The battle within

There is a bit of a battle going on inside me, at the moment and I blame my good mother!

We read, that as we age, we need a purpose in life. We do.

However, we also read that we need to take it easy and relax.

At Christmas I got a present of a book that I’ve been dipping into daily. It’s about finding peace within. Here are some quotes from it.

‘How beautiful it is to do nothing and then rest afterwards.’

‘If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon, in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.’

I wish!

This is where my mother comes into it! She never allowed us to sit and be idle. Were any of your mothers like this, I wonder? If she spotted us doing nothing, a job was found immediately. Her aim was to instil a work ethic into her children.

Remember, too, that in those days, according to our Catechism, the first danger to chastity was ‘idleness.’ It was a known fact that ‘The devil finds work for idle hands!’ One must be kept busy.

Of course, as a teenager, I thought that as soon as I had a home of my own I would sit down all day long and do nothing. And of course, I couldn’t! My mother had (too successfully) instilled a good work ethic in me!

Now, in my seventies, I am still the same. I feel I must be busy during the day. And sometimes, I am just too busy, which is absolutely ridiculous.

No matter how good my library book is, I do not allow myself to sit down after breakfast and read it for hours.

And this is the battle within - between having a purpose in my day and being able to ‘do nothing and then rest afterwards,’ as my book suggests

So, my New Year’s Resolution is to find a middle ground and I’m succeeding so far. I write, read and walk (these are my ‘purposes’ in life) and whilst walking, lately, I thought of the lovely poem we learnt in school. ‘What is this life, if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.’ So, I sat down on a seat in Burgess Park and watched the lovely river flow past. I tried to empty my mind of the long shopping list in there, and managed to do so.

In the library, later, I was very impressed with a stand of books which I took a photograph of to share with you. Have ‘A Blind Date With a Book,’ it said. On the stand were ten books parcelled up in brown paper and tied with pink twine. A luggage label was attached to each one, with a ‘teaser’ as to what the story was about. (This was in mid-February, close to Valentine’s Day.)

I have the height of regard for the lovely staff of Athlone Library. They are very pleasant and helpful, and all sorts go on in it. I complained here, last week, that hairdressing salons no longer have gossipy magazines for us to read. Well, our library has them all, as well as highbrow publications, and the daily papers.

Every time I am in the library I note that there are three or four people sitting reading these. Yesterday, I ‘allowed’ myself to sit down there too, and I looked through lots of them.

Some afternoons, at around 5 pm, I sit and watch the ‘Today’ programme on television. At least, I mean to watch it but I often have a little snooze whilst doing so!

One Friday afternoon recently, as I was half asleep, I heard some of my weekly article being read aloud. Of course, I thought I was dreaming. I opened my eyes to see Marty Morrissey, on the television, reading out an extract from my Jean’s Journal. It was from the article about looking for a perfect husband. Daithi was laughing loudly.

Marty does a slot, on ‘Today’ every Friday, called ‘Weekly Roundup.’ He picks out interesting pieces from local papers. He choose mine that day and I was very chuffed. However, he never mentioned ‘Jean Farrell’ nor ‘The Westmeath Independent.’

I watched the programme Superagers on television last week. The wonderful men and women on it were mainly in their late eighties and nineties. They boxed, swam, rowed, cycled or danced daily. It was very uplifting and heartening. It reminded us again of what we already know.

Keeping fit physically and mentally makes us happy and healthy. It enriches our souls. So does company. My daily stroll to Dunnes provides me with exercise and a chat, because I always meet someone who engages me in conversation. However, I think the verb ‘stroll’ should be replaced by ‘fast walk!’

I’m often sorry that I don’t like gardening, the way my three sisters do. It would tick all the boxes. There is exercise involved and then one can sit and ‘smell the roses.’

Life expectancy is interesting, as I’ve mentioned here before. I was born in 1951. The average age of death then, in Ireland, was 66. That means that a person, in 1951, who was the age I am now, would be considered very old, indeed. Life expectancy in 2023 is 84.

“Til death do us part,’ we vow on our wedding day. “I didn’t know it was going to be for so very long,” a woman exclaimed, on television recently. I laughed!