Grit with Guests: The Meaning, by Diane Meyer Lowman
I have known Diane Meyer Lowman for more than 40 years. We met as roommates at Middlebury College in 1977. If you’d asked me then whether I thought that girl would become one my best friends and confidants, I would’ve been more than skeptical — but life has a way of surprising you. The first poet laureate of Westport, CT, Diane Meyer Lowman is an excellent writer, a deeply compassionate soul, and a wonderful companion. I’m thrilled that she’s the one to debut my Guest Post series!
- Randy Kaufman
There are traits of mine that most anyone who knows me fairly well knows: I’m obsessed with Shakespeare, I don’t do late, and I write, for example. But of late, my relative isolation has highlighted quirks and idiosyncrasies and routines that I doubt anyone knows about: I don’t like my bare feet touching uncarpeted floor of any kind, I prefer blue ink to black, and I translate most of what I hear or think into Spanish in my head (to name a few that I’m willing to share).
What occurs to me in my Covid-induced solitude is, beyond the fact that these myriad habits that make me me, when I die, they will remain unknown and lost forever. That leads me to think about the millions upon millions of mortals who have predeceased me: What were their eccentricities and foibles? What made them them? And are they unknown and lost forever?
I said to one of my boys recently, “Everyone died! Think of all the people who ever lived – they all died!” According to Quora.com, that’s 110.8 billion people. I’ll never know how any of them felt about bare feet on wooden or tile floors, or if they translated everything they heard into another language. My son looked at me as if I’d spoken in another language, although I knew he understood me because he nodded and said, “Yes, mom, they’ve all died.”
I don’t dive down this dark existential rabbit hole despairingly, though. I revel in all those peculiarities that make me uniquely me. It brings me a serene sense of joy to know that while I enjoy my steaming cup of PG Tips tea with a very specific amount of grass-fed cow whole milk, someone else may start their day with Yorkshire Tea with half and half. How boring life would be if everyone drank the same tea.
Neither do I feel a narcissistic need to share my every preference and proclivity with the masses, somehow validating or justifying my existence. I’m not sure anyone in the Twitterverse or in Facebookland needs to know my warm beverage preferences (although at any given moment hordes of folks are sharing just that level of detail on social media...all the time...every day...).
I practice legs-up-the-wall pose for ten minutes or so before bed. I prefer nocturnal to diurnal showers. My mentions in this essay notwithstanding, I don’t lament the fact that idiosyncrasies like these might go unnoticed or unnoted.
Because the upshot of all this down-sounding thinking is that the beauty — the meaning — lies in the plethora of differences in all of us that go to make up the whole of humanity. It lies and in the fact that the way we walk through the world makes it what it is. Some adhere to a mistakenly existentialist notion that life is void of meaning. But I remind them that the very definition of “existentialism” (my favorite philosophy, by the way) is that it is precisely because of this inherent lack of predetermined or predestined meaning that we — each and every one of us, every day, with every single decision and action we take — get to define that meaning and create humanity as we go along.
One way that we can all provide peeks into those unshown folds of ourselves is through what we do, writ large. Our broadly visible actions and decisions. The careers we choose, the way we parent or mentor, the political or investment choices that we make. Artists share a lot of themselves through their media but so, too, do others in less creative endeavors. Making mindful choices about these big picture parts of our lives can both reveal bits of our inner workings and make meaningful impacts on our environments.
But one need be neither a Bob Dylan nor a Mark Zuckerberg to leave a mark on society. In fact, I would argue that it is the cumulative nature of every single choice and action we take on a daily basis that really makes the most lasting impression. Do I choose to beep emphatically at the car in front of me for not gunning it at the first nanosecond that the light changes to green, or do I wait patiently, realizing that the driver may be preoccupied with a loved one’s illness or a recent job loss? Does the person in front of me in line at Starbucks snipe at the barista because the line for lattes is moving slowly and she has to get to work, now, or does she smile and ask how he’s doing and empathize with how busy the store is? Scientific American describes The Butterfly Effect as “the outsize significance of minute occurrences.” While the flap of a butterfly’s wing may or may not cause a hurricane in the Caribbean, whether or not I beep at that person in front of me, or the coffee aficionado barks at the barista will surely affect all of us.
We have a choice in virtually every minute of every day to act in a way that infuses positivity rather than negativity into our own bodies and minds, and the atmosphere around us. In his Yoga Sutras, Patanjali introduced in Sutra 1.12, the concepts of abhyasa (persistent effort) and vairagya (non-attachment to the result). We need to strive to show our best selves to the world, but not for recognition. We do it because it’s the right thing to do. It is in this way that we show the nuances of who we are and leave lasting collective impressions on the world long after we’ve left our physical bodies behind. The imprints of the infinite choices made by those 110.8 billion and counting people are our legacy.
I called this essay The Meaning, stopping short of The Meaning of Life, because I don’t pretend to know that. None of us do. In the most literal sense, we make it up as we go along.
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