What now, oldest daughter?

 

I am a lineswoman.  For those of you who know me personally, no worries. I’m not talking sports. I’m referring to quotes.

Lines I have read or heard often come to me when I’m out walking early in the morning.

“Don’t you want to be alive before you die?”

The question repeats itself as I walk. I’d read it a few days before in Anthony Doerr’s gripping new novel, All the Light We Cannot See.  It’s asked by an older woman who is challenging  her friends  to take potentially dangerous actions against the Nazis occupying their small coastal town.  We don’t know very much about the woman,  except that she’s in charge of a bakery.  We witness the courage and leadership required to take the action she proposes and then the impact on her friends, the community and the novel’s young protagonist.

Though thankfully no comparable dilemma confronts me, the French woman’s question takes on talons and sticks in my brain.  I find myself asking,  “What does it mean to be, to feel “alive”?

Maybe it means taking a look at my bucket list. Maybe it means evaluating if I need to become involved in issues affecting my life.  For sure, it means cutting any coasting and recognizing that what I  do with my time matters.

“Are you having any fun?”  

Ironic question to pop into my head as I hit the hardest, mostly uphill part of my morning walk.  This quote comes compliments of the movie Quartet, which my husband and I had watched again a few nights ago.  It replays, complete with melody, as I head up the first semi-steep incline that lies between me and home.  Am I having any fun?  Such an important question.  Even now as I do my self-imposed exercise, begin to pant and at the same time hear the chirps of the nearby prairie dogs, I recognize that “fun”  includes things which give me satisfaction, make me feel good about myself and what I’m doing.

That’s when as I round the last uphill curve, the final quote comes to mind, one penned more than a century ago by American philosopher and psychologist William James.  A copy of it was push-pinned into the corner of my office cork board for years: “Seek out that which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive…the inner voice which says, ‘This is the real you.’”