Getting the Most out of Life
It seems to me faintly ironic that I contribute to a magazine called Better Parenting. Most mornings I can be found weeping in coffee shops after the struggle and defeat of trying to get children through the morning ritual and off to school on time. There’s something ironic too, about New Woman’s proposal that I write about “getting the most out of my life”. The fact is, that having secured a relatively successful acting career, found Mr Right, borne three healthy children and made a quite satisfying new writing niche for myself, I can more often be found kicking holes through the fibro or squeezing my spots in vicious self-destruction. Shouldn’t I be luxuriating in pine-essence and counting my accomplishments or something?
Like anyone else embarking on life, I was kicked out the door with my fair share of aphorisms. Invaluables like, “remember to wash between your legs, serve on the right, take away on the left, don’t talk about yourself,” and I’ve spent much of my life ignoring them. The one that stuck, however, is probably the most questionable “you’ve only got one life so make the most of it.” As a product of fairly lackadaisical Protestants, the idea of coming back for a second or third shots at a life just wasn’t debated and so, with a finite time limit imposed, my interpretation of “making the most of it” meant stuffing in as much as possible before your time was up. To a certain degree, I must admit, it did instil some motivation. Enough, anyway, to discover that stuffing in as much as possible didn’t determine how much you got out of life.
At a certain point I must have personified what a lot of young girls only dream about (I certainly did), of foreign travel, movie-star status and silver-lined bank accounts. I remember driving down Sunset Boulevard shortly after arriving in Hollywood, quite sure that fulfilment was a mega billboard with one’s name and face splattered across it. Two years later I found myself detouring Sunset to avoid confronting such a spectacle. Why is another story, but it serves to illustrate how false one’s preconceptions, of the things that bring happiness, can be. At least I now knew not to waste any more of my life barking up the fame and fortune tree.
But barking up the married with children tree didn’t entirely satisfy either because even though there’s less time for self-absorption there’s still the odd moments after the school bus has left or lying wide awake between the baby’s night feeds, where you wonder “hey, what about me?” Then inevitably “Lucy Lockets got all this and she’s got a stimulating career” or “Miss Muffet’s still got a career because she hasn’t had children and still has big perky boobs.”
Clearly happiness, fulfilment, whatever, is only possible if one has it all. Family career and big perky boobs. Not a problem, I thought, I already had the family, was making inroads to a stimulating new writing career and was seriously contemplating the big perky boob implants. Happiness was within my grasp, when I happened to stumble across an article called ‘A life in the day of.”
“Big things don’t really matter,” says Leslie Elliot. “It’s the tiny things.” Lesley is 34, has three children and plans to spend the rest of her life preparing the family for when she is gone. She is dying of breast cancer. “I just want to make it to the pancake race and the Breakthrough (cancer victims charity) car-boot sale.”
Former hostage Brian Keenan, too, seems pretty keen on this “it’s the tiny things that matter” business. In his book An Evil Cradling he describes how when the guards bought in a bowl of fruit, the hostages didn’t eat for a day because they wanted to take in the colours.
Well lately I’ve been working on appreciating tiny things. The way the early morning sun highlights the steam from a freshly boiled kettle, the smell of freesias on the window sill and yesterday, lying on a dappled lawn and watching my small, naked son pee on the cat, I had to acknowledge that yes, they couldn’t get much better. But blimey it’s fleeting. The question is, if we don’t have the threat of death breathing down our necks reminding us that this could be the last time, how do we stay in the sublime, with the pressure of meeting school buses, mortgages and deadlines?
Well, according to Robert A. Johnson, Jungian analyst and author of ‘Transformation,’ it’s a predicament shared by the majority of educated Western man, “Complex man (inbetween simple man and enlightened man)” he says “remains trapped by nostalgia for the past or anticipation of the future that mostly eludes his grasp.” Since there’s no going back to the rich inner world of the simple man it seems we have to move forward into a higher consciousness. Well cool, I’m out’a here… but here’s the rub. Enlightened consciousness is the culmination of human evolution and can be attained only by highly motivated people after much work and training. Umm, slight problem.
“No one can be anything but a partial human being, ravaged by doubt and loneliness unless he has close contact with his shadow,” says Johnson. This prerequisite certainly bodes better for those of us living in Australia than, for example, Northern Europe where the weather usually prohibits shadows. The German writer Goethe unable to rely on sunny days gave his protagonist Faust a black poodle to assist him on his journey into higher consciousness (often called redemption.) “Faust has a shadow through which God can touch him and redeem him!” concludes Johnson, “the black poodle makes redemption possible.” I’m not taking any chances. Forget the implants, I’ve ordered a poodle.