A Merry B-Corp Christmas!

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When I was teaching Ethics and Public Policy, I always assigned an article that described a very ethical corporation. Paid employees well, on-site day care, paid suppliers promptly, were good citizens of the community, good benefits program, and opportunities for promotion.  The only fly in the ointment was the company’s product. They produced instruments of torture. The moral of the story, like Tom Lehrer’s satirical song The Old Drug Peddler, is that one should do well by doing good.

Corporations want to be people in some ways and not others. Bankruptcy is easier for them than actual humans with burdens of medical or student loan debt. They pay lower taxes and extract all kinds of goodies from local governments hungry for jobs. One of the ways in which they are not like people is a lack of consequences for many of their antisocial actions. B-corporations are a partial answer to that question. (The B stands for benefit.)

B-corporations have corporate charters that make them accountable to all their stakeholders, not just their stockholders. Suppliers, customers, employees, the community, the environment. But they also should have an obligation that is not often included in corporate charters: to produce goods and services that are useful and do as little harm as possible.  So, I was delighted to find a B-corporation online that was offering a product that met both criteria. I can’t be too specific because I bought it for one of my blog followers. Let’s just say that it should contribute to the health of a member of my family by addressing certain allergies.

The last few Christmases have awakened my inner B-corporation. I want to have a good Christmas while doing good. Donations have always been part of our family Christmas for the past ten years, as well as reconnecting with friends and including strays where we can. Everyone gets to spend $30 on my credit card to support a project of Global Giving, ranging from tree planting to refugee relief to protecting endangered species. We also give a turkey to our local food bank and seek out other options for sharing. We enjoy the lights on homes and city streets and make our house festive with the ornaments and Santas that emerge from eleven months under the bed and in the closet.

We have cut back on the number of gifts in our family of twelve. No, I did not have ten children; that would be wildly irresponsible and not conducive to having a professional career! The family consists of me, three daughters, three sons-in-law, four granddaughters and one grandson-in-law. Everyone gets two gifts and gives two gifts. At the behest of my oldest daughter, we emphasize giving experiences and consumables—tickets to plays, movie gift cards, edibles. (I give a lot of books, but I consider them consumable, as I expect most of them will eventually wind up in a library or a yard sale or a friend’s house.)  We play family games while my sons-in-law fill in for my late husband by making minor household repairs, and usually go to a movie together.  An artificial tree serves from year to year, leaving a real tree to grow, absorb carbon dioxide, and provide shelter for wildlife. Preparing our Christmas feast is a joint effort, supplemented by snack foods I only make once a year—sausage balls, Hershey kisses wrapped in chocolate cookie dough, miniature cheesecakes, scones. Daughters and granddaughters do some cookie baking.

Each year there is something new along with all the old familiars.  One COVID Zoom Christmas featured a reading of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. This year’s innovation for me is finding a B-corporation offering a useful and consumable product.  What will your Christmas add to your family traditions this year?

Lessons from a Doughnut Box

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When I was a child, my mother would occasionally buy us a dozen confectionery sugar-coated doughnuts in a blue box from Reynolds’ Doughnuts. On the side there was a picture and a poem.  The picture showed a tree with two men sitting under it, one on each side.  The man on the left is contemplating a fat doughnut with a small hole.  The man on the right is contemplating a skinny doughnut with a large hole.  The poem read, “As you ramble on through life, brother, whatever be your goal, keep your eye upon the doughnut, and not upon the hole.”

Nothing reflects abundance more concretely than a doughnut, rich in fat and sugar and calories, if somewhat lacking in nutritional value. But it is the picture these words paint, that remind us that we have abundance if we choose to see it.

As you count your blessings this Thanksgiving Day, think about the shape of your doughnut.

What Time Is It?

~ purplesage41 ~ 4 Comments

Tonight is the time for that dreaded semi-annual ritual, changing the clocks. We are all mandated (except for two states) to switch back from long lighted evenings and dark mornings as the overall daylight duration continues to shrink toward the winter solstice. The overall majority of Americans is opposed to clock-switching twice a year, but they can’t come to a consensus on whether they want DST (Daylight Savings Time) or EST (Eastern Standard Time). Legislation on this issue has been stalled in the House, which is no surprise, given its current inability to even give us the time of day. The pending legislation takes the side of DST.

Let’s be clear. It is not possible to save daytime, or daylight.  You can only relabel it as a different arbitrary time of day that affects everyone, but especially school children, working people with regular hours, and businesses that are busiest int the evening (like golf courses and bars and entertainment venues and restaurants). DST leaves more children waiting for the bus in the dark and getting to school before sunrise.  (Suggestion: how about starting school later? Like, when the kids are actually awake.)

DST/EST is clearly not the most pressing public issue facing Americans.  We have a few other problems, like a war in the Mideast and a skyrocketing federal budget deficit because Republicans hate taxes and Democrats like public programs. But the clock changing affects the lives of all of us who must be at a certain place at a certain time.

I prefer EST, mainly because of the school children.  It doesn’t have much effect on me personally because I am retired. On the other hand, I am cutting back on my night driving for reasons of vision and reflexes, so I wouldn’t object too strongly to continuing DST, because it’s going to be dark even earlier when we revert to EST.

My main concern, like the majority of my fellow citizens, is changing the clocks twice a year. Having to adapt our schedules to the time change is confusing and disruptive, especially for sleep schedules.  But as a long-time advocate on public issues, I do see a bright side.  I am a blueish purple person in a red state, and I don’t very often get to contact my legislators about things we can both support.  Here is a perfect chance to make nice with the two people who represent me in Congress by lobbying them on a bill that’s not particularly controversial but on which he (both white men, no surprise there) can be a hero by stopping the clock-turning and stabilizing our circadian rhythms. You can even offer talking points like states’ rights (Congress is the obstacle, my state wants to stabilize) or school children in the dark or more daylight time for evening golf—whatever floats your boat and the somewhat larger and more expensive boats of your representatives in Washington.

So be brave, be active, stand up for truth, justice, and the American Way.  Practice your lobbying skills on this largely innocuous issue as a first step toward bigger and better lobbying.  Trust me, you’ll like it.

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The Case for Religious Community

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I like people who ask me good questions. I used to have a friend whom I hiked with, and she was a good questioner. An introvert, she thought carefully before posing questions.  An extrovert, I thought my answers out loud. 

One day I told her about a sermon I was working on, and she asked me one of her best questions ever. What is a sermon? she asked (being a lifelong non-church goer). What is its purpose?  After some stumbling around, I finally came up with an answer.  The purpose of a sermon is to affirm, challenge, and inspire, I said. But in reflecting on it later, I realized that the same purpose applies to the faith community at its best.  A church/congregation/synagogue/temple/mosque is the place where we go to be affirmed, challenged, and inspired.

Other kinds of communities can serve those same purposes. Civic organizations like Rotary of the League of Women Voters  Extended families. Builders for Habitat for humanity.  Groups dedicated to music, dance, theater. Anything that has a shared sense of common ground and common values and goals is a community. (The Latin roots of the word community mean building together.)  But religious communities are uniquely expected to embody shared values and beliefs that shape the way we understand ourselves and encounter the larger world.

Some of us are affirmed in our beliefs and/or values, others challenged, and still others perhaps inspired to articulate more clearly their own unique set of beliefs or values by our religious community experience. I remember a group of us crafting a mission statement for our congregation many years ago that resulted in an inspired ending offered by one member: We are grateful for the values that we share and the diversity that both challenges and enriches us. We are also affirmed by identifying ourselves as part of the shared stories of the faith tradition and of the individual community embodying and celebrating those stories.

A loving faith community affirms each of us in all our gifts and limitations, our sameness and our diversity, our strengths and weaknesses, because of – and in spite of – our uniqueness. It holds up a mirror to us so that we can see ourselves as others see us, and so that we can identify our gifts and passions, and then cultivate and express them both within and beyond that community.

A loving faith community challenges us to embrace and interpret its shared beliefs or values and stories and to reflect on what they mean to each of us. We are invited to consider how these elements of our faith tradition challenge and inspire us in terms of how we live our lives, what kind of work we do, how we relate to others, how we can use our gifts to bless the world.

A faith community always offers us the challenge of dealing with difficult people and conflict. You may not think of that experience as a gift, but it is only by working through conflict and accepting difficult people that we grow as a person and develop attitudes and skills that will empower us to work with difficult people and conflict in the larger world.

Finally, inspire. Some inspiration comes to us through our individual spiritual lives and practices, but the faith community also has a role to play. Spirituality is that sensation of awe and wonder and peace, the dissolution of boundaries that divide us from each other and the sacred. It can be evoked by walking in nature, kayaking on a lake, contemplative prayer, meditation, or other means. It can also be experienced in religious worship or ritual, by the words repeated or sung or heard as well as the silences and ceremonial acts such as communion or sharing the peace with others. In The Perennial Philosophy,Aldous Huxley described the “merely muscular Christian” as a person who attempts the impossible task of continuously ladling from a bowl that is never replenished. A faith community offers ways to replenish that bowl.

Faith communities of all kinds embody the virtues of hope, love, trust (another name for faith), gratitude, and humility. These are virtues or values shared by all faith traditions as well as by those who embrace no faith tradition. To affirm and practice these virtues is the purpose of both individuals and faith communities as we engage in the endless shared  work of building a better, safer, more just and sustainable world community.

Dabo’s Dilemma

~ purplesage41 ~ 2 Comments

Dabo Sweeney, in case any of my followers don’t know, is the head football coach at Clemson University. He has been there twelve years and won two national championships as well as six conference championships and numerous bowl games. So far this year, they have lost two games to ranked opponents and won handily over two unranked teams. What happened? The transfer portal, which allows players to switch teams with no required sit-outs before playing for the new team. This year, the University of Colorado’s roster had only ten continuing players and a record 53 that came through the transfer portal.

 Unlike many other coaches, Dabo is not a fan of the transfer portal. It doesn’t mesh well with his understanding of what a coach is supposed to do. Yes, Clemson expects him to win games, but until now his coaching philosophy has served him,  his teams and Clemson University well.

Coaches like Dabo rely primarily on recruiting young men coming out of high school or sometimes junior college and, through football and other support systems, to help them to become mature, responsible, competent, and successful adults. These coaches are mentors, just as their academic colleagues are mentors for young men and women in a developmental and transitional stage of life. They learn self-discipline, good work habits, healthy lifestyles (except for concussions and other injuries), teamwork, and the ability to bond with others. They learn to collaborate in order to compete. Some of them join the NFL but many others do not, although their maturity, dependability, ability to work well with others, and having a degree from a respected academic institution will make them likely to succeed in whatever career they choose.

A transfer student is at something of a disadvantage in moving from one team to another in mid-career. The transfer must do a lot of starting over to bond with the coaches and team and learn their particular rules, playing style, and expectations. The developmental process is interrupted. I never played sports, but as a retired faculty member and a mother I do have some experience with students who transferred, including all three of my daughters. Team sports aside, relationships are disrupted, courses don’t transfer, and existing social networks formed in the previous year or years are difficult to join.

I don’t know Coach Sweeney personally, but everything I have heard and observed suggests that he makes a firm commitment to the whole student, not just the throwing arm or the running speed or other specific skills that can be practiced and finely honed in order to serve the cause of winning games.

Like Coach Sweeney, the University he serves faces the same dilemma. Diminished state government support has made public institutions more dependent on legislative goodwill, private donations, and adoring fans to provide enough resources to run both the athletic program and the academic institution in serving the needs of all their students. That financial support depends on successful football seasons. On the other hand, the historic mission of academic institutions is preparing young people (including football players) to live rich and meaningful lives, be responsible citizens, and have productive and useful careers. The transfer portal may sometimes serve those goals for particular players, but it’s more about ensuring a successful season than a successful college graduate.

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The Autumnal Equinox (Mabon)

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A few days ago, the holiday of Mabon passed largely unnoticed. Its astronomical name is the autumnal equinox (equal night). It occurs when the earth’s axis is vertical, so that the sun is directly over the equator and, except for extreme latitudes, most locations will have day and night of equal length. In mathematics, it is called an inflection point, a subtle turning in a movement where the rate of change increases or decreases—that is, it speeds up or slows down. My science consultant is pretty sure that the rate of change is now slowing down as we trudge our way to the winter solstice. Mabon is one of eight holidays associated with the changing angle of the earth toward the sun over the course of a year. The northern hemisphere tilts toward the sun in the spring and summer and away from the sun in the fall and winter. 

Most cultures of the world over the centuries have paid a lot of attention to equinoxes and solstices and other events that affect daylight and temperature, because they guide planting and harvesting, grazing domestic animals and providing for their winter. In modern industrial societies, however, many of us have lost touch with the rhythms of the earth. Instead, the autumn equinox is associated with football, the spring equinox with new clothes. We may get our furnace filters changed and adjust the thermostat and start wearing the warmer garments in our closet – we may even be attuned enough to the changing seasons to stop mowing and start raking – but by and large, with central heat and air conditioning, we are probably more impacted by the shorter days than the falling temperatures.

The ancient Celtic pagans, like most agricultural societies, paid great attention to what they called sky holidays—equinoxes and solstices. Solstices—Litha in summer, Yul in winter—mark the longest and shortest days of the year. But there were also four earth holidays at the midpoints between these four, each tied to the activities of the agricultural year in northern latitudes. . Samhain in autumn fell between the equinox and the winter solstice, marking the coming darkness, slaughtering some animals to provide food over the winter and bringing others into winter quarters. Samhain was the pagan New Year. Like the Jews, whose new year is also in the autumn, they went through the darkness into the light as their way of beginning again.

Depending on the latitude, there would be various harvest festivals scattered throughout. Between the summer solstice and the equinox there was a holiday of first harvest in the more northern latitudes called Lammas – the first of August, when people blessed the first harvest in both pagan and Christian traditions. (I know many churches celebrate with a Blessing of the Animals, but I have argued for celebrating Lammas with a blessing of the vegetables, which are generally much better behaved.) A third holiday, February 1st, survives in Groundhog Day. In pagan times it was celebrated as preparation for spring by cleaning out the dead greens from Yul and relighting the hearth fire. That custom makes this holiday, Imbolc or Oimelc the only known holiday dedicated to housecleaning!

The final holiday is Beltane, a fertility festival at the time of planting in northern latitudes. The customs of going a-Maying (gathering wildflowers) and dancing around a Maypole are remnants of this fairly raucous holiday encouraging the animals, seeds, and soil to be fruitful and create abundance.

There are a few recently created seasonal holidays that are both celebrations and reminders of our kinship with all life. Earth Day in April and  Arbor Day in June  both encourage us to get down and dirty in a constructive way. But the pagan earth and sky holidays, some adopted and refashioned by Christian traditions, offer similar opportunities to be aware, active, and engaged in building a good relationship with our planet and its non-human inhabitants. Concerns for the health of Planet Earth, the exhaustion of resources, climate change, loss of species, loss of rich topsoil, water shortages, all are symptoms of how humans have suffered from the loss of those deep connections of interdependence between earth and humans in earlier eras.

While I don’t want to create another occasion for Hallmark cards and gift buying, perhaps we should try celebrating some of these holidays with a bit of planting and harvesting. Hug a tree. Support protecting forests and wildlife. Plant shrubs that attract pollinators, and avoid unhealthy pesticides that kill the bugs that feed the birds and bats and contaminate the sources of pollen for bees. Buy from local farmers. Reduce the use of fossil fuels both by using less energy and by turning to more renewables. If you have a garden, try making it as organic as possible and emphasize native plants and edibles. (My two blackberry bushes provided my breakfast dessert for six whole weeks this past summer!)

But it’s also okay to have a party, preferably a picnic (maybe not for Yul and Imbolc), to serve locally grown seasonal foods, go swimming in a lake, hike a trail or mountain,…you fill in the blanks. Our future is intimately tied up with the health of the planet and all the living things that dwell thereon. Let’s have a party and invite the ants, the bees, the weeds, the birds and butterflies to join in the celebration.

Pick Your Tyranny

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Pick Your Tyranny?

In the 19th century, John C. Calhoun, on whose former plantation I taught, was concerned about the tyranny of the majority.  That is, he feared that a majority would impose their wishes on the whole country without regard to those who were harmed or disadvantaged by their actions.  He had a point, even though at the time it was a point about slavery (and secondarily, about tariffs). But equally distressing is what the U.S. is experiencing now, the tyranny of the minority. A vocal minority is trying to inflict a narrow, change-resistant, anti-democratic way of being onto a majority that clearly and openly disagrees with them about guns, abortion, book censorship, gender identity, sexual orientation, and a whole host of cultural issues.

The Constitution tried to avoid that kind of cultural tyranny in parts of the Bill of Rights, especially the First Amendment and the Fourth (which until Dobbs was interpreted as creating a right of privacy). The general attitude of the cultural majority is embodied in the bumper sticker, “if you don’t want an abortion, don’t have one.”  If you don’t want your child to have gender-affirming care, you are certainly free to make that choice, but don’t inflict your minority religious and political views on my child. Likewise, if you don’t want your child exposed to ideas in certain books, you have that right, but it does not allow you to prevent everyone else’s children from engaging with those ideas or books. (By the time those protected children are adolescents, many of them will be intensely curious about the content of those forbidden ideas or books—and will find a way to satisfy that curiosity!)

 If readers want to accuse me of being  “woke”, I am happy to wear that label. I don’t want to be asleep. I want to be aware of the challenges others face and help them find ways to overcome them, whether those challenges arise from an unwanted or life-threatening pregnancy,  gender identity, sexual orientation, poverty, racism, misogyny, or any of the many hazards of being human in a pluralistic society.

Economic policies are a different matter. We can assert our own cultural practices without inflicting them on everyone else, but the economy is community property. We all affect the economy with our earning and spending and saving and its ups and downs in turn affect each of us. As you may have noticed, it has become increasingly difficult to get agreement on our shared economic policies—the budget, the national debt, the tax system, the role of government in infrastructure and disaster relief and reducing poverty. In economic policy, the tyranny is that of a very wealthy minority who want lower taxes, less government regulation, and privatization of everything from schools to health care to fire protection and law enforcement. Those changes would let them get out of contributing to these services for anyone outside of their immediate families in their private schools and inside the gated communities tat provide their own road maintenance, fire protection,and security..

That minority has been quite successful in imposing their view of how the nation should run its government budgets, school choice, reduced funding for public higher education, and resistance to expansion of publicly funded health care. In health care, for instance, the US. has worse health outcomes and higher health expenditures both public and private than any other developed nation.  They are aided and abetted in this pursuit of unenlightened self-interest by certain features of our Constitution that were put in place to placate the wealthy slave-owning plantation class by ensuring that that nation would have disproportionately ore more representation in Congress and the electoral college from smaller, rural, and from 1787 to 1868, slave-owning states.

We don’t need more Republicans or more Democrats, more congressional hearings or more showdowns over shutting down the government. We just need to give up the joy of tyrannizing over those with whom we disagree and, in the words of Rodney King, ask ourselves “Can’t we just all get along?” The cry of tyranny (often rephrased as fascism or socialism) is used by both sides to try to get their own way, but it also undermines trust and confidence in our institutions by convincing people that they are in the service of the tyranny on the other side  Democracy, unlike football, is not about winning. It’s about compromising. It’s about considering the needs and concerns of all kinds of minorities whether their minority position is grounded in religion, culture, gender, age, race, income, health, security, education, or anything else. It’s also about the role of government in meeting the needs of the majority for basic public services and protections and ensuring that the cost of providing those services is shared equitably among its citizens.

None of us can or should get everything we want at the expense of others. Considering differences in needs and desires and being willing to make compromises is the hallmark of being an adult and a good citizen. As the 2024 elections approach, those are the qualities I will be looking for.in candidates for public office fro city council to the president of the United States.

Gender and Language

~ purplesage41 ~ 3 Comments

Two years ago, following the death of my dog and cat several months earlier, I adopted a ten-year-old dark calico cat named Midnight.  I changed her name to Minuit (French for midnight) and began having a conversation in French with her every morning, fondly calling her “mon petit chat.”  Then I thought, wait, French is a gendered language.  Better check. Yup, I was unwittingly offending my cat by using the wrong gender. She is ”ma petite chatte. “

Gendered language issues are not new.  Back in the day long ago, a human being in English was man. A female human being was a wo-man.  A male human being was a wer-man.  Then the male human beings dropped the “wer” part, leaving us with centuries of confusion of who was included.  Are all men created equal? Does that include me?  Probably not, or the founders would have given me my justly deserved right to vote. One man, one vote? Man of the year (which finally became- thank you, Time magazine- person of the year).

Other distinctions were more subtle.  Is a female on stage or screen an actor or an actress?  Are you pleased that we no longer have stewardesses but instead flight attendants? Were those who fought for women’s right to vote suffragettes (-ette being a suffix meaning little, as in kitchenette or dinette) or suffragists (-ist being a suffix that denotes a supporter of a political position, as in communist, strict constructionist, capitalist, fascist, racist, sexist, leftist…)

Back in the 1960s, there was a frenzy over the title given to women.  Men were just Mr., unless they happened to be a doctor or a senator or a governor or something.  But women’s title was defined by marital status.  An unmarried woman, however old, was Miss (mademoiselle in the case of my cat). A married, divorced, or widowed woman was forever Mrs., an abbreviation for Mistress, indicating that she was-or at least at some point had been-attached to a male. I managed to partly escape that dilemma with at least some people by becoming Dr. Ulbrich, but the larger escape was the widespread use of Ms., indicating gender but not marital status.  (Pronunciation “Miz” is courtesy of the South, and it applies to all adult women regardless of marital status.) More recently, there was an effort to desex the terms for a person of Latin American heritage from Latino (male) or Latina (female) with the unpronounceable Latinx. Not a hit even among people of that particular ethnic heritage.

And now it is a “they-them-their” controversy, and I am an absolute troglodyte on that issue. While I am firmly on the side of LGBTQ rights, I find myself in a lot of company with others who are distressed over the chosen nonbinary pronouns of they, them, their.  (When asked, I assure people that my pronouns are still I, me, and mine). I do not think those rights need to include the use of a plural pronoun that takes a singular verb sometimes and not at other times, the bane of every English teacher. Yes, we do have a gender-neutral third person singular pronoun, but no one is suggesting “it” as a replacement.  A little creativity is called for.  How about sherm, herm, herms? Or a loan from another language?

In the meantime, at least my cat and I have gender clarity.  Even though she has been neutered, she is still a very female cat and doesn’t seem to object to being so identified.

Creating a Legacy

~ purplesage41 ~ 2 Comments

Once you have settled into your retirement plan, or your actual retirement or semi-retirement, there is one remaining important task of the later years.  That is to create, expand, and communicate your legacy. Obviously a will, healthcare power of attorney, and final wishes should be on that list.  And maybe even a draft obituary!

But legacy requires a bigger answer than that.  When you are gone, who will have the store of family stories and memories? How do you pass them on? What about your stuff?  What do you still want to do or accomplish that will influence the world around you once you are no longer present?  And how, in ways great or small, did you change the world for the better?

Let’s take up those items in no particular order.  Start with stuff.  It is really important to scale back the volume of stuff that your family or heirs have to take deal with. I know that well, having probated the states of my mother, my husband, and my best friend.  The first two were easy. The last involved no will, no immediate family other than eleven scattered cousins from Prince Edward Island to California, and house full of stuff.  You may live to be a hundred or be run over by a trailer truck tomorrow. Best not to procrastinate.  When I downsized our three-story house to a townhouse and cleaned out my “pack rat”: husband’s office and workshop, my children said, “thanks, Mom.”  It’ also a chance to give or promise things to family members or friends who will treasure them.  My middle daughter has already put in her request for the double bookcase build by her Dad (her sisters already have some of his pieces) and the desk that belonged to my great-great-grandfather, whose daughter marched for women’s suffrage.

What about the family stories and memories that you want to pass on so that your children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews and other survivors will be reminded of you and feel more aware of their place in the chain of humanity?  I am especially privileged to have a daughter who did the family genealogy and a mother and aunt who were great story tellers. One of my tasks for this year is to share those memories of my father with my half sister and her children. But I do regret not asking my aging family members to fill in some blanks in the stories of their lives.  I have no excuse.  My mother and her sister and my father’s sisters all lived well into their nineties. Don’t procrastinate. Ask them.  Particularly interesting is tracing passions, skills, gifts, and other characteristics. My great- great- grandmother was one of the few immigrants in my extensive New England family tree, a German whose occupation had been a washerwoman.  My aunt Marion, her great-grandchild, who died at 96, recalled her fondly and learned from her how to get any stain out of anything.  More common gifts helped me find why I, with little aptitude for art or music, raised an artist and a musician—we found the links scattered in both sides of the family tree.  I collected family stories, interspersed with pictures and dashes of genealogy, into a small bound volume called Stories for My Grandchildren.  My #3 granddaughter used to sit at the dining room table when she was very young and instead of asking me to read a story, she asked me to tell her another family story. Ask, listen, and share.

Finally, what footprints will you leave in the sands of time to guide or inspire those who follow? It does not require a Nobel prize or and Olympic medal.  This stage of life calls for two ways to leave a less concrete but perhaps more valuable legacy.  That legacy live on in those you cared for and/or mentored, in the communities and causes that you supported and served. Just think of the people who mentored and cared for you, who created and sustained the communities that nurtured you and worked for those goals and cases that you believed in, and ask yourself, what did I do in m lifetime to perpetuate those values, those skills, those communities, those noble goals? Keeping their memories alive in what you say and do will blend their legacy with yours. I kept the memory of my great-grandmother Alice Munger Stewart alive—she marched for women’s suffrage, I organized a local League of Women Voters and actively served at both the state and local level for most of the last 50 years.  So may people taught me how to be a teacher, a writer, facilitator, and I channel them all.  If you journal, or even if you don’t, take some time to write down the people to whom and for whom you are grateful and what gifts they gave you.. If you are still uncertain about your legacy, ask your friends, your relatives, or anyone else who knows you well.  Maybe even gather a group and tell each other what one another’s legacy is.

Legacy doesn’t take place over night.  As Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living. Your life is the container of your legacy.  Spend some time identifying it, practicing it, and celebrating it.

The Last of Life III    Relationships and Communities

~ purplesage41 ~ 2 Comments

According to Jacob Schroder, summarizing a number of studies of retirees in Kiplinger Magazine in 2020, money is important to a joyful and meaningful retirement, but so are at least seven other things. He lists the following:

Working at staying healthy, fostering strong social connections, having a clear sense of meaning or purpose, never stop learning, cultivating optimism and practicing gratitude, and having a feathered or furry friend.[i] So far we have explored the transition in terms of meaning and purpose as well as habits and structure, which he doesn’t mention. This week we are focusing on what is for most of us an especially challenging aspect of aging that is exacerbated by retirement—your social and community life.

Many people move when they retire. They may want to be closer to family, move to a less expensive area, get away from the cold (or hot) weather. For some people (especially introverts) it is difficult to build a circle of friends in a new community and stay in meaningful contact with those you leave behind.  Dear Abby probably gets more variants on this question than any other. Some retirees divide their time between two locations (snowbirds) or change their minds as they get older and want to be closer to family and old friends. Retirement advisers recommend checking out your prospective new home—maybe rent for a year or check it out in out with the locals.

Those of us who retire in place have a somewhat easier challenge.  Even if we have good genes, work to stay healthy, cultivate optimism, practice gratitude, pet the cat or dog, and have meaning and purpose, we still must face the loss of friends and family over the years. I have friends who are divorced or widowed and friends with no adult children who find themselves spending more time alone and are looking for companionship. I knew this was ahead for me even though I live in a community with a lot of people I knew before retirement. I became a widow at 74 after a 53-year marriage. Most of my female relatives lived well into their 90s. When I paid my yearly visit to my beloved Aunt Marion the year before she died (at age 96), she said sadly, “I used to have a lot of friends, but they are all dead.” Even in the same community, friends die or move away. Friends from work drift away. If, like me, you move to a retirement community in the same town, you miss the neighbors, although retirement communities are good ways to meet people and make new friends. And if you have had a partner and that relationship ends through death or divorce, you soon find that your married friends are less inclined to socialize with you.

Family can be very important, but we were all taught to take responsibility for our own lives and to raise our children to be independent. Mine are. I am proud of them, but they lead busy lives and I don’t see them all that often, although I know they will be there for me if I need them. The grandchildren are all young adults with busy lives of their own. The last one is in college, and the others are working and planning for their futures. Motherhood is satisfying and meaningful, but it is a job you work your way out of, sometimes with a second shift when the grandchildren are young. So family matters, but most of us want companionship closer to our own age and without all the baggage of hanging out with someone whose diapers you used to change.

Girl Scouts sing this little ditty, “Make new friends, but keep the old, one is silver and the other’s gold.” It’s important to make the effort to keep in touch with old friends, and not just on Facebook (which I divorced three years ago). But it’s also important to have a strategy for making new friends. Living in a small college town, I often find myself a source of advice and suggestions on what to do, where to go, how to find your “people.” I am a religious and political liberal living in the red state South, so I learned early on how to find my people. My oldest daughter, who shares that outlook on life, did the same with different resources. (She has running friends, neighbor friends, and a national network of work-related colleagues.)  Some of these newcomers found me, and some of my newer friends are people I have mentored through the process. My longest-term friend in my current town has been with me for 58 years, knocking on my door to welcome me in 1966 as a fellow wife of a physics professor.  Most of my friends are close in age, most but not all are women.

Where did I find them?  At the time I wasn’t actively looking.  I have church friendships that resulted from wanting to raise my children in a faith community and sing in a church choir. I have friends from doing kid things like being a scout leader and carpooling. I was looking for a way to be active in nonpartisan politics in a very conservative state, so when I arrived in Clemson intent on joining the local League of Women Voters, only to find there wasn’t one—I started one.  Many of my lifelong friends were people I met that way. Intentional communities of all kinds—quilters, bridge groups, book clubs, pickleball—all are ways to meet people. Newcomers’ clubs in many communities help people to make friends. The town just down the road from mine, Anderson, has a group called ABC—Anderson By Choice—people who have moved there from distant places and decided to stay. Adult education programs are another resource—you can enjoy learning new skills and ideas while also meeting people who became friends. Volunteering is another way to meet people and make friends.

I have learned, despite my reserved New England upbringing, to suggest to someone who strikes me as friend material to go out for coffee, or lunch. For most of my life I waited for someone else to take the initiative, but now I sit down on Monday and ask myself, whom do I want to spend some time with this week? I also have a pool of friends to travel with, although there are more and more opportunities for solo travel. I belong to one group that meets weekly on Friday afternoon for wine and conversation and another that meets monthly for dinner and take turns being the speaker. (A bunch of retired academics, as you might guess!)

Some friends just happen, but someone has to take the initiative—first to meet, then to befriend and embark on a voyage of mutual discovery and adventure.  So pick a target and find something simple you can do together. And cultivate the relationship, check in from time to time, suggest an outing or a visit or lunch. Old friends, new friends, new communities will make your retirement life more satisfying and more meaningful for you and for your new friends.

[i] https://www.kiplinger.com/retirement/happy-retirement/601160/7-surprisingly-valuable-assets-for-a-happy-retirement