Here I am!

Over the weekend I was watching 2.5 year old Clara while her parents went out to dinner.  She is at that stage of language development where she is still working on the use of pronouns; I, you, mine, yours.  She has it down pretty well, but there are still a lot of third person references, "Clara do it!"  It is interesting to watch her language development from this distance. As someone who sees her maybe once a week or so, it is easier for me to see the leaps in her skills, to be astounded by each new step.  And those strides in language come hand in hand with a growing sense of identity, of personal control and purpose.

We were playing a little game of hide and seek or peek-a-boo.  I was sitting on an ottoman in the middle of the room and she would stand behind me.  "Where's Clara?" she would ask.  I would look high and low, "Is Clara down here?  Is she up on the ceiling?"  As I pretended to search the room, looking around from my perch, she would jump out and with arms wide proclaim, "Here I am!"  If I continued to search, she would become more insistent, "Here I am! Here I am!" until I held my open and exclaimed, "Oh, there's Clara. There she is!"  She would fall into my arms, giggle, look up and ask, "Do it again?" Back behind me she would run and I searched again.

"Here I am."  What a strong sentence.  Look at me, see me, know that I exist.  But also, here I am, I am a person, an individual. I can control where I am, what I do, and how I think. I can be here, I can be there.  But right now, I am here and I want you to see me, find me.

It also reminds me of one of my favorite hymns, "Here I am, Lord."  I've always liked that one, the melody and the words. It has such a positive feel, I'm here, I'm ready, I'm willing.  In that sense, the sentence becomes "Here I am (for you)."  Now it is an offer, a statement of availability. I'm not here only as me, as an individual asking to be seen, but wanting to find you, too.

Bodies and stories

Tired of narrative gerontology yet?  Hope not, because I continue to read...

My latest thought is about the relationship between our bodies and our stories.  It is impossible to separate our experiences from our bodies. After all, without a body we would not "be."  In that way, our body is the setting for our life story and the changes of our bodies, the changing setting, one of the storylines.

I can think of only a few times when the condition of my body was noticeable to me.  One was during my first pregnancy. I was quite pregnant and had gone to lunch with a group of friends. We were shown to a booth in the restaurant and I realized that I could not comfortably fit my belly into the space.  I suddenly became aware of my body in a way I had not considered before.  I knew I was pregnant, I was gaining weight. I knew that I was wearing differernt clothes to accomodate the changing shape.  But, I had not considered it on a day to day basis.

The other time was when I fell skiing and injured my knee. The moment of awareness was as I was falling and thinking, "My knee is not supposed to move in that direction."  It was a short, but intense moment of realization.  My body was doing something I did not want it to do.  The feeling was different from the frustration of being unable to make my body do what I want, it was if I was suddenly aware of my body as separate from me.

With age it seems we become more aware of our body, its functioning or not.  It becomes more a focus of our stories. The changes in our body force us to focus on our identity in a new way. Am I the same person in a different body, or do I change in some way as my body changes?

The rise of the introvert?

In an interesting parallel to the hoopla around the release of Cain's book, "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Won't Stop Talking,"  Eric Klinenberg has just released, "Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone."  Klinenberg, a sociologist, garnered a great deal of attention a few years ago for his book, "Heat Wave," chronicling the effects of a massive heat wave on the citizens of Chicago.  Many, if not all, of the fatalities in that disaster were people living alone.  I don't know if that is what piqued his interest or not, but it seems to make sense.

I read a discussion their discussion of the book in the Chronicle of Higher Education. More interesting to me than the notion that people might enjoy living alone, was the apparently "erroneous" statistic about the social isolation of Americans based on the 2004 General Social Survey. I remember when this came out, the finding that over a quarter of Americans are socially isolated.  Turns out that the number pulled from the survey, while correct, is extremely volatile and usually ranges around 10%.  In addition, there are other, more reliable measures and questions, that put the social isolation mark lower than 25%, too.  But, the number fed into our fears that technology was driving people apart, that the social fabric of our society was disintegrating (re: Putnam's Bowling Alone.)

I heard part of an interview with Klinenberg on the Diane Rehm show today. He points out how the proportion of people living alone has increased and how the satisfaction of those people has increased, too.

I find it interesting that both books should premiere nearly simultaneously--what is the link between introversion and living alone?  Are we seeing an "introvert backlash"?  Are the quiet people starting to speak up?

Not sure if this link will work...here is the Chronicle article
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Case-for-American/130480/

Here is an essay by Klinenberg:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/living-alone-means-being-social.html

Here is the interview with Diane Rehm:

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-02-06/eric-klinenberg-going-solo-extraordinary-rise-and-surprising-appeal-living-alone

Reading and Living

The chapter I've just finished in Reading Our Lives was titled, "Reading Literature: The Interpretation of Text." The gist of the discussion was, how is the work we do creating and "reading" our own life story like reading a novel?  Or is it?  One idea I found interesting was viewing reading as a constructive act. In this view, the reader constructs meaning from the text, there is nothing actually "there" until we read it and interpret it for ourselves. Of course, this means that every reader will take a different view of the text, interpret it slightly differently.  There seems to be a lot of discussion about what is owned by the author and what is created by the reader, but I didn't find that all that interesting.

More interesting, though, was the notion that when we go back to a text, we will read it differently.  Obviously, on a re-reading we have some sense of the arc of the story, so details that we may have skipped over now seem more relevant.  We see foreshadowing in the characters' actions that we might have missed before. But, more relevant, is that we are different, both from having read the book in the first place and from the experiences we have had after the reading.  We come back to the book as a different person.

I have three books that I have read multiple times:  Two I read first when I was about 14, One is One (Barbara Leonie Picard) and Knee Deep in Thunder (Sheila Moon).  The other is a more recent discovery, Out Stealing Horses.  The first two I read multiple times after discovering them in the middle school library.  I hunted for them some years ago and was able to find copies of both, One is One is out of print. Since then I have read each 2-3 times again.  Who knows why they resonated with me so strongly.  Both dealt with themes of loss and grief, of "becoming oneself", of discovering inner strengths and peace.  There are a million coming of age stories like them, but these were the two I read and the two I keep reading.  There is a familiarity in the story, but I still cry when someone dies.  There are passages in each that I have continued to hold as touchstones, words that continue to offer solace in times of sadness and hope in terms of trouble.

Christine Lagarde, Newsweek

Christine Lagarde, my hero, is on the cover of this week's Newsweek magazine.  My favorite quote from the article, "...I think it [a compromise platform] has to include as many people as possible. I leave aside the bastards, because that's one thing that I don't compromise with: people who lie, people who cheat, people who are not with the group and behave like parasites. That, I can't stand."

Book group narratives

Okay, I'm a few pages further in my book on narrative gerontology, it's been a busy week.

Today's topic was a continued  discussion of the importance of the narrative environment.  The authors discuss macro and micro environments.  How our stories are shaped by our culture, our religion, our gender, and our politics. The "master narratives" of our lives. But also how our narratives vary within those realms.  I certainly noticed how the narrative environment of academic administration differed from that of the academic faculty.  Many of the problems between faculty and administrators, I think, can be traced to differences in narrative.

I was very interested in comments about friendships.  Some years ago I read a great book, "Necessary Losses" by Judith Viorst. I was familiar with her more personal essays and memoirs, but this book is an accessible introduction to the principles of psychotherapy.  In one chapter she discusses friendships and the notion that we have "friends in spots."  That no one friendship provides all that we need or want in a relationship. Some friends are good for discussing issues around work, others are good for discussing family. Some friends are mostly there for fun and entertainment, with others we share more intimate details.

I was really struck by another part of Viorst’s book, the idea that friendships help us grow. She wrote that “growth demands relatedness and that intimacy produces continuing growth throughout our life because being known affirms and strengthens the self.” I liked the quote from Buber she uses, “Through the Thou a man becomes I.” Friends all add different elements to our lives, but through each of those encounters a different part of ourselves gets “opened up” or exercised.

Our friendships are also narratives, conversations. As Randall and McKim say in "Reading Our Lives," each friendship "develops its own brand of narrative environment, its own rules of engagement, its own codes for talking and listening, for sharing and withholding...Between the story of me and the story of thee is the story of us."  (Why is it we revert to old English when we want to talk about something REALLY IMPORTANT?)  Our friends become coauthors of our lives, and we of theirs.  At any time there are storylines about them and their lives swirling around inside of our heads.  "Narratively speaking, our lives are intertwined."

Sitting with my book group last night, our discussion found its way to books we have read together in the past. It is interesting to think about how our discussion of narratives becomes part of our narrative lives, individually and collectively.

Family stories

Spurred by my recent attendance at the session on narrative gerontology, I've been doing some reading on narratives.  Right now I'm crawling through Reading Our Lives: The Poetics of Growing Old. I only understand about a third of it, and it is slow going, but today I ran across an interesting few paragraphs. The discussion was about the "culture of embeddedness" we encounter in our families of origin. In our family we learn (the book says "inherit") patterns for talking about our actions, expressing our emotions, and conveying our ideas.  We are exposed to entire strategies for composing and editing the stories of our lives; the little stories and the big ones.  Being conversant in this "family genre" is essential for our inclusion in the group.

However, this group is not static, it changes over time as people age, or die, and people come and go.  So both the players and their perspectives shift.  Here is a nice sociological line, "In short, we shape the stories we are part of even as they shape us."  It reminds me of the analogy we use for society and the effects of individuals, or cohorts, on society.  We can view social life as a river, it is bounded by shorelines, and those shorelines keep us "on track" in some sense.  However, the stream is also shifting the shorelines over time. Some parts are eroded, the course changes subtly or dramatically. So, the same idea we are shaping society as society shapes us.

Also interesting is the idea that there is some objective story or history and our individual perceptions of it.  I am always fascinated when my siblings and I start to compare childhood memories. We have very different versions of the same event, we even argue about the actual "facts"--who was there, where or when did it occur.  I like this sentence, "What we make of that history, however--the episodes that stand out for each of us andd the overall myth we have composed of it inside our own minds--is another matter."  I emphasized the word myth because I like the sense of our life stories being mythical.

Well, that was one page of reading.