Dancing Our Sorrow Away

When I was in College, the Jackson Browne album “Late for the Sky” was in heavy rotation on my apartment turntable. The album’s introspective songs had a certain appeal to a young man growing up and just starting to make his way in the world because they asked big questions about the purpose of life and how to think about all the tricky emotions that come with adulthood.

His song “For a Dancer” acknowledges one of the sad truths about life: that one day everyone and everything we love will be gone. Knowing this, Jackson sings that we owe it to those we love to make a joyful sound with our lives while we are here – and to do our best to spread seeds that will blossom long after we are gone.

Listen on Youtube to: Jackson Browne: “For a Dancer”

The final verse of the song reminds us that we all know people who have had a positive impact on our life (a teacher, coach, parent, friend) and who helped us to become who we are. Those people did great things for us, usually without knowing it. We are likewise called, Jackson sings, to have a positive impact on the lives we touch – even though we may never live to see the fruit of our labors.

Into a dancer you have grown
From a seed somebody else has thrown
Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own
And somewhere between the time you arrive
And the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive
That you’ll never know

Jackson Browne “For a Dancer“

The song was written as a moving meditation on the death of Browne’s friend; who died in a fire at a young age. Browne explained that his friend was an interesting guy; a great dancer; a great tailor who would make his friend’s clothes; an ice skater who skated for the Ice Follies. “He was a Renaissance man and when I wrote him the song – I was trying to express the idea that your life is a dance”.

I like that image of our life as a dance and that we never know when it will be our last time on the stage. When I think of dancing, I think of being uninhibited, of letting my body react to the beat of the music, and of sharing a joyful personal moment with my dance partner.

When you are busy dancing, you are not worrying about your troubles, or the problems that that you will face tomorrow. Dancing is one of life’s rare human rituals; a moment of pure expression when you are able to forget about your ultimate fate and just focus on making a joyful noise.

A recent Youtube video created by the School of Life Company echoed a similar philosophy about the benefit of living life in the moment. The video was a commentary on the cultural expression “…rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic“, that is often used by people when they want to convey the futility or meaninglessness of a task.

Those familiar with the fate of the Titanic know that the hull was damaged and that the ship was destined to sink; so for the passengers on that ship to concern themselves with the position of the deck chairs is a failure on their part to recognize the true hopelessness of their situation.

Our life situation can become a little like passengers on a doomed liner. Our larger hopes in life have not come to fruition. We have come to see that our career won’t ever flourish; our relationships will always be less than ideal; we’ve passed our peak in terms of looks; our bodies begin to fall prey to ever more humiliating illnesses; society is becoming more dysfunctional than ever and political progress looks highly improbable.

It can start to feel like our ship is going down and that it would be silly trying to improve our condition, let alone find pleasure and distraction in our daily life. It would be to live in denial of the facts. Our instinct instead is to become pessimistic and gloomy about our ultimate end.

However, there is a crucial element which makes our predicament different from that of the passengers who lost their lives on the Titanic. Those passengers only had a few hours to contemplate their fate before the ship broke apart and sank into the icy waters of the North Atlantic. Our ship is going down too, but much more slowly. It’s as if the captain has let it be known that our ship is sinking and we can’t be rescued… but it will likely be a decade or more before we meet our final fate.

So, though we can’t be saved, though the end will be grim, we still have options as how to use our remaining time. We are involved in a catastrophe, but there are better and worse ways of passing the time and filling our days. Under those different circumstances, expending thought and effort on ‘rearranging the deck chairs‘ is no longer ridiculous at all, it becomes a logical step; one that can be turned into a higher calling.

When the larger hopes for our lives become impossible, we can learn to grow inventive around lesser, but still real, options for the time that remains. Keeping cheerful and engaged, in spite of everything, can bring some light through the dark storm clouds that you know are ahead.

Consider, for example, that you are on a very gradually sinking luxury liner in the early 20th century, you might every evening strive to put on a dinner jacket, dance the Foxtrot to the music of a string quartet, sing a cheerful song or settle into the ship’s library to read a good book – even as the water begins to pool at your ankles.

Or you might try to engage in a friendly game of shuffleboard on the slightly tilting deck; or decide to drop-in on a wild party in Steerage; help to comfort some despairing fellow travelers; or just try to have a deep and comforting conversation with a new friend – even though you can hear the sound of dishes smashing somewhere in a galley down below.

Of course your life would – from the big picture perspective – still remain a thorough disaster; but you might find that you were at least starting to enjoy yourself.

This kind of attitude and inventiveness is precisely what is need to help us cope with our state. Can we invest the days we have left with meaning even though everything is, overall, entirely dark? Our culture teaches us to focus on our big hopes, on how we can aim for everything going right. We crave a loving marriage, deeply satisfying and richly rewarding work, a stellar reputation, an ideal body and positive social change. What remains when those things are not attainable – when love will always be tricky, politics compromised, or the crowd hostile?

What is our equivalent to seeking the best spot for a deckchair on a sinking Ocean Liner? If marriage is far less blissful than we’d imagined, perhaps we can turn to friendship; if society won’t accord us the dignity we deserve, perhaps we can find a group of fellow outcasts; if our careers have irretrievably faltered, perhaps we can turn to new interests or hobbies; if political progress turns out to be perennially blocked and the news is always sour, we might absorb ourselves in nature or history.

In doing this, we would be turning to what our society might dismiss as Plan-B’s (what you do when you can’t do the things you really want to do). But there’s nothing wrong with that! It just may turn out that the secondary, lesser, lighter, reasons for living are, in fact, more substantial and enjoyable than we imagined.

And after a while we might come to think that they are what we should have been focused on all along – only it has taken a seeming disaster to get us to realize how central they should always have been.

My mother has always been a model to me of this kind of inventive thinking and an example of someone who has always been able to discover new things to do when she can no longer do the things she loves doing.

Now in her 94th year, she has good reasons to be gloomy about her present condition. Her ship has been slowly sinking over the last two decades. She is the last surviving member of her large, close knit, family; she lost her beloved husband after 66 years of marriage; she reads about the passing of friends and acquaintances almost every day in the obituaries; she has lived through several strokes and cardiac operations to place stents in her arteries; she struggles with gradual loss of hearing, eyesight, teeth and memory as well as the humiliating indignities of incontinence and lack of mobility that come with aging.

Despite these life difficulties, it is not in my mother’s nature to be gloomy. She laments what she has lost, yet she finds a reason to be optimistic about her situation and to be happy with the things that she can do. Here are some of the ways my mother has learned to stay cheerful, smiling and engaged in her diminished old age:

• She has learned to navigate an iPad so she can keep track of the Facebook lives of her eight children and dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
• She has become a late-in life sports fan, following with anticipation the exploits of her favorite New England Patriots and Boston Red Sox teams.
• She volunteers for her Church prayer line ministry, spending time each day praying for those in her parish who are in most need.
• She visits her husband’s grave regularly to sit in contemplation and tend to the flowers and plants.
• She tries to include some form of bodily exercise every day. Short walks with her walker outside on nice days, elderly chair exercises, rubber band stretching exercises.
• She communicates with her smart speaker to listen to music or hear the news (even though she worries about Alexa eavesdropping on her conversations).
• She stays engaged by reading books and bingeing her favorite TV shows.
• She visits French Youtube language web sites so she can enjoy hearing and practicing the French language that she grew up speaking.
• She has become the project manager of her house, assigning her children work to do around the house that she has historically done in the past and overseeing it to make sure it is done to her standards.
• She takes short field trips with her children to places from her past and shares happy memories of the people and events that shaped her life.

I co-share caretaker duties with my siblings and I feel blessed to spend one or two days every week with my mother. It has been a privilege for me to watch how she accommodates the frailties of old age without sacrificing her spirit. She knows the end is near, but she is not afraid; and until the end comes she is determined to wake up with a reason for living – and make sure the deck chairs are properly arranged on the deck.

May we too always find a way to dance our sorrows away.

“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!”

In the book “Winesburg, Ohio”, a collection of short stories published in 1919, author Sherwood Anderson reveals the individual struggles of  the inhabitants of a small Ohio town as they try to reconcile their day to day lives with their roles in the community and their ambitions for the future.

The reader gradually discovers how the lives of each of the inhabitants intersect with one another and by the end of the book Anderson has painted a masterful portrait of the life of an alternating complex, lonely, joyful and strange American town.

While exposing the innermost thoughts of the character George Willard, a young man working as the town’s newspaper reporter, Anderson writes a very insightful commentary about the inner workings of a young mind as it begins to transition into manhood.

“George Willard, the Ohio village boy, was fast growing into manhood and new thoughts were coming into his mind… The mood that had taken possession of him was a thing known to men and unknown to boys.

There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens, he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name.

Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure.

If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy.

With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.

He shivers and looks eagerly about. The years he has lived seem but a moment, a breathing space in the long march of humanity. Already he hears death calling. With all his heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of another… He wants most of all understanding.“

Anderson’s striking observation struck a chord of recognition with me because I can remember when this transition happened in my life. It was after I ventured off to college, leaving behind the comfort of my own small town and the loving protection of my parents. It was then that I began to study and think about all the great thinkers, theologians and scholars that came before me and how their lives had contributed to human progress.

Like the character George Willard, I began to think backward for the first time in my life. I realized that all of those great men and women who inspired us with their accomplishments were now gone – countless figures who came out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The limitations of life began to become startlingly clear.

My professor of Medieval Literature studies was especially influential and enthusiastic about exposing me to the different philosophies and spiritual themes behind the great works of the middle ages – and describing how those writers grappled with trying to understand the meaning of life and their place in it.

He shared the despair felt by the pious man Geoffrey Chaucer as he considered his great work The Canterbury Tales; recognizing his book was a masterpiece, but also acknowledging that the work fell short and was ultimately meaningless; saying “What does it matter in the face of eternity“.

Shakespeare also brought readers face to face with the deepest questions about the pain and emptiness of life in Macbeth describing our existence as meaningless; “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing”.

The idea of the meaningless of life was a theme Solomon used in the Book of Ecclesiastes. He wrote “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity“. The word vanity as used by Solomon does not represent pride or vainglory. The Hebrew meaning for the word “Vanity” translates to vapor or breath, so Solomon was really trying to convey that all things are like a breath – short, impermanent and passing.

Unlike most other books in the Bible which teach about the meaning of life, Solomon in Ecclesiastes instead points a finger at the whole world and declares it meaningless. The world has no satisfaction in the end and all our accomplishments will be forgotten. He shares the same sentiment that his father before him, King David, expressed in Psalm 103:

“The life of mortals is like grass,
  they flourish like a flower of the field;
  the wind blows over it and it is gone,
  and its place remembers it no more.”

Solomon presents us with the problem of what it means to be human. We search high and low for answers to a gnawing fear inside us that we’re alone, that all of life is useless and we’ll just end up six feet under ground with no one to remember us. Solomon stares this fear in the face, offering up the most despairing of answers—there is no answer:

“I have seen all things that are done under the sun, and behold all is vanity, and vexation of spirit.“ – Ecclesiastes 1:14

The effect all this deep questioning had on that young college kid coming of age was bracing. It did not cause me to despair because my faith and my upbringing provided me with an innate certainty that life does have meaning and purpose. But it did change my outlook on life in a profound way.

It made me realize that life was short and that no one is indispensable. It motivated me to put away childish things, focus on things of substance and appreciate each day. It reminded me to avoid selfishness knowing that whatever I accomplished or how much wealth I accumulated, it would die with me.

The biggest effect this change of thinking had on me, however, was the same one it had on George Willard. It made me want with all my heart to come close to some other human, to touch someone with my hands, to be touched by the hand of another. To find understanding with another soul. I reasoned that if you mean something to someone, and someone means something to you, then life can never be meaningless.

I was blessed to find that someone in College, that understanding with another human that brought life wonderful purpose and meaning; and even though that relationship was finite, as all relationships must be, the good news is that there are an unlimited number of  humans out there looking for understanding and love.

My advice is to venture out and mean something to someone – and in the end, your life will have meaning.