The Good Place

 

I turned 54 yesterday. As I sat with my eighteen-year-old daughter on the couch I thought to myself, “wow, she has a really long time to live.” I get tired just thinking about the days ahead for her — college, graduate school, work, figuring out her life day after day after day.

But I didn’t get tired when it was happening. It didn’t feel like a slog when I was in it in my twenties and thirties. The work I was doing felt life-giving and necessary. I felt like figuring it all out was my JOB. 

I just started watching The Good Place. Eleanor Shellstrop, the main character, gets sent to the show’s version of heaven (The Good Place) accidentally. In reality, based on her terrible behavior on Earth, she should have been sent to the Bad Place (hell). I’m just on season one, but from what I can gather, Eleanor learns some important lessons in the Good Place that change her. The powers that be want to send Eleanor to the Bad Place. But in her time in the Good Place she changes and those powers recognize that maybe Eleanor actually belongs there. 

In the Good Place, you are matched with your soul mate. You live in your dream house. There are 18,000 flavors of frozen yogurt you can eat any time, as many times a day as you want. You get to fly. There’s no traffic or pollution. Everything you need and want is there. 

In the Bad Place, you have to do tasks you’d despise on earth — like hosting a baby shower or cleaning up rat poop all day long. Eleanor has good reason to stay in the Good Place and she and her friends are working their asses off to make it happen. 

Last weekend I co-led a retreat with ten women in menopause. We were all seeking clarity about ourselves, our lives, and the world around us. At our age, we don’t have the kind of energy that 18 or 20 or 32 year olds have. We are tired. But there’s a pressure to keep acting the same way we’ve always acted. 

Unfortunately, in our dysfunctional, capitalistic, American society, women are told that either they keep up with the younger Jones or accept their fate as washed up old dogs with no reason to live. The United States has the highest number of plastic surgeries — 4,361,867 in 2018, almost 2 million more than Brazil, the country next in line.

The message is that if we keep looking younger, we’ll keep acting younger. We’ll retain our passion to work hard and stay young. Getting older is a negative thing. Women (and men) in this country work as hard as Eleanor Shellstrop to stay out of the Bad Place of aging.

At the retreat we released that pressure valve of staying young. We acknowledged our desire to just be where we are now, to give up the grind and reflect on where we’ve been. Instead of striving to keep up with things that don’t matter to us anymore, we honored the need for rest and community. 

What I realized at our weekend retreat, and again on the couch with my young, full of life daughter yesterday is that I really don’t want to be young. I don’t want to work as hard as I used to. I don’t want to worry about being liked or approved of. I want to settle back and reflect on how hard I have worked already. Going back to the younger stages in my life would be like going to the Bad Place. 

I’ve spent years in different careers, in different relationships. I’ve explored countless therapy modalities and self-help concepts. I’ve read thousands of books and traveled far and wide. At fifty-four, I want to sit on the couch and listen to my daughter tell me her plans. I want to bask in the comfort of knowing that I don’t have to work that hard anymore. 

Spending the weekend with a group of women in a similar physical and emotional place was affirming and energizing. I was reminded again and again that I like where I am. I don’t want to go back and do the hustle I watch my daughter doing. I don’t want to figure out what my major is or pine over romantic interests. I’ve done all of that and I’m happy where I am.

There are lots of aspects of getting older that are hard. I don’t love the new jowls that are forming on my face. My joints are pretty stiff. And I can’t drink wine without getting a massive headache. But even with the little trouble spots, I choose this place. I want to be where I am now. I like getting older. It’s where I belong. This is the Good Place.

The Absence of His Presence: Goodbye Freckles

Our dog died yesterday. We think Freckles was nine or ten years old. Some of his history is unknown to us so we deduced his age based on what we do know and the vet’s best guess. We also don’t know Freckles’ breed, but we think he was part Shih Tzu for sure. Based on the length of his torso and the shortness of his legs, he also might have had some Dachshund in his DNA.

Whatever he was, he was amazing. He didn’t bark (except at the mailman). He didn’t shed. He only whined around food. He napped constantly — wherever, whenever around the house, snoring loudly as if sending our household the constant, subtle message to just slow down, calm down, and chill out.

Sometimes Freckles’ would send a more direct message — coming directly to where one of his humans was sitting, settling in to nap along side them. He often sat right next to me on my meditation pillow or snuggled his bottom right beside my head when I lay on my yoga mat.

Every night he excitedly climbed the stairs for bed as if he were going on an doggy adventure. He’d march down the hall clicking his nails on the wood floor until he reached our room where he’d burrow into the blankets in his crate and start snoring again.

Freckles was also obese. When we got him three years ago we started on an immediate campaign to help him lose weight. We exercised him, revised his diet, tailoring his portions down to the exact quarter ounce. His only treats were raw foods — his favorites were carrots, cucumbers and red peppers.

Because of his history of obesity, the vet told us, Freckles’ had a bad heart. We knew that in one of his previous households he’d spent years eating fatty human foods and getting little exercise. He was well loved but his health suffered as a result. We hoped that by investing in his health we could postpone or even reverse the possibility of heart failure.

But we couldn’t. Freckles lived in our home for a little over three years, creating a slow steady presence so grounding and anchoring that I didn’t even realize it until he was gone. Two nights ago Freckles began to struggle to breathe. My partner Nancy and I raced him to the ER vet where he was given oxygen and medication. The interventions didn’t work — nine hours later he went into respiratory failure and then heart failure and died.

When we got to the vet they put us in a corner room with a flyer about getting support after your pet dies. There were tiny cremation urns on the shelves and a box of tissues on a shelf next to the tiny naugahyde couch where we sat.

A vet tech came in and handed us a clipboard with a list of choices for what to do with Freckles. At the top of the list was the several hundred dollar option for individual cremation with a ceramic paw print souvenir. Listed below were other cremation options and the option to take your dog home.

“I want to take him home and bury him in the yard,” I told Nancy.

“I don’t know if I can bear to handle his dead body and bury him,” she said. She was imagining a rigid, dead Freckles.

“Can we see him first and then make a decision?” I asked the tech. “Sure,” she said and left our tiny bereavement room to collect Freckles.

Another tech brought Freckles back. He was strapped to a tiny stretcher underneath a plaid fleece blanket. After she wheeled him in, the tech unstrapped Freckles and left him for us, still covered in the blanket.

Nancy gingerly pulled up the blanket to uncover him. He was still warm, still Freckles. We laid our hands on him and cried. We missed him so much already.

Just minutes after reuniting with his body Nancy looked at me and said, “Let’s take him home,” nodding as tears ran down her face.

We pushed the call button for the tech to tell her our decision.

It felt good to drive home with Freckles. The tech had put Freckles in a tiny cardboard casket and it was comforting to have him in the backseat with us. We decided, on the twenty-minute drive home that we’d bury him between the two vegetable beds he liked to snack out of every summer. His favorite were the snap peas. Every season Freckles ravaged my pea plants, his fat little butt hanging off the edge of the raised bed as he chomped the plants he could reach.

As soon as we got home I went to my sewing room and got a white cotton sheet I’d been saving for a potential future project. While I ironed the sheet Nancy gathered shovels, gloves, and a pick ax from the garage. I brought the sheet up and we laid it out on the dining room floor so that we could prepare Freckles.

He looked the same in the box as he had on the stretcher. He was still Freckles, still soft and furry, lying on his side, the same position as he often was, napping around the house. Together, we took him out of the box and laid him on the sheet. Nancy got his favorite stuffy, a raggedy old black cat, and we placed that between his paws. We added a carrot and his tooth cleaning bone, two of his favorite snacks.

Then we wrapped him in the blanket, tucking him in for his next journey. Friends had brought flowers to a dinner party we’d hosted the night before and we laid several buds on top of his wrapped body. We said thank you and goodbye and then we went out to dig a hole.

I’d read that we would need to dig a hold three-feet deep. We didn’t really forge a plan for how we’d do it. We just started digging. To accommodate Freckles’ body the hole would need to be short, narrow, and very deep. We dug from soil to clay to rocks. It took about two hours and lots of inventive techniques to dig the hole. We barely spoke as we dug, both grateful for the activity to distract us from our grief.

By the end we were covered in dirt and filled with pride at our accomplishment. We went in to gather Freckles. After another round of goodbyes and the last minute addition of his pink monkey, we carried Freckles out to the garden and kneeled down to lay him into the hole. We thanked him and told him we loved him. And then we covered him up with the soil we’d just dug.

As I meditated this morning I waited for the tapping of Freckles’ nails to come join me on my mat. I keep hearing phantom snoring in the dining room as I sit here writing. I feel the pull to wrap this up so I can take Freckles on his walk before I start my work day.

I feel the absence of Freckles’ presence everywhere. It’s not even been a full day that he’s been gone but I miss him. I miss all his little sounds, gestures, movements, and needs. I missed his excited running in circles at breakfast time this morning and I miss all the walks we’ll take along the lake.

To my left, outside in the garden is the tiny grave we dug for Freckles. He’s there. Last night at his dinner time we went outside to toast him. We lit a candle and made some wishes. We told him thank you and I love you again.

It wasn’t the same last night, going to bed without the sound of Freckles’ snoring. Freckles was everywhere, all the time. There is a huge void in our home. There’s no way around this feeling. It’s the absence of his presence.

A few times since we buried Freckles, in moments where I’m aware of his absence, when I look to his bed and know I’ll never see him snoring there again, I go to the window and look at the raised beds. I look at the spot where we laid him to rest and feel comforted. He’s here. He’s gone but he’ll always be with us.

Last Minute Parenting

 

These days I am intermittently filled with pride and overwhelmed with sadness. I always knew, but never quite believed that this moment would come; that my daughter would grow up. Periodically, I saw it happening. My iPhone reminded me every year of how much smaller she looked the year before, but this feels too sudden. How did it happen?

I am counting the months until my daughter moves out of the house — not in a good way. Soon I’l be counting the weeks, and then the days. “How can I make the most of this time?” I ask myself, “how do I soak her in before I send her off?”

And my biggest questions, “have I done it right?” and “have I done enough?” Rationally I know that I won’t lose contact with my daughter when she goes to college, but the combination of her surging independence and desperate need to impart everything I know in the next ten months leaves me furiously scrambling to make sure she is ‘ready.’

When my daughter has a conflict with a friend I move through all of my own friendship struggles like a slideshow in my brain and tell her, “It doesn’t matter what they do. You need to make sure that whatever you do has integrity.” As I share this lesson I am reminded of the countless times I acted dishonorably. 

When the topic of Fentanyl-laced pot comes up I look anxiously at my daughter, hoping that she’d never take a toke off of a joint from an unknown source. As we talk about the risks she tells me, “Well, I don’t smoke weed, but if I did, I’d get my own from a dispensary.” Phew. I am reminded of the innumerable stupid choices I made in high school and college, eschewing the clear voice at the back of my head telling me not to risk it.

Every day I think of things I want to make sure my daughter understands before she leaves — how to really scrub the toilet; how to make good coffee; how to save and invest her earnings; to be on time; to communicate respectfully; how to write a resume; to join clubs at college; to trust herself; to try new things. 

And every time a lesson comes into my mind I have to soothe myself. “Laura, you’ve had eighteen years,” I tell my panicky mother-self, “she knows what she knows.” I have to trust that my daughter will keep learning along the way. Just like I did. She’ll learn from the world, from her own mistakes, from the wisdom of all the other people she’ll come across in her life. She has her her own internal wisdom and all the micro-lessons I’ve done my best to share along the way.

My friend Linda is seventy-five. Every morning she sends me a text message. Usually it’s a GIF with a prayer for a good day or a funny image of rain clouds or a traffic jam. Every day her sweet image includes the letters, “GM” which stands for Good Morning. Linda has been doing this tiny ritual for months. I love it. It’s a daily reminder that I am loved and that someone is thinking about me.

Even though my daughter still lives at home, our time together is limited; I always want more. A few weeks ago I started my own version of Linda’s daily affirmation for her. I think of the real things I want my daughter to know — that she is loved, that she is good enough, that I am proud of her — and so many more. Whatever piece of wisdom or sentiment that comes into my heart at the moment, I write. In a very short text, I write a GM message. The act comforts me. Maybe she’ll read these texts or maybe she won’t, but I hope that even if she doesn’t read the text every day, she’ll know what it is — a sign that she is loved. 

The first time I wrote the GM text, my daughter texted me from her basement bedroom to ask me what the text was. “It’s just something I’m doing,” I wrote back, “you’ll get one every day.” I waited and watched the three dots on my screen.

“Thanks Mommy,” she texted back. Message received.

The 'Self': Welcoming her Back Home

Last week I talked to my therapist about a feeling I’ve been having lately. I’m on the precipice of something. It’s familiar and foreign at the same time. It’s a feeling I have at work and at home. It’s a moment when I feel like I actually know what to do without stressing or struggling, without thinking too hard. 

It’s happened recently at meetings with my staff when I leave the meeting feeling like, “well, that was easy.” And also with my daughter when I find myself in the unusual position of offering her advice that seems to help at just the right time. What I notice is both situations is the very clear absence of drama.

I shared this feeling with my therapist who is a very wise, very old (81) woman and she said, in the sage-like maternal way that I love so much, “Laura, that’s your ‘self’.” She explained that for most people, at some point in their lives, the ‘self’, or what I’ve called ‘essential nature’, leaves and a series of parts take over. These parts might be judgers or worriers or caretakers. The parts can be anything and they are different for all of us. We all take on different parts to get us through our complicated lives.

But at a certain point the ‘self’ feels safe to come back and reorganize. “This,” my therapist told me, “is what is happening for you now.”

When I look up ‘self’ online I get this definition, “a person’s essential being that distinguishes them from others, especially considered as the object of introspection or reflexive action.”

I have believed, even proselytized the belief that when women get to the age of menopause they come back to their essential nature, or true selves. It comes from a combination of hormonal reorganization and lived experience. By age 45 or 50 we have learned and endured a lot, and we are done with the bullshit and the drama that come with managing all of the parts. 

This fed-up-ed-ness enables our true selves to come back, take charge and settle in for the long haul. This is the time when the ‘self’ can push aside the parts that have been holding down the fort and reclaim what is rightfully hers.

When my therapist pointed out the presence of my ‘self’ in our session, it felt like a great affirmation and recognition of this belief I’ve been carrying. I have infinite faith and respect in this woman and she has an additional three decades of wisdom on me. To hear her point this out opened up a new portal of acceptance of this concept for me. 

Since that conversation with my therapist I feel different. I have a knowing now that I can’t un-know. I can’t push the ‘self’ back out. She doesn’t want to go. I am aware of a peace but also an absence. I’m so used to the drama, the confetti of other voices in my head that I feel a sense of aloneness without all those parts shouting their opinions.

I know this is going to be an adjustment — it’s just me now, myself. I can feel the changes on the inside — a new openness inviting possibilities. I worry that I might seek out new drama to fill up this space. I wonder if my ‘self’ is secure enough now to resist this temptation. I hope so. I really hope so. 

The Healer

Today I went to see my acupuncturist. I’ve been seeing him for over a decade. Early on in our relationship I determined that he was a true healer. I don’t exactly understand what he does, but it’s magical.

I’ve referred countless friends, colleagues, and former students to him and everyone agrees. He’s truly magnificent. I call him the healer.

I can go a year or two without seeing the healer and then, when I realize no one else can help me, I go see him. Every time I see him I fall a little bit more in love with how wise and insightful he is. I’m grateful that mostly I am very healthy but a few weeks ago I went for a back injury I sustained carrying heavy bags of soil and removing a tree. 

After the healer did his assessment he informed me that I had somehow twisted my lumbar spine. He gave me a treatment and sent me home with some exercises to do. For a week I practiced the squats, pelvic rolls and hip openers. I felt good. I felt great. 

Then in the middle of the second week I felt the pain creeping back. I scheduled another appointment for today. When I went in, as he always does, the healer asked how I was feeling and if anything in my life had changed. 

“I’m exhausted,” I sighed heavily, “I feel so tired today.” He asked if my diet or my sleep or my exercise patterns had changed. When I replied that nothing had changed, as if inviting me to dig deep for the root of my exhaustion, he sat back quietly and waited. 

“I think it’s emotional,” I said, near tears, “there’s a lot of change — the weather, work, and my daughter is eighteen, and she’s almost gone and that is so much harder than I thought it would be.” 

He nodded with sympathy and invited me onto the table where he had me lie down so he could do further assessment. I closed my eyes, grateful for the time to rest. The healer moved around my body manipulating my hips, lower back, and legs. After about thirty minutes he settled on where the needles would go.

By this time I was half-asleep, grateful for the familiarity of his presence and the utter faith I have in his abilities. I could rest here for as long as it took. It felt good to be in capable hands. I trusted the healer implicitly.

After the healer placed the needles into various spots on my body, he left the room and I drifted off. I fell into a hypnagogic sleep, imagining my hands moving even though I knew they were totally still with needles in my wrists. After some time (I don’t know how much), the healer came back in. He palpated my stomach and my hips and said, “Can you lie her a bit longer? You’re not fully cooked.”

I nodded, happy to stay on that table all afternoon. On this second round of rest I had a memory of the healer in my early days of knowing him. Many years ago, when my daughter was 5 or 6, I had a similar pain in my lower back. During our initial conversation I shared that I was in a mental tug-of-war about moving my daughter to a new school that her teacher recommended. The teacher said this new school would be more academically challenging and better for her.

I was conflicted. I loved her elementary school and I wasn’t sure if moving her was the right decision. That day the healer did a treatment focusing on my gallbladder channel. After the session those many years ago, he explained to me that the gallbladder channel was often associated with decision-making. He said, “it could be that the pain you’re having is related to the decision you’re trying to finalize OR maybe the decision you’re trying to make is contributing to the pain.”

In the end it didn’t matter which was the chicken and which was the egg. Both existed — the pain and my need to make a decision.

This afternoon, after the healer removed the needles from my arms, legs and hips, he said, “Laura, from what I can tell, your back is fine. What I think is going on is that you’re stuck.”

“I am,” I said as I pushed myself up to my elbows to get off the table. As I put my watch on and laced up my boots I shared the memory I’d had of the day he’s worked on my gallbladder channel twelve years ago. He smiled and nodded. “I remember,” he said.

I put on my jacket to go and walked towards the door. As I opened it to leave I said, “Thank you so much.”

“You’re welcome,” he smiled, “You know, I worked on your gallbladder channel today too.” 

Back when I was the mom of a young child struggling with the decision about where to send her to school my struggle manifested itself as pain in my back. This year, as I round the corner of my life into an empty nest, I am again faced with some big life changes and decisions and the pain, again, shows up in my back. 

Bessel Van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, writes, “…the two most important phrases in therapy, as in yoga, are “Notice that” and “What happens next?” Once you start approaching your body with curiosity rather than with fear, everything shifts.”

He’s right. It’s funny. I taught yoga for twenty years and I still forget to slow down and notice, to remember that the body and the mind are deeply entangled. My first instinct with pain or discomfort is often to try to assign some action that got me to the pain instead of to explore other areas of my life that might be contributing. 

The body keeps the score — my back told me something wasn’t right. But knowing the score doesn’t explain the game. The game is as big as life — there are rules, players, goals, and thousands of other contributing factors. The healer, in his great wisdom, reminded me (again) to slow down and expand my perspective. 

Every time I see the healer I reconnect with the idea that the messages from my body are sharing a bigger story about my life. Maybe I should try to remember this the next time my back hurts. But if I do that, I won’t need see the magnificent healer. And I don’t want that…..

We Are All Connected

Several years ago I did a year-long energy mentorship with an integrative medicine doctor. To this day, I consider her to be one of my greatest teachers. Over the course of that year (and beyond), my teacher helped me to understand energy, intuition, and the power of the universe.

The first thing I, and the other handful of curious women in my class, needed to understand, is that we are all connected, every tiny molecule in the universe is connected. 

Believing in the oneness of the universe is a huge pill to swallow, a great leap of faith, but my teacher helped me to understand this concept by sharing how it is explained and understood in different traditions. She also broke it down for our class, giving us little exercises to see our own inter-connectedness.

The very first exercise we did was to look in our closets every morning and not think about what we would wear, but simply go for the first thing that we reached for. Then, later in the day we could notice if this made sense — did the weather change and we were grateful to have a sweater instead of a blouse? Did we have an unusually long walk and we were relieved to be wearing comfortable shoes?

One class we went to a nature preserve and walked in solitude until we found a plant that called to us. We were encouraged to spend time with that piece of nature and notice what we could learn from it. I found a tiny weed by a creek and sat with it for thirty minutes noticing every tiny detail of the plant that I would have otherwise passed by.

One year I went to India with my teacher and shared with one of my traveling companions about a lunchtime laughing class that they were offering at the trauma hospital in Seattle. I shared how I hoped to take that class upon my return. Later that afternoon, on the bulletin board of the ashram where we were staying, there was a flyer advertising a laughing class in the town we were in — 8000 miles away and 13.5 hours time difference. We laughed together, wide-eyed, at this unusual and magical connection.

There was a time in Mexico when I knew, on a visceral level, that even though the people transporting us seemed legitimate — they were wearing uniforms and made a “phone call” to our hotel to prove their identity — there was something off. I tried to convince my partner that we were being swindled but her counter arguments were strong and I, prone to anxiety, chalked my sixth sense up to being anxious instead of intuition. In the end, my inexplicable knowing that something was wrong was right. We got taken for a fake ride, losing over $300 in the process.

Over the last several years since that first energy mentorship class, I’ve learned countless ways to listen to my intuition. I believe wholeheartedly that we are all connected. This is my faith, the thing that I can tune into when I struggle to make a decision or choose a reaction in my life. I trust that I am not alone, that there is a greater force helping me.

My family likes to tease me about my belief system. Sometimes I’ll say, “I just know” or “I’ve got a feeling about this” and eyes will roll. But sometimes I’m right. When I sold my business just four months before COVID hit, it had been a long-time coming. I went back and forth on the decision. After almost twenty years it was hard to let it go. But in the end I lowered the price for the right buyer and said goodbye. That was the right decision.

I trust my gut on most things, especially big decisions, because I need the support of the universe. I don’t want to be alone in this world.

My greatest struggle of late has been the slow painful letting go of my eighteen-year-old daughter. In the past I had control over her. She still lives at home. She still checks in about her whereabouts. She’s still my daughter. But I am recognizing each day that the actual “control” I have is slipping away. And it should. My daughter’s job is to graduate into full independence. My job is to let her go.

Sometimes, oftentimes, I panic. I worry about my daughter. Is she safe? How can I protect her when she’s at a party and there’s alcohol, and she drinks, and a football player takes advantage of her? What if someone brings a gun to school? How can I protect her then? I can’t. 

Last night my daughter went out with two friends. I rarely see her these days. She’s out more than she’s in, filling her social coffers with the constant flow of friendship. I went to sleep around 10:00pm and woke around 11:00pm to the sound of her voice. “Mommmmmmmmy,” the voice cried from downstairs. The voice sounded unfamiliar, like a much younger child. 

I woke up and called back to the voice. “Lucia,” I yelled loudly down the stairs. There was no answer and the hall light was still on which meant she wasn’t home yet. “It must have been a dream,” I thought to myself. My heart beat fast as I walked down the stairs towards the basement to see if she was in her room. On the way, I looked out the front window and saw her car. There she was, sitting in the driver’s seat, having just pulled up. She was looking at her phone as she often does when she first parks.

When Lucia walked in I shouted down to her, “the craziest thing just happened….” and I shared how I’d awoken from a dream to her calling me and that she’d pulled up in her car at just that moment. I said, “See, we really are all connected.”

“Mom,” she said, “I’ve been sitting out there for like twenty minutes.” I let it go. I didn’t need to annoy her further. I went back to bed filled with a mixture of relief and gratitude. I closed my eyes and drifted back to sleep. We really are all connected. 

Melancholy Part ll

I used to be a prolific reader. I still read regularly, but not nearly as much as I used to. It’s too easy to turn on a show on my laptop or scroll through dumb shit on my phone; I waste time that could be spent reading. I keep a library of books that I’ve read over the years. I hold onto almost everything but especially the books that really move me.

During COVID I found comfort in rereading some of those books. I’m a fast reader so sometimes I remember snippets of books I’ve read but can’t grasp the full story in my memory so rereading often yields surprises. Though I don’t remember the exact story of the books I’ve loved, there’s a feeling I remember and I want to go back and experience that feeling again. 

There was one book, a novel I read close to ten years ago, that I have thought about thousands of times that I could not go back to during the peak of COVID. I knew it would be too upsetting so, though I thought about the story often, I left the book on the shelf.

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker, is about eleven-year-old Julia and her family. They live in California in current times when a rare phenomenon strikes the planet. The Earth’s rotation inexplicably starts to slow. The book follows the course of the Earth’s slowing alongside the adolescent development of the narrator Julia.

Last week I finally felt like I could stomach The Age of Miracles again. COVID feels mildly under control. We have a functioning human as president and my daughter is in actual school. The Age of Miracles was everything I remembered. The story filled my brain for days. I thought about it all the time and I could see parallels in the world we live in now — rising temperatures, fires, and the extinction of certain flora and fauna. For me, the book was then, and is now, viscerally relatable.

The Age of Miracles compels me in the same way the 2008 Disney movie Wall-E did. I recently rewatched that film and loved it as much as I had the first time.

I wonder why certain topics stick in our brains and others move through like water through a sieve. Both Wall-E and The Age of Miracles are about the utter collapse of our environment, the total devastation of our planet. I wonder if these stories are so stuck in my mind because they hold a deep-rooted truth about the world or because the topic is the one that scares me the most. 

When I read about Julia persevering in a planet ruled by days of cold darkness followed by days of sun that’s become dangerous and radioactive, I take a pause to grieve for my daughter’s future; I pray that she dies before we get to that point. I am terrified of her living in a world like that.

But in The Age of Miracles, Julia and millions of other people on the planet adapt. They find ways to survive while understanding very clearly that their time on Earth is limited, that they will probably witness the demise of their planet and of themselves. Despite this imminent destruction, they have an enduring hope that keeps them going day after day. 

In Wall-E, the humans abandon the Earth and wait out planetary destruction somewhere in Outerspace on a giant spaceship. After signs of life on the formerly dead planet become evident, the Earthlings come back and try to rebuild what was destroyed. Starting from nothing they trust that they can recreate a habitable world.

In both the book and the movie there is a sense of utter despair and surprising hope that totally pulls me in. It is not unlike the feeling of melancholy. The feeling of welcoming both the tragedy and the possibility, of existing in that opposite land is strangely comforting. 

I know we’re not the first generation to fear the future. Humans from the beginning of time have faced peril— vicious predators, famine, world war, nuclear arms. And they have carried on. Their perseverance has gotten us to this point and now we will keep going, enduring, and hoping.

I will read The Age of Miracles again and I will watch Wall-E again. As hard as it is to recognize how close we are to the planetary destruction of those stories, I take great comfort from the undeniable presence of hope that runs through them.