“But I’ve bought a big bat,
I’m all ready you see,
Now my troubles are going to have
Trouble with me!”
~ Dr. Seuss (from “I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew”)
In a fit of the doldrums (aka a creative desert), I was re-watching “Fried Green Tomatoes” the other night, and I noticed my pronounced simpatico with the character Evelyn, played by Kathy Bates. In the story, Evelyn is going through menopause, and her marriage is falling apart. Never one to stand up for herself, she has an epiphany when she meets and talks to nonagenarian Ninny Threadgoode (in an endearing performance by Jessica Tandy), and learns about her remarkable life.
From this point onward, Evelyn gradually takes control of her own life, her relationship, and her future. She is unstoppable as she figures out how she will make her life count for something.
In just the past year, I’ve noticed an alarming development in my own approach to life, involving doing/learning new things. For instance, having a grandchild for the first time, I’ve been confronted with new-fangled contraptions such as car seats and strollers that are nothing like the car seats and strollers I remember from my own children’s toddlerhoods. These particular models have more buttons, hooks and straps than the gear of an astronaut setting out for the moon, and after a brief explanation, my son left me to grapple with driving my grandson to his music class.
Twenty minutes later, I was in the parking garage, struggling to get the poor little guy out of the car seat. He started crying, I started crying, and after fifteen minutes I ended up calling my son to admit defeat. We got it all worked out, BUT…..I realized that, among other things, I had fallen victim to a case of mild neophobia, or a fear of new things.
My husband and I are thinking of getting an electric car, so we went to peruse the choices the other day. Our current gas guzzler is from the ‘80’s (that is not a typo) and still runs well, but we see the lifespan writing on the wall (plus California will help us buy and pay for a new electric or hybrid vehicle just to get ours off the road).
I was invited to drive the model, a Chevy Bolt, around the block, which I was looking forward to doing until I realized that my brain had frozen. Nothing inside the car reminded me of an actual, well, car. Fortunately, the saleswoman we were working with was gentle with me, and I managed to creep out of the lot and go a short distance.
I’ve always been a pretty quick learner, and usually have also enjoyed learning to do new stuff. I’ve been comfortable with adventure in some contexts: I’ve gone to Vietnam to do a three month artist-in-residence program in my fifties for instance, I’ve taken flying lessons, ran a marathon at sixty and two half marathons before that, I’ve founded organizations, raised money for the arts, wrote and published a children’s book, etc. I might have been frustrated along the road, maybe occasionally worried, but none of this stuff actually scared me.
So this is different. It has a foreign feeling to it, like some invader from another planet coming to take over my life’s pursuits. It is not something I would like to continue, so I’ve made a decision not to allow it to. And I believe that’s what it takes: a basic decision to take my life in the direction I want it to go, to not allow something unfamiliar or misunderstood to derail the course my life is on.
I just crossed some kind of age line that prompted the three word test at my annual wellness exam: the examining physician gives you three unrelated nouns to remember, and several minutes later asks what those words were. This test makes no sense to me, because for people like my husband (who has dealt with attention deficit all his life), remembering those words would have been difficult when he was thirty, much less his current age of eighty-two. Asking him to pick up certain groceries without writing it down, for instance, is a lost cause, and always has been.
However, ask him how to do a complex series of actions in Photoshop (like setting up a macro), and he is all over it. Clearly, there is nothing wrong with his brain.
There is very little in this world that can bring you down faster than doubting your own ability to do life. But unless you’ve been diagnosed with some kind of dementia, I’ve come to see that it is essential to be aware of and fight any feeling that resembles timidity, giving in, fear, paranoia, etc. Greet each day with a new goal, new project, awareness of where you are and where you’re going. If fear starts to creep in, nip it in the bud. Fear is not dementia, and it’s within our ability to control.
Getting to Dr. Seuss’ Solla Sollew is not so difficult, when you’re carrying that bat.
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