Did I answer the question?

I just turned 18, and yet I feel the weight of life fully already. I guess the only question I really have is, what is the meaning to life? 

Wow, what a question to ponder.

I wish I could tell you definitively what your goal in life will be...I think all of us at some time in our lives would have been either grateful or curious to find that out...and your situation where everything seems to be crumbling around you leaves very little room for hope or to catch your breath. Even the support you've counted on from a parent isn't what it appeared to be.  The teenage years are a difficult time already in terms of expectations and demands, not to mention the pace of life speeding up and pulling you along, whether you're ready or not...what to do?

Let me say this.  You may not believe this, but you've already lived long enough to have made a difference in the lives of countless others.  Your parents' lives were changed forever by your birth, and it does not matter if you were the first, last or whatever child...you were an element of change....whether for good or not, no one can really say, because it's difficult to measure something as nebulous as a life's influence or effect until you've reached the end of it.

Life has a way of using people up and then spitting them out like a discarded rind, leaving very little tangible in the way of satisfaction save for obvious financial, material markers.  Your mom went from a bigwig to "nobody"...little wonder why she's feeling exhausted or spent?  What does she have to show for all her efforts? 

What you need to understand is this: life is more than a specific goal or purpose...it needs to be lived in order to be appreciated, it needs to be shared in order to recognize its fullest potential.  Intangibles such as happiness, fulfillment, connecting, belonging, being loved and loving others, patience, perserverance...these all have a place in the picture that each of us is constructing that will at the end of our days comprise a life lived.

There was a old saying in the 1980s: "life's a b***h, and then you die."  I couldn't relate to it then, and I still can't.  It must be terrible to feel that there is no point to living life if all there is to expect will be grief, sorrow, disappointment every single day, every single moment.  I honestly hope that where you find yourself is at a way station, not a crossroads, and that what you're struggling with has to do with wondering what your real qualities and gifts are and how to look for them and recognize them when you do.

If your grades are that low and you need to graduate from high school in order to cope with things, then go ahead and do so, but move on with a different attitude: take some time to figure out why things happened the way they did, what could have been done differently, and what can be done differently now.  There is no shame in looking at community college or online classes as a stepping stone to higher education...there are many young people out there who might experience greater success later in life had they opted out of the typical college track and figured out first what was their best option.

Find out what truly excites or motivates you...don't be satisfied with what other people think about you; take the time to really come to grips with what is important and essential to you. Remember what was said in The Little Prince: "it is only with the heart that one can see clearly."  

Keep a journal and make entries every day, no matter how trivial or minor things may be when you add them...it's amazing what occupies our mind/thoughts when we stop to look back at the past week or month...and you may be surprised to find something in a thread here or there that resonates more with the passage of time.

Take the time to discover how fortunate you might be compared to others.  Volunteer for an organization whose cause you believe in.  Help with the Red Cross.  If you're good at science or math or animals, check out what's available locally in terms of outreach.

Whatever you decide, make a concerted effort to listen more than talk.  Instead of stating your opinion immediately, listen to what others may say...encourage dialog, conversation.  If your mother is truly burnt out, then you might be someone she can confide in and trust during this difficult time for her...you might be someone she needs other than just being a daughter or child...you'll never know if you don't try.

TS Eliot once wrote that "we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of our journeys will be when we return home and see it for the first time."  Sometimes, it's not necessary to know what our purpose is, so long as we remain open, hopeful, thoughtful, aware and caring...for ourselves, others and the world around us.

Give yourself the space and time to clear your thoughts and realize how many lives you touch every single day.  Think about your real blessings and gifts: being financially stable, smart or attractive isn't what I'm looking for, nor should you...I am talking about intangibles, things that cannot be seen but are essentially important to our well-being...this is the quest you find yourself on at this time.

If you give yourself permission to strike out on a path different from everyone else's expectations for you, you may discover what you're looking for...I suspect you're already perceptive enough to know this since you wrote and wanted some feedback. I know you have what you're looking for, inside your heart and mind...give yourself permission to be open, honest, caring and genuine, so that you can see yourself for what you really are.  From what you've shared here, I have no doubt there is a unique, special person who deserves to be discovered and appreciated for who and what she really is, not what others expect her to be.

Remember, look for subtle signs of encouragement and hope all around you...the Japanese view courage as a plum tree blossoming while snow is on the ground.

Hearsay-I

Lately, whenever I hear the most recent lauded composition by some up-and-coming composer that turns out to be yet another variation on the minimalist notion of "music" (repeat a basic motif again and again, ad infinitum), I recall that a major composer like Ravel thought his Bolero essentially an exercise in orchestration and crescendo...when you remove the orchestral fabric there still was left behind a melodic phrase long enough and interesting enough to qualify as compositional, not fragmentary in the way so much of modern music is being written these days.

I think that's what I find lacking so much in contemporary art, whether music, art, ballet or writing: a reliance on minimalism instead of cogent, coherent thought to convey an experience.  It's the reason why in spite of so much technical prowess displayed by younger and younger performers, I still prefer the work of artisans whose work has been tempered/enhanced by experience as well as the spark of that indescribable, elusive element that makes a work of art or performance more than the sum of its individual parts.

Whenever I get frustrated at life, I look to interests like music for a respite, and Ravel has definitely proven to be that for me throughout my life...it is ironic that someone considered as austere and "clinical" as Boulez could have been my principal avenue into this music.  It reminds me of the reason why I loved french in college even though my professor told me my Russian classes "ruined" my pronunciation (but she said it so sweetly and so echt-francais that I found it endlessly charming to this day)...the notion of french music performance has everything to do with understanding the cultural, artistic and stylistic approaches...a reviewer of a recent biography of the composer said it best:

...His capacity for the most beautiful invention distinguishes his work in all these genres: one needs to hear only the first few bars of the Piano Trio, or of the Pavane, or of the Chanson Hébraique, to be drawn in immediately to an intense, beautiful world. 

Ravel’s music evokes an atmosphere that is of the era of Proust, but not Proust’s social context, of somewhat depraved aristocrats and useless young women waiting for someone to marry them. It is a world of the refined bourgeoisie, the people who sought to hold things together during the Third Republic, especially after the war, and to develop further a distinctive French musical culture. Debussy was dead before the Armistice: Saint-Saëns and Widor very old; Les Six still in short trousers, or learning their craft. Ravel was the pre-eminent French composer of that era, and he made a statement not just for French music, but for the whole of French culture, and for France itself. 

Evocation instead of context: I could not have described it better.

One of the most revered pieces of music to me is the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis by Vaughan Williams, and it is no coincidence to me that its unique voice was crafted in that curious alliance between Ravel and RVW where the latter sought the former out for instruction even after he had already begun actively composing.  To me Ravel's compositional style was only one part of his genius...another was his ability to "hear" in orchestration how to best present ideas with as little distraction as possible.

From Today's Quora Postings

What 5 rules would help me become successful if I applied them to my life?

(Jane Chin)

1. Nothing happens until you act. You can be the smartest most incredible reservoir of potential the world has ever known and this potential will die with you unless potential energy becomes kinetic energy.

2. Your ability to heal, to help, and to harm intercalates with the stories you tell yourself about who you are, why you exist, and the nature of the world you believe you live in. [I want to use a different word than intercalating but I am not yet decided on which is cause and which is effect, which is chicken which is egg.]

3. Your true personal power grows not from what you will do once you have arrived, but what you have been doing all the way along the journey, especially the really shitty parts where you imagine everyone's booing you and laughing at you and betting on you to quit or, making this life a perverse game indeed, betting on you to stay until the bitter deadly end instead of quitting while you're ahead.

4. There is a reason why the word "fulfillment" is written as "FULfillment" and not "FILfullment": you must identify what you already hold in full (abundance) and give this away as readily as you exhale your breath. Same goes for why the word "generous/generate" is stitched into the word "regenerate": you become renewed the more you gift of what runs through you, inexhaustible. The more you give to take from others, the more exhausted you become in giving. The more you give that comes from a place of "you cannot help but to give of this, as this is how you express yourself to life", the more you are given in return.

5. There is a critical lesson that the most favored Psalm in the world teaches, regardless of religious affiliation (I posit a similar lesson resonates in other religious texts only I'm not scholarly enough to know them) -- "even though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil." notice how the song does not speak of "the valley of death" but instead inserts a seemingly clumsy extra appendage "shadow" as in "valley of the shadow of death". This is because we become afraid more of the shadow, which creates the valley, than of death itself, which we cannot know. But we who live all learn to know fear. Thus my final lesson is, correctly identify the shadow, and please do not mistake the shadow or equate the shadow for death itself. We fear the fear of death more than we can truly fear death.

Ironies

It was almost a month since I made a meaningful entry to this online forum, and while I kept meaning to write but never got around to doing so, it seemed odd that I didn't feel as guilty about not writing as I thought I would have...then this morning the realization hit me: the reason why I didn't feel so bad about not writing here was because I was fulfilling that desire to reach out and communicate through different forums, not just this one.

I joined an online volunteer network late in March that allowed me to respond to anonymous requests for advice.  While I thought it would take awhile to get used to what was being expected in terms of content, focus, etc., it didn't turn out to be as arduous as first thought...and then I discovered that there was a vast number of people out 'there' who wanted advice or at least a different perspective on their situation...so the minimum of two questions answered a week totaled 45 by the end of April...this in addition to the 100+ questions I've replied to on the other volunteer site I've participated in since the start of the year (Good Judgment Project) where a minimum of 25 was requested!

Now it's only been a month for one volunteer function and four months for the other, so it's hardly time to make any blanket assessments other than this:  when I consider what I'm doing in terms of work, add in these two outreach functions, and still feel as if I could be busier, then that says something about the kind of mental stimulation I need to keep from going crazy or feeling bored!

A principal frustration with my work's reporting has been the extent to which the basic content may be fine but the approach/direction gets tweaked to the point where the end result sounds less like me and more the kind of stylized, generic format preferred by banks...depending on whatever else was going on around me, that could either prove to be a minor annoyance or something more major when in fact it never ever really changed that much...what differed was my need to have it belong to me in order to maintain my sense of self-worth.  Whenever wholesale changes needed to be made (especially when recommended by people I did not really like), that would definitely do a number on my self-esteem.

Now though, I am regularly receiving positive feedback from one volunteering effort and not being questioned about my interpretation of world events in another, and it means a much more ongoing, sustaining realization that I may not be as totally clueless or useless as I might have felt in the recent past.

This is where hubris comes in.  Just because I've made some progress in developing a better self-image through outreach, I cannot stand on my laurels or strike out and attempt to do more...what I've needed to develop throughout my life is a sense of consistency; the kind of regular, steady sense of awareness and diversity I've felt in music, ballet, art and science...and this may be one of my last, best chances in which to do so. What I've told more people to follow is something I need to practice myself; namely, small incremental steps, advancing towards some distant goal that I will better understand some day but not now...that in the journey I may better understand something essential about life than I have to this point, and that meaningful growth does not have to scattered all about but can be focused and directed when we have the patience to allow it to be that way.

Coming back to the fold

While I expect to post more later today or at least this week, the following will suffice for now.

Jack Ramsay, coach of the Blazers during their championship 1976-1977 season, died at 89 of cancer.  A consummate coach and teacher, canny observer both off the court and on, someone who handled himself with grace and discretion (traits missing so often these days)...someone whose enthusiasm for the sport of basketball made it all the more fun to experience.  Another remembrance of times past now gone...before game 4 last night, I read of his recent struggles with cancer and wondered how he was faring...Dan Patrick's on-air remembrance today was wonderful because it was heartfelt, eloquent, and personal; qualities we should all wish to be remembered by.

John Houbolt's death at age 95 on April 15 was announced in today's New York Times.  He was the creator of and guiding force behind the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous method of reaching the lunar surface that NASA used for the Apollo program.  While I am unsure how much was fact, the opening to the HBO episode on the Lunar Module ("From the Earth to the Moon") succinctly captured the 'voice in the wilderness' quality of his quest to convince NASA officials that a third approach to landing men on the moon deserved serious consideration (the others: direct landing, earth orbit rendezvous).  For this young enthusiast, it just made sense that LOR was the quickest, most efficient way to achieve the goal of a lunar landing by the end of the decade.  It seems appropriate that someone with as clear a legacy as this engineer should be remembered as clearly and succinctly as he is today.

Last entry for an eventful month

10:15pm in Madison, Wisconsin where it was amazingly warm (over 60 degrees) when I arrived shortly after 6:30pm...one weird sight I won't forget soon: in spite of the warm temperatures and clear skies, all the lakes we flew over on the approach to the airport were still frozen!

Getting to the hotel was a trip since I really didn't know where I was going and the directions given over the phone made some sense but I was so tired I forgot the last half of them and so I called again when I made it to the mall that the hotel is named after, figuring it had to be close...and it was, but I was so glad I was able to drive around before it got dark; THAT would have substantially increased the degree of difficulty.

Going to dinner was made charming by two events:  a huge family leaving the restaurant and marveling at the fact that it was still so warm out (I had packed my coat in my suitcase and decided to leave it there for now; it was that warm!)...everybody had taken no chances and brought along their heavy coats, and the infants were decked out in multiple layers, so much so that they didn't move much, or couldn't.

And then my waitress was a charming young lady named Amy who prefaced every question with 'sir' this or 'sir' that, and when I told her she didn't need to be that formal, she explained it as simply a habit, and not really a bad one these days.  Anyhow, we had a natural banter going that was enhanced by a busboy joining in the fun...we fist bumped (all three of us) and it made the dinner a little happier and a little less lonely than it otherwise would have been.

I am SO ready to have my sinuses behave...I've gone through more kleenex than I've ever used on the road before!

Thank goodness for familiar things: music playing in the background, books on this and the iTouch, my little bronze horse from The Black Stallion, a crystal prism from a long-closed store in Savannah when I helped Nathan settle in that freshman year, already 9 years ago...amazing.

Small steps...my personal Kaizen

It was no surprise to me that I fell asleep around midnight and woke up at 4:45am...that was the way it always used to be whenever I'd travel somewhere far enough away that I wouldn't be able to sleep in my bed that night.  Beginning a journey is in many ways a separate and distinctly different experience than planning one; the reality of what you're about to embark on is something that can only truly be felt once that process begins in actuality. 

There are many who feel their life's steps are preordained, predetermined...it's at such moments that I appreciate the true magnitude of faith; to think that anyone/anything can be so omniscient as to know what is to happen to each and every one of us, at each and every moment, is to find sense within the inherent chaos that permeate our existences and provide us not only with an awareness of past/present/future, but also the ability to believe in the possibility of a continued existence beyond our immediate reckoning...not perhaps in life eternal but in life later today, tomorrow, next month.  To me, the true power of faith is believing in that gossamer link each of us have with God and how that thread remains connected no matter what direction we choose, what path we walk, no matter if we choose to affirm or deny that...in the best spirit of a zen koan, it simply is, and nothing said or done can change its essential quality...denying or affirming it is unimportant really; living up to its potential is what we should strive for.

Little things done to advance the day help tremendously, not perhaps in distance spanned with each effort, but when looking back at the collective result.  For me, relief and joy in remembering to cut a long toenail before it reminded me every day that I hadn't clipped it!  Taking my supplements, drinking some coffee, having some oatmeal, packing phone chargers, remembering my checkbook..taking the time (I actually made the time by waking up early) to stop, think, write and truly begin the day by consciously being in it and being actively involved in shaping it as opposed to feeling that I am a passenger only, unable to do anything to affect the day's flow or anything within it...perhaps I ultimately can not, but at least by being aware of what I can do to make the day ahead a time worth being engaged and involved in, I become less a passenger and more of a partner in the process. 

One of my pet peeves is the phrase "no big deal, it doesn't matter"...unless you are engaged or involved in the process of life, how can you tell whether something is or is not a big deal?  Isn't it better to evaluate and determine the worth of a moment before casting it off as unessential?

In any case, spending a half hour with one's thoughts helps ground oneself, especially before any journey, whether involving thousands of miles or a few short steps.