If you’d like, google “choosing a word for the year.” It’s a thing! And when Google comes through – which it always does – you’ll be directed to 529,000,000 results! I hope that you are closer to knowing what word you’d like than one out of 529,000,00! If not, you might want to wait until next year.
I’m not ready to wait. I took part in an hour long time of reflection during Advent, the liturgical season that leads to Christmas. The spiritual director that led the time of reflection – attended by participants from many countries – suggested we choose a word for the year. I’d known about this practice – a centering practice, to return us to ourselves when the activities of life seem overwhelming – for many years, but I expect that I was not ready to choose a word for the year – until now.
Finding the word was not difficult for me, but I recall a story – a scene from a movie – that relates to my word. Cher stars in the 1987 movie, “Moonstruck.” It’s a good movie. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth an evening of your time! I can recall the story line, and the faces of the characters, although not always their names. What I do recall, the scene that has stayed with me for all the years since I saw “Moonstruck” for the first time (it had to be in a movie theater then, not on my computer, like now), is the scene when Cher goes to Confession. She’s a good Catholic girl from an Italian family, and she and the priest know one another well, although they are hid from one another in the confessional booth. So she begins her confession, and she quickly rattles off a series of “sins” – and quickly drops into the middle of her list of sins: “I slept with the brother of my fiancé.” The priest stops her; what was that??? She repeats her sin: “I slept with the brother of my fiancé.”
The priest responds: “Reflect on your life.”
Choose your word for the year. Write it down. Keep it with you – in your mind and heart.
Happy New Year!
City Street in Autumn, photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 11/17/2022, Piedmont Avenue
One of the luxuries of getting older – inhabiting the wisdom years – is to be able to enjoy – there’s that word! – the simple, stunning beauty of light. Enjoy!
Sometimes, a few words fill a void that has been within for a long, long time. Sometimes, I have heard those few words in a story, real or imagined.
“The Island” is a Russian language movie that tells the story of the sailor Anatoly and his captain, captured by a German vessel during World War 11. To save his own life, the Russians instruct him to kill his captain, Tikhon; afraid of death, Anatoly complies.
The next day Anatoly, who has survived, is saved by monks on the shore. Filled with guilt over his choice to kill his captain, Anatoly becomes the stoker – the keeper of the fire – for the monastery, and as the years pass, he also provides wisdom and healing to people who come to the monastery.
Many years later, an Admiral brings his daughter, possessed by a demon, to the monastery for healing. Anatoly exorcises the demon. Anatoly learns that the father of the girl is Tikhon, the man he thought he had killed to save his own life. Tikhon forgives Anatoly.
Within days, Anatoly prepares for his death. The monks bring him a coffin, and he lies in the coffin, apparently awaiting his death. A monk – a man who has frequently had difficulties with Anatoly, leans into the coffin and asks Anatoly for some words of wisdom, words that he might now have, as he faces imminent death.
Anatoly speaks: “Just live your life, and try not to sin too much.”
photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 10/26/2021, Bahlert Lake, Beaver, WI
It was in the beginning of January, 2001. My mother was in the last days of her life, and she lay on her bed, under hospice care, in the Mathilda Brown Home in Oakland, every day, all day. I sat with her often – as often as possible – and we chatted idly, our conversation about ordinary things. From time to time, Mom would close her eyes as she lay on her back, and I sat in the silence – our last times together.
At the time, I was the proud and enthusiastic owner of the Palm Pilot, powered by batteries, that held my calendar.
One afternoon, I sat next to Mom’s bed as she rested, and because I had not brought a book or other work from my office, I turned on my little computer-calendar and started to play Solitaire- a bonus feature. A few moments later, Mom sat up, and threw her legs over the side of the bed, as she looked at the object in my hands. “What is that?” she asked.
?????????????????
Over the years, I’ve come to value my own curiosity more and more. Curiosity has been a great gift to me. As I get older, I know that I prefer to spend my time with curious people – people whose sights are set on the abundance of wonder in the world. Their curiosity may lead them to interests that aren’t mine, but it’s the quality they possess that makes them interesting – and, well, curious – to me. What they give me from what they’ve received from their own interests continually makes my life richer.
And their curiosity flows over – to people. Curious people are interested in other people, about the world other people inherit, about how other people got to where they are going now, what decisions they made, who they’ve encountered in their lives. Over the years, my friends loved to visit with my parents. In their small living room, my friends’ lives were of interest to Mom and Dad, whose lives were enriched by the young people in their lives. Mom and Dad were interested in the lives of the young people who visited, and the young people knew that – and liked it.
A curious stone building, once home… Saukville, WI, 5/2022 Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert
My brother Ronn was 9 years older than me; he married when I was 14. In my eyes, he was all grown up, making his way in the adult world. One day, after he’d been married a year or so, he said something to me that I’ve never forgotten: “Do you know that some people are not as interested in things as we are in our family?” “No,” I answered Ronn, in response to his reflective question. I’ve never forgotten his question, his observation, really, about the world as he saw it – his own world growing larger by his connection to another family.
Curiosity has led me to be curious about myself, to be curious about my inner life, about what has brought me here, about who and what I’ve encountered over the course of the years of my life. My curiosity extends to other people: what makes them tick? In my mind, curiosity is not dependent on finding answers; curiosity is interested in questions…
I’ve always loved libraries. What better place than a building whose purpose is to hold books, computers, magazines – all filled with something to satisfy someone’s curiosity – or to leave someone’s curiosity unsatisfied, so that they have to go back for more?!?
I didn’t come from highly educated people, people with degrees and titles. But I did come from a curious sort, people whose eyes lit up with the discovery of that was new, new in their lives. I expect that the quality of being curious is not related to education.
And would the world be different, if human beings were less concerned with certainty than with curiosity?
My mother did not graduate from high school, although she received her GED while I was in university. I know for certain she did that so that I would graduate with a degree, since I was wavering, and had taken a semester off during my senior year at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She didn’t tell me her reason to do it then, but I knew. When she received her certificate, I sent her a spring bouquet.
Mom quit school early to work. She married young, also, and had a son within a year – Ron, my brother. Mom was bright. Now, when Mom comes up in conversation, I tell folks that she should have been a teacher – a kindergarten or first-grade teacher. The daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who lived in flats in neighborhoods of poor folks, it was enough that she learned to read and write. She taught her father to read English when she was a girl. In my mind’s eye, I can see her, bright and determined, her feet wrapped around the rungs of a wooden chair in a cramped Milwaukee flat, as her father, Vlas, paced – determined, also. He was smart, although illiterate in his native language. He made that long trip across the ocean, left the familiar village of his homeland so that his children could learn to read and to write.
So Mom knew the value of education, although she could not see to get a degree herself. The life of a working class woman in that era intervened. She was married and divorced by the age of 22. She worked hard at Cutler-Hammer in Milwaukee, where her employers noticed the bright, hard-working young woman. Although she had greater earning potential than my father, she quit her job when she married again. That’s how things were done.
When I was girl, I walked 3 blocks to the Center Street Library – on 27th and Center – with Mom, every week. She must have read all of the books in the “mystery” section of that library. It was in those days that I learned to love the smell of libraries. In a library, it seems we can smell the riches of what is carried in the aisles. Twice in my life I have worked in a library – in high school, and again in seminary. For awhile as an undergraduate, I flirted with the idea of becoming a librarian. Books would save me, many times, during my life.
The old Center Street Library at 2620 West Center Street, Milwaukee, photo circa 1920
When Mom and I left the Center Street Library to walk home, we each carried two or three books to read for the week ahead. I see now that Mom was living her mantra, handing it to me: “you learn something new every day.” I was not able to see that for many years, but now, in my own learning, I understand. And I came to see that the learning that comes every day is not always in books!
Mom taught me how to wash clothes, too. During summers when I was a young girl, my babushka-d Mom would take me down three flights of stairs to the shared basement of our flat to show me how to wash clothes. I remember the smells – the damp and soapy smell of the basement, the hot, steaming water of the wringer washer. Into the first load went whites – sheets, pillow cases, underwear. Into the second load of the same water went towels and colored clothing. Into the last load went Dad’s work clothes. I know the smell, I can see the beautiful wooden stick Mom used to lift the clothes from the washer into the first rinse water, and then into the final rinse before the clothes were taken in the large wooden basket into the yard to dry in the humid air. As I write, I can smell the air, too.
If I could have one item of Mom’s, it would be that wooden stick, smooth, smelling of soapy water, imprinted with Mom’s hands, her weeping and her worries. Like most of what has been held and used over the years, that wooden stick is gone.
I see Mom’s broad, strong peasant hands, hands that in later years would be crooked with arthritis. She was a worker, teaching a little girl whose work is ideas and books and the fabric of words. “You learn something new every day.” I took those words into myself, and I made them my own.
The path I have taken through life has been the path of learning, too, not always from books. I keep your mantra, Mom.
TheWisdomYears.org 