Diminishment
I wake up to a cloud hanging over my head. My head feels fuzzy and it takes a moment or two to get some clarity. It is not even 5 a.m., the sun has not risen, and... where am I? Who am I? I reach through the dimness of my mind and reconstruct what I’ve built of my life—taking shape as I slowly feel my body come back to me. Oh, it’s me, and here I am.
It takes longer to go through days, these days. Gone are the days when I could teach four classes and still have young children and make meals and breastfeed and make a garden. I need more people around me, now, assisting, assisting, assisting. Sometimes students have to meet me at the foot of the stairs to carry my laptop bag, offer an arm to make sure I am stable. And the children are all grown up—and the velocity of all that movement, that might have masked all the aches and pains of bending and breaking, now has room for full expression. Why does everything hurt more and longer?
As my mornings begin, and my plate is smaller with things to do or accomplish, I’ve been thinking of the word “diminishment,” and the different versions of it. For this is what this is surely: a diminishment of myself and my powers; a diminishment of what I can do and be. And a diminishment of the need of the world for me.
“Diminish” is a 15th century word meaning to “make less or cause to appear less.” It is younger than the word “work,” which appears around the 10th C, but older than the word “selfie,” chronicled formally in 2013. It is quite wondrous to think of words as having birthdays. Dictionaries are built on usage. For hundreds of years, lexicographers have studied the way each word has appeared in print or in oral use and then recorded and transcribed—defined and made permanent—creating the structure of the root word, the different ways the word can be used and, for the ultra nerdy, the date when the word first appeared in the world. Truly, in the beginning was the word.
I can imagine finding this word “dim” and creating the metaphor that to lose one’s power looked the way a light could end. Words are meant to sound like something, too—and that quick dance from “d” to “m” is perfect for the way it all happens oh-so-quickly. In a universe that relied on natural light or on candles made of tallow, the dimming of the light could be dreaded. With nightfall came loss of sight, loss of vision, even danger. And although candles could light some of the way, there was certainly a dimming.
My world, and yours, is full of diminishing returns. I still remember that moment when I realized not everything lasts forever. It’s comical to think about it now, but without an experience of long time, you never quite learn the lesson right away about things ending. It isn’t so easy to see because we live in a world that contains both “for the moment” (that which is fleeting and ephemeral) and that which seems to be forever and unchanging. Trees can live for centuries and do outlive generations. The sky and the moon above us, although they contain dead stars, continue to do their work, regardless of the foolishness of human beings below them. And yet, they too, will not live forever. All things big and small, and finally even that cockroach, will die.
It isn’t fashionable to talk about these things—especially in a world that dooms you to believe that you can live forever, or at least look like you never age. We do not celebrate the lines, the sagging, the drop, the drip, the loss, the ends of things. Our shapes change and it upsets us. We are no longer ourselves and we rail against the inevitability of evolution. We bemoan the “no longer cans” and “no longer be’s…”
I think of nature and her graciousness at accepting the ends of things. I think of her daring to bloom and flower even if it won’t last a day, a night or year. She never diminishes her power, mutes it so that she will be more seen by us who find the artificial lights of the modern world far more beautiful. I say this all the time: you want to see a fantastic light show? Just look up.
This is romantic, of course; the real diminishment I feel these days can feel cruel. My body has diminished, literally: a shrinking of my spine making me even smaller than small. It can no longer walk as much as it used to. My daily medicine intake is a sign that I need much more support to age well. And there are those moments in meetings, or gatherings, when I feel my voice is no longer needed or valued. I’ve become the old woman in the room, sometimes. I’ve learned to keep quiet; to maintain a smaller space, aware that I must make space for the new generation. The young ones are faster, quicker, more adept, and can make a video in 20 minutes. I still have not learned how to do a PowerPoint presentation.
What to do in the face of my own diminishment? As I wake in the light of new mornings, I pause and acknowledge a whole new me—even as I diminish. Be like the flower, I suppose. Or the weed. Dazzle with whatever I have left, and then wither and go and be part of the rich soil that will sustain new life on earth. I will take the diminishment like the star that I am.