Tag Archives: Human condition

WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER

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We’re All in This Together

Remember your senior year of high school? The prom, the senior banquet, graduation. Remember calling your friends and asking about their dresses? Who they hoped to go with, what to wear to the senior banquet, and then the rented graduation robe and hat that ruined our poufy hair? We shared every moment and activity with our closest friends and anyone who would listen. We were all in it together, the biggest transition of our lives for most of us, leaving home for college, getting that first job, or maybe entering the military. High schools can be cliquey, but they are also times of bonding around a shared experience.

Then there was that 25th reunion, when many of us came together again to share not only our stories about adulthood, but more importantly, our memories of a time when we were all in it together.

The other day a friend, Carla, and I were talking, and of course the conversation devolved to that painful (pun intended) litany about our aging bodies—eye problems that make it unsafe to drive at night, knees, achy shoulders, hand arthritis, heart issues—if you live in a body and are over 80, there’s probably some component that’s either on the fritz or on its way there. Carla mentioned one of her friends who is getting a knee replacement—but the friend didn’t tell anyone. She believes she needs to tough through it, not bother anyone, etc. Carla reminded her—and me—that we’re all in this aging business together. And we are.

I think of my new bridge group. Most of the members have known each other since they taught together at a local elementary school. There’s a kindness and consideration that I love being part of. Two members, sisters, have tremors, and one of them takes a medication that exacerbates the tremor, such that she needs two hands to bring a coffee cup to her lips. When it’s her turn to host, we help serve, clear the table and do whatever we can. One member fell and broke both ankles, so we took the club to her rehab facility and played bridge in a hallway with a pitcher of water, Styrofoam cups for our coffee, and paper plates for treats. Another member needs us to watch carefully so she doesn’t get lost as she plays the cards. We play bridge, no matter what, and some players are quite good. We also have great fun, supporting each other, including me with my creaky knees who needs time to get up from a chair. We’re all in this together.

But it’s more than supporting each other as we age. Being in it together is part of the human condition. I especially see that living in Minneapolis right now. I am honored to be part of a community where we help each other. One woman decided to collect coats because people are usually released from ICE detention with absolutely nothing but the clothes on their backs, and we’ve had a very cold January. So many coats were donated that she had to find other charities that need coats in other areas.

The nearest public transportation to the ICE detention center is a half mile away—a long walk when it’s cold. So volunteers wait to drive released people home, even though sometimes people are released in the middle of the night. At my son’s school, teachers put together a Christmas for a family that was afraid to leave their home for fear of being detained. The city council found a million dollars of funding for people who can’t pay their rent because they haven’t been able to work (many immigrant businesses have had to close, especially on Eat Street where Pretti was shot.).These are only a few of the ways in which people pitch in, because even if we’re US citizens and not in danger, in Minnesota, we’re all in this together.

Last Wednesday, at the University of Minnesota basketball game, two former players were introduced at half time. We all cheered for one man in his late 50’s who looked fit and trim. He then walked under the basket and wheeled out another player in a wheelchair, wearing his letter jacket from years ago. The announcer told us his name and years that he played and then said that he is battling ALS. Immediately balancing popcorn and drinks and ice cream everyone stood, everyone, even the children and band and students and press, and they clapped. The camera flashed to the player in the wheelchair and threw his image on the scoreboard. He was both sobbing and smiling. The clapping grew deafening, and as we clapped, his smile stretched across his face. Blinking back my tears, I realized again, young and old, we’re all in this together—and we mostly know it.

I have to brag that the Gophers, a nobody team with a new coach and only seven players beat Michigan State, ranked #10. As we left the arena, happily hustling to our cars in the cold, picking our way on the icy sidewalks, I tried to pry my hearing aid out of my ear. I have a bad habit of unconsciously fiddling with it and pushing it deeply into my ear. As I grabbed it, I dropped it. Oh no! Hearing aids are not cheap. How would I find it with everyone speeding to their cars around me. I bent to look. Someone said, “Did you lose something?” I replied, “My hearing aid, and they’re not cheap.” The crowd stopped, literally stopped, and everyone started looking. Within minutes a man found it in a nearby snowbank where apparently it had bounced. “Is this it?” he said handing it to me. . . And we all walked on. It wasn’t just Minnesota nice, it was the humanity that we all share.

As I get older and my body shows it, I am often discouraged. I want to hide my infirmities, but this past month, living in Minnesota, I have realized that we’re all in this life together whether it’s aging or something else. I promise myself not to hide, pretend I’m the Karen I was at forty when I’m not. It’s about accepting myself and doing my part to help others, knowing that we’re all in this together.

Heart Picture from Turgay Koca. Others thanks to ChatGPT

Vulnerability 2: THIS IS IT

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Less than three weeks ago, I was hit making a right turn from a freeway exit. I never saw the car until it slammed into the side of my car on the driver’s side and the airbag inflated—almost simultaneously. Wham! The airbag smacked the side of my head, stunning me. I was not sure if I was alive and if more was coming. I had to escape, get out of the car, see if I could stand, walk around. Make sure I was okay. In a Volkswagen, if the side airbag inflates, the others do too, so it took a frantic few seconds for me to figure out how to exit the car.

I’m okay; the car was totaled. In the warp speed of modern life, I already have a new vehicle, and I’m driving around with renewed caution. As I told one of my grandchildren, “Confident Karen has been compromised.” Yet again.

Maybe I’m telling this story because I need to keep telling it and telling it to take the power out of the memory. I’m also telling it here because it’s the perfect example of how physically vulnerable we are as human beings. Did you ever, as a child, step on an ant hill and crush both the ants and their home? I did. I felt powerful when I did it, but I also saw how fragile life is. I believe that experiences like this teach us, from childhood on, that we, too, are living things, and thus as physically vulnerable as the smallest ant.

Life can change in what seems like seconds. Sometimes there are clues but often we sidestep their importance. Take life threatening illnesses. Gary Stout complained of indigestion for a couple of months before finally seeing a doctor. In four days (which included the weekend), we had a terminal pancreatic cancer diagnosis. Jim Storm looked a bit yellow on our trip to Florida in spring of the year that he almost died from sepsis. I thought he was tanning too much; he thought he had the flu. He had a perforated ulcer that led to life-threatening sepsis.

Fortunately, such tragedies are not the norm, but admit it, modern life can be a jungle lurking with human versions of predators—unexpected bills, diseases in ourselves and loved ones, deaths, loss of jobs, threats of poverty or alcoholism, pandemic. What makes us different than animals, however, is our consciousness. We believe we can ward off predators with anticipatory actions, yet life deals surprises, aptly expressed by the word “accident.”

 In fact, as Erich Fromm writes: The price that man pays for consciousness is insecurity. He can stand his insecurity by being aware and accepting the human condition. . . He has no certainty; the only certain prediction he can make is: “I shall die.”

Here’s where emotional vulnerability comes in. Fromm proposes that humans develop a frame of orientation. We organize the world cognitively and emotionally, and we adapt. To me, that orientation is the human equivalent to the instincts that drive animals. Our vulnerability is not only physical, but there’s an emotional component, threats to our orientation, the meaning we are constantly making.

Here’s an example from my 6th grade. I was older than my classmates, and I was mortified when my unexpected breasts emerged before theirs. I thought everyone was staring at them. I hunched my shoulders forward and put a tee shirt under my clothes to hide them. It didn’t help that my mother took me to Zahn’s Department store to be fitted for a bra. I still recall the humiliation of the poking and pinching as she and the clerk said how perfect my breasts were. Really? Couldn’t they see my reddening face? Every day in school, I felt vulnerable, different, and fearful that I wouldn’t be accepted by my classmates, the other girls.

In her blog Vulnerability: What’s in a Word, Karen Rose described what I believe is one recourse for vulnerable beings on an unpredictable planet—the ability to share our vulnerability, so we are not alone with it. But it isn’t as easy as it sounds.

From protecting my budding breasts to protecting my adult insecurities, I’ve been a slow learner about emotional vulnerability. Jim Storm was a good role model, as he loved a good discussion. If I said, “We have to talk,” he was in. “Let’s” he’d answer smiling, sitting down in his favorite chair, folding his hands, and adopting his social worker mien. He listened and honored my inner truth, demonstrating that not only do we need our own courage to be vulnerable, but we can also open the door for others to do the same.

I’m reminded of the Robert Frost poem, A Servant to Servants, and the famous line, “The best way out is always through.” I have slowly wandered my way through this life being more and more willing to be vulnerable to people, emotionally.

Getting older is helpful. I realize, THIS IS IT. I may not get another chance to tell others that I love them, that they are full of baloney and I still love them, or that they are driving me nuts and I still love them. I’m not suggesting crossing boundaries, but simply owning my vulnerability, both physical and emotional. I’ve gradually learned that by plowing ahead, taking the risk of being vulnerable, I’ve both revealed new dimensions in relationships and also given others permission to be vulnerable to me. I can be there for others and myself.

To live is to be vulnerable, yet most of us want life to last as long as possible. Our physical vulnerability is offset by good surprises, babies, weddings, graduations, birthdays, our dream job. Even better are relationships filled with love, and this planet is ever glorious. So why not be vulnerable to others—you already are—and go through it together.

Condition: Provisional

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https://www.flickr.com/photos/rayandbee/5915105592
The Wheel of Life
Vigeland Sculpture in Frogner Park, Oslo

As I live through this COVID-19 pandemic, one phrase keeps popping up in my mind: the human condition. To me, the human condition is our imperfection, our inability to escape suffering, and that we live in a natural world indifferent to us. I keep reminding myself and my family that we are experiencing firsthand what can go wrong in a natural world that we thought we had mostly tamed. At the same time, our culture promotes an ethic of personal responsibility, suggesting that we have an influence on what happens to us. So what does it mean to be subject to the human condition but responsible at the same time?

Take my grandfather Nils Jacobsen’s life. In 1917, before the end of World War I and another pandemic, the Spanish flu, he brought his wife, Marthe, and two-year-old son, Alden, my father, from their farm in Norway to Racine, Wisconsin, where they hoped to build a new life. The 1920 census listed them living in a rental in Ward 8. They were still finding their footing. In 1926, Nils sold the family farm in Norway, which he inherited as the eldest son, to his brother.  It appears that life was going well in Wisconsin. Times were good! 

By the 1930 census, Marthe and Nils owned a home, a sweet bungalow that’s still standing, and they listed a second son, my father’s brother. But it was the start of the Great Depression. Soon after, Marthe died at age 51, and by the 1940 census, Nils, my father, my mother, my father’s brother, and my older sister were living in a rental flat. It was World War II, and the fishing on the Great Lakes had dried up.  My father and Nils struggled to find work they could do. Nils died in 1948, a bitter old man, as my mother described him. 

Not an altogether happy tale, but I suspect most families, if they dig, can find similar stories. How much of what happened was Nil’s responsibility? Maybe selling the farm? But surely not Marthe’s death, the loss of their home, and the loss of fishing for a living. I tend not to judge him harshly. Nils and his family lived through World War I, the Spanish Flu pandemic, the Great Depression, and World War II. As for Nils dying a bitter old man, I’d say he succumbed to the human condition

While Nils confronted the human condition writ large, until now, my own experience has been more personal.  After my second husband, Gary, died, I struggled, literally, for years with searching for meaning about his death.  I endured guilt that I had done something to bring this outrage on us, and I believed that if I could identify what I’d done, I could atone for it—I should atone for it. When I wasn’t feeling guilty, I was asking myself about the larger karmic meaning of his death—were the repercussions in our immediate world a way of balancing the scales, so to speak? I found no clear answers. 

Being a church-goer, I decided to take my pain to the minister, Pastor Rob. Pastor Rob didn’t like the idea of karma—that I bore responsibility for Gary’s death and, thus, for my grief.  He thought such thinking was where New Agers go wrong. Instead, he told me that Gary and I, like all humans, were subject to the human condition, which includes suffering. Neither of us had caused his death and I didn’t owe any atonement. Wow! I walked out his office feeling lighter, a new freedom. I still didn’t know the meaning, and in truth, I continued to seek it, but not finding it now felt okay. My search became part of my human condition. 

Later I learned about provisional existence. Viktor Frankl wrote that prisoners in concentration camps could not see an end to their suffering.  They could see no future so they lived a “provisional existence.” Pastor Rob had given me such an existence. I found no meaning, but I could live with that, provisionally, and keep looking. Frankl said something else that resonates with me in these times, that rather than me asking for the meaning of Gary’s death, I am being questioned by life and I need to find my own answer in my own terms.  In Frankl’s words: Each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life byanswering for his own life

So here I am, living in a world-wide pandemic. This isn’t the retirement I planned, stuck at home, worried about family, friends, and the world more generally. Worried about an uncertain future, are my savings withering so that I’ll be one of the people living solely on Social Security? Will we have a depression? What about my grandchildren, one in college who’s been forced to come home?  The other about to graduate into a precarious world, and there will be no celebration. I am being questioned by life, and how will I answer? 

I have choices. I can weather the pandemic, hopefully stay healthy, and go forward with what is available now.  I can support family and friends as they move forward, too. If my money’s gone . . . well, I’ll deal with that if I must.  My other choice, of course, is, like my grandfather, to grow bitter, that my glorious retirement has been denied me, that my plans have been slayed by a merciless nature. 

 Every day I take advantage of the one freedom still left, the opportunity to take a walk in the unfolding spring, oblivious to the havoc of a virus. It’s Minnesota, so it takes a while for spring to show its color, but because my life has so drastically slowed down, I linger on my walk and look for small signs of the turn towards spring.

One day I noticed tree stumps, and I walked along eagerly photographing tree stumps, which mind you, are presumed to be dead, cut off. But then I noticed that some tree stumps don’t quit easily. They make the best of things and put out new shoots of life. Now and then there’s a hollowed out-stump that couldn’t regenerate itself. But everywhere in nature there are examples of persistence. Think about those weeds we so fervently pull. 

I have my share of human arrogance, but I’m learning to accept the indifference of our world—some natural and some human behavior—it is the human condition.  But in fact, indifference is a condition all life faces, human, stumps, and otherwise. So I carry on, knowing that as I’m questioned by life, I can keep on putting out shoots, it’s on me to find my own answer. 

A picture containing photo, fence, showing, outdoor Description automatically generated

Later I learned that coppicing is a traditional method of woodland management that harnesses the ability of many species of trees to put out new shoots from their stump or roots if cut down.