Eating the Elephant

 

Last month my husband and I went on a trip to the Holy Land with our parish, touring Israel and Jordan. The trip was amazing. We visited sites we’ve read about in the Bible and or have seen in movies, like Petra, the ancient city carved into rock facades, which was featured in the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Among the places we visited were Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus and the site of the first Christmas. We also visited Nazareth, sailed on the Sea of Galilee and floated in the Dead Sea. We rode camels in Jericho, walked the Via Dolorosa, the “Way of Sorrows” in Jerusalem to Jesus’s Crucifixion site and entered the Holy Sepulcher, the empty tomb of Jesus.

In Jordan, we visited Mt. Nebo, not the one with Sam’s Club and Target, and the Roman ruins in Jerash. We saw Bedouins herding sheep in the desert, visited Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, and placed prayers in the cracks of the Western Wall. It truly was the trip of a lifetime, and I encourage anyone who gets the chance to visit the Holy Land to do so.

 Sunrise over the Sea of Galilee, Tiberias, Israel

 

But then it was time to return home.

We left Jordan and did the complicated swap of having our bus driver and Jordanian guide transport us to the border, deposit us there to go through immigration, re-enter Israel, where an Israeli guide and bus driver picked us up and transported back to Jerusalem. We were having dinner in a hotel before our guide was to transport us to the airport for our flight from Tel Aviv to Newark and then on to Pittsburgh, when I thought to check on our flight status. When I saw a red warning that said “Canceled,” my heart sank. I asked if anyone else had checked the status, which prompted everyone to pull out their cell phones. Not only had our flight been canceled, but we had also been rescheduled on a later flight leaving Tel Aviv but terminating in San Francisco, making it a 15-hour flight. Then we had a seven-hour layover in San Francisco before departing on a connecting flight to Denver, and then flying back to Pittsburgh.

My husband and I had purchased preferred seats so that we could sit together, but the new flight had us both in middle seats-the worst possible places. A sense of desperation descended. I don’t sleep on planes. I didn’t think I could handle such an ordeal. We’d already been up 19 hours when we took off; all told, by the time we arrived home, I had been up for nearly 50 hours.

Many of you face or have faced far worse circumstances than travel troubles. I have a neighbor who had a health issue that left him in isolation for nearly a year until he received a bone marrow transplant. On the last leg of the trip, I sat next to an 81-year-old woman from West Virginia, who was flying back from visiting her grandchildren in Denver. She told me that when she was 27, her husband, who was a coal miner, had his skull crushed in a mining accident leaving her a widow with a two-year-old and new baby. She said she didn’t know how she made it through.

But I know how she did it, and anyone else facing dire, seemingly insurmountable circumstances, knows the secret. It’s the eating-the-elephant mindset. It was Desmond Tutu who said that “there is only one way to eat an elephant: a bite at a time.”

 

When I boarded that plane to come home, I tried to take it one hour at a time, one leg at a time, and find something good within each hour. I watched several movies and chatted a bit with my Israeli seatmate. In San Francisco, I had a delicious BLT sandwich, after no bacon for two weeks. And the lady from West Virginia was sweet and talking to her helped to pass the time. I never thought I’d be able to cope with being up 50 hours straight and being confined in a middle seat for 15 hours, and yet I did.

For any of you facing a challenge now or in the coming new year, remember to take it one small step at a time, find the good even in undesirable circumstances, and realize that you have more strength than you may realize. And before you know it, that elephant will be gone.

This originally appeared in the December Issue of Northern Connection Magazine.

Prisoners of Our Own Devices

We write our articles somewhat in advance because of printing deadlines; therefore, I’m writing this only two weeks after the autumnal equinox. I love summer so much, and as we bid this one farewell, I was thinking about what some of the best moments of this one were for me, and although a trip to the beach came to mind immediately, one small thing kept coming back to me.

Sometimes on Friday afternoons, I go to Mass, and one Friday at the beginning of August, I ran into a friend there, Patti. We went to high school together. Although she’s a friend, she’s not one I talk to every week. Nevertheless, she invited me back to her house that afternoon at 4 o’clock, explaining that she often has a few people over for an hour or two on Friday afternoons before dinner just to relax and celebrate the arrival of the weekend. As it happened, I was able to go, and I sat on Patti’s patio with her, and two other high school chums, Donna and Carol. We had simple snacks and iced tea, and we just talked for more than two hours until it was time to go home for dinner. There were no selfies, no music, no one pulled out a phone; we just sat in the summer breeze and laughed, reminisced, and talked about what was going on in our lives.

I don’t know if it’s because we’ve been so starved for human contact because of the lockdowns that it made just spending time together that much more special, but that Friday afternoon was one of the best times of my summer.

That evening, my husband and I went out to dinner, and I noticed something that I hope is not a trend. There were two different families at the restaurant and each of them had a small child with them, but what I noticed was that each of those children, instead of sitting and talking to their family gathered around the table, they had headphones on and were absorbed into an iPad screen. I know some children have sensory issues and as someone who had twins, I know it can be rough dining out with children, but how do children learn good behavior if they can’t ever be bored? How do they learn to relate to others if their eyes are glued to a screen?

I’m not the only one who has noticed that kids are missing out on the here and now. A Twitter firestorm erupted right after that trip to the restaurant when a woman posted this Tweet: “At Disneyland with the family and probably 50% of toddlers are strapped in their strollers on iPads or phones. At Disneyland. We are so screwed.”

There’s a funny online meme of a group of people seated around a table, and they are all ignoring each other and focused on their cell phones. It has a caption that hearkens back to the lyrics from The Eagles song Hotel California, and it says, “The Eagles were right, we are all just prisoners here of our own device.”

We are coming up on Thanksgiving, and I urge you to rediscover the beauty of connecting with others. Don’t become a prisoner of your screen. Sure, I’m going to take a few photos when everyone gathers to commemorate the occasion, but then I’m going to set aside my phone.

That feeling of peacefulness and connectedness I experienced this summer on Patti’s patio doesn’t have to be a rare event. It can happen anytime you are gathered. After long periods of isolation in lockdown it’s time to unplug and reconnect with others. Thanksgiving is meaningless if we don’t acknowledge and appreciate those seated around our table. Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Bucking the Trend

I’ve developed a new pet peeve.

If you participate on any social media platform, you’ve, no doubt, come across posts with headlines that read something like this: 30 Things That Are Dating Your Kitchen. 5 Trends That Women Over 50 Should Not Follow. Stop Making These Fashion Mistakes Now!

 

The cultural guardians of good-taste rail against such concepts as “slut-shaming,” and “fat-shaming.” Well, I think I’ll become the advocate against “trend-shaming.”

I realize that those types of posts come from advertisers, but what I think really unnerves me is the subtle, subliminal message that we must conform or be outcast. If you now have granite counter tops in your kitchen, I hate to tell you, but by the wisdom of the trend watchers, you are passé and woefully out of touch. Darn, I just got my granite countertops in my kitchen four years ago, and now according to these terrorists of trends, I must rip them out to be on “on point.” Ah, no.

The irony of all these types of promotions is that they usually are interspersed among such insipid platitudes like: Dance Like No One Is Watching; Everyone is Beautiful in their Own Way, Blaze Your Own Trail.

Yeah, be your own kind of beautiful, but only if you follow our lead. 

I’m not against advertising, it serves a great purpose. It underwrites so many things in our lives from sports to even this publication. What I’m fed up with is the push for conformity in their quest for cash that annoys me.

This doesn’t happen exclusively on the internet. I remember about a decade ago watching an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show that featured a stylist, who critiqued audience members who volunteered to receive some fashion tips from him. After he told various women that their hairstyles weren’t right for their face shapes, or that the color the woman was wearing was draining her complexion, one woman stood under his critical eye.

He sized the woman up and sneered, “I see scuff marks on your shoes. That is a disgrace. It signals to me that you don’t care. Why, you are probably wearing underwear with holes in it.”

The poor woman seemed to shrivel under his criticism, and my heart ached for her. He humiliated her on national TV, and I wished someone could have shone a light on his soul because I bet it was quite shabby.

I guess what I’m saying is that while it’s nice to be trendy, fashionable, beautiful, and with-it, but that is not the most important thing in life. Being content and happy is, so don’t let anyone sell you that you are less because you don’t want more of what they’re trying to peddle to you.  

 

This article originally appeared in the October issue of Northern Connection magazine.