“I begin to suspect that the world is divided not only into the happy and the unhappy, but into those who like happiness and those who, odd as it seems, really don’t.”
— C.S. Lewis
Absent in the Spring
Rereading Absent in the Spring (Agatha Christie writing as Mary Westmacott)
July 23, 2018
One of the things I like most about traveling is the
complete break from the usual routine. I almost always come back from a trip
refreshed and ready to make changes in my life…whether or not those changes
actually take place. Sometimes it takes leaving home to see myself more
clearly.
It can also be a little bit frightening.
Absent was one of Christie’s favorite books. She
completed it in three days straight, and wrote in her autobiography that it was
“one book that has satisfied me completely…. It was the picture of a woman with
a complete image of herself, of what she was, but about which she was
completely mistaken…. What brought about this revelation would be the fact that
for the first time in her life she was alone—completely alone—for four or five
days.”
In the book, self-satisfied, middle-aged Englishwoman Joan
Scudamore finds herself stranded at a rest house in the desert on her way home
from visiting her daughter in Iraq. There are no other travelers for company,
she runs out of things to read, uses up her writing paper, and has no sewing or
handiwork to occupy her. She’s left with nothing to do but think and remember.
At first, this makes her uneasy:
“The truth was, she reflected, that she had always led such a full and occupied life. So much interest in it. It was a civilized life. And if you had all that balance and proportion in your life, it certainly left you rather at a loss when you were faced with the barren uselessness of doing nothing at all. The more useful and cultured a woman you were, the more difficult it made it.”
And then downright frightened, as her thoughts take her
places she’d rather not go.
“There was nothing to be afraid of in being alone—nothing at all.”
Eventually, she comes to see herself as she really is, not
as she’s told herself she is all her life.
“She had got to know, once and for all, just what kind of a woman Joan Scudamore was….”
The title comes from a line in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 98,
“From you have I been absent in the spring.”
One of Joan’s realizations is that even though she really loves her
husband, she’s been “absent” from him in the ways that really matter.
When Joan returns to England, will she keep her hard-won
self-knowledge and make changes? Or will she return to her old ways? I won’t
spoil the end for you—you’ll have to read it for yourself.
Absent in the Spring was written in the 1940s, but
anyone whose life is overfull with commitments, social media, and general
busy-ness might recognize in themselves the tendency to fill up time with doing
in order to avoid uncomfortable thinking.
“Happiness is primarily about cultivating your inner life,
instead of trying to influence your external life…. Even if you can control
most things, controlling everything is impossible. So the best route to
happiness is not trying to control your surroundings, but to control what is
happening inside you. If you can control your feelings, your emotions, and your
desires, you can be happy. It’s not what happens that makes you unhappy—it’s
your reaction to what happens.”
—Frederic Lenoir, “Be Aware of the Good Things Around
You,” A Book That Takes Its Time
Way back in 2010, when I first read
Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project, I seized on the concept of Rules
of Adulthood. At that time, mine included:
- There is time enough
- Live joyfully
- Be Kathy
- Put on your big girl panties and deal with it
- Pause before you say no
- It is what it is
- Rise to the occasion
- I am enough
- Slow down—faster isn’t better
- Progress, not perfection
- Help is everywhere
- What would I do if I wasn’t scared?
There’s been a lot of figurative
water under the bridge since then, including my turning 50—howisthatevenpossible?
Now that I’m, ahem, so mature, I've been toying with the idea of
revising my Rules of Adulthood for my new stage of life
(midlife-no-kids-at-home-but-not-quite-retired).
One of the issues I commonly deal
with now is worry about the future. As I get older, I see my parents and
in-laws aging and coping with various physical and emotional challenges. I
worry about losing my husband. About becoming ill myself. After Scout’s death
hit me hard, I worry about losing Tank, Prudy, and Luna, knowing that there's
no guarantee they will live the long life Scout did.
Milestones keep coming, but they’re
not fun ones like college, marriage, and starting a family. More like
colonoscopies, bereavement, and loss of physical vitality!
Wait, where was I?
Oh, yes, Rules of Adulthood. To
combat these worries, I some additions to my original Rules of Adulthood:
- Everything is figure-out-able (courtesy of Marie Forleo). Instead of stressing about what might (or might not) be ahead, believe that I’ll be able to figure it all out when the time comes.
- Life is not a competition.
- Be easy with yourself. After all these years, trust that you are a good and decent person, even when you make mistakes. (See next rule.)
- Everyone is doing the best they can--including you.
- Quality, not perfection. Perfection is unattainable, but you’re almost always able to live and work with quality.
- See the funny side. Because laughing is better than crying. Usually.
- Don’t immediately label things that happen to you as “good” or “bad”
It’s good to review the way we
think from time to time. As we age, ideally we’re becoming wiser, kinder
people. As we experience more, we learn to see other peoples’ points of view.
Maybe we soften, maybe we grow stronger. Life is a work in progress, and though
change is sometimes scary and hard, sometimes it’s just what we need.
Do you have Rules of Adulthood you live by? Please share in the comments!
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| Photo by Slava Bowman on Unsplash |
“In actuality, misery is a moment of suffering allowed to become everything. So, when feeling miserable, we must look wider than what hurts. When feeling a splinter, we must, while trying to remove it, remember there is a body that is not splinter, and a spirit that is not splinter, and a world that is not splinter.”
—Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
