this potential spate of injuries.

It is that you have lost strength. Partially because of aging yes, and partially because of breaking her arm. She, like pretty much everyone, did well with physical therapy but then basically stopped after it was over. Even though once there is a break it is like a rip in one’s jeans, the fabric becomes more fragile and needs extra care.

We made new modest weight loss goals and a commitment to building strength over the next six months. We have specific targets and once we get into the strength training again, we will come up with goals around that. We have a gentle supportive form of accountability.

Mrs. Sherlock was a navy nurse on a ship stationed in Viet Nam during the war. She used to ride motorcycles all over the west with her husband. She went caving many many times with him. She has traveled extensively. She has not had a dull life. She is a 74-year-old woman helping her 30 something tenant move something upstairs. She broke her arm out riding her bicycle. She likes stimulation and drama.

I do not. The outward contours of my life are so much more constrained than hers.

But my internal life is pretty wild, and I have been exposed to a wide assortment of human drama over the years. She does have a point though, we need the rituals and practices of celebration and grief, frustration, anger, and caring that cultural norms used to afford us when we weren’t so on our own.

Now so many of feel constrained. Constrained by expectations. Why should we care so much when we are happy, or wracked with worry or grief, what other people think?

I know I have internalized those constraints so deeply that they feel like they are part of my DNA. And I have no intention of loosening them. But I wonder if maybe I could soften around them and let a little light in around the edges.

My heart might then be willing to let me live just that much longer if I do.

Last updated April 03, 2023