Chapter 26: What's it (Life) all about, Elizabeth?

This manuscript is both a memoir of sorts and a work of fiction.  The stories and events included are based on my life experiences and memories but I have changed names, details, event sequences, and outcomes throughout the work.

Read Chapter 1       Previous Chapter       Next Chapter

"What's It All About Alfie?" lyrics

Chapter 26: What's it (Life) all about, Elizabeth?

When Elizabeth awoke, she lay quietly in bed for a few moments. Slowly, a realization dawned upon her. Today was the spring equinox! It had finally arrived. The frigid temperatures and austere landscapes of winter would soon be just a memory, giving way to the warmth and colors of spring. Elizabeth felt her whole being rejoice as she quickly arose. She took her first peek outside and noticed that spring had come dressed in a clear, although cold, sunny day with a vibrant blue sky. Elizabeth could hardly wait to go outside and embrace the new season.

As she finished eating her breakfast and her regular morning duties, she noticed a song playing in her mind. (The song was “Alfie,” written in 1965—lyrics by Hal David, music by Burt Bacharach.) She recalled that the song had started surfacing in snippets several days before. She had been curious about why this particular song—one that she remembered first hearing when she was about twelve years old—was going through her mind. But she was busy and didn't take much time to figure out the answer to that question. Today, though, the song was insisting that she pay attention. So Elizabeth took a few moments to look up the lyrics and consider their meaning and relevance to her life right now.

Elizabeth sat in front of her computer, did a quick Internet search and found the lyrics quite easily. She found several versions of the song online and listened to the different artists who had performed the song. She even spent some time reading about how the song came into being, who had written the lyrics, who had created the music, for which movie it had been specifically written, and the synopsis of the movie, since she had never seen the film. She decided to print the lyrics and bring them with her as she took her walk on this, the first day of spring.

Bundled up, Elizabeth took her first steps into the new season. She had the printed lyrics in her pocket but she really didn't need to check them because the words were already in her memory from all those years ago. She decided to use the lyrics as a walking meditation. “After all,” she thought, “if the song was in my mind, and I haven't actually heard it for years, there must be a message for me.” She had often received messages from song lyrics in the past and knew that the Universe/Source/All That Is communicated with her in that way.

The first line of the song was a question. Elizabeth phrased the question as if she were asking it to herself, “What's it all about, Elizabeth?” She decided that the word it referred to life in general and she decided to apply the word to Life and the flow of magic for which she had been searching. For her, that question summed up her focus: “What is the flow of magic all about?” Was it, like the song lyrics asked in the second line, something that only happened while she was alive, and then, only as pieces of magic, never as consistent and persistent flow? Or did it continue before and after her earthly existence? In other words, was magic eternal and actually the underlying canvas of All That Is that created, maintained, and filled her life? She again thought of the scripture that had come to mind so many times over the past several months—“For in him, we live and move and have our being.” 

Elizabeth considered these questions. She had realized in reviewing different events in her life that the magic she longed for was always flowing; it had existed always and would continue forever. Magic, as well as Life/Source/All That Is, was eternal. That's why the scripture would continue to come up as she was thinking about magic or Source or Life or All That Is. For her, those words were all synonymous for the same substance or essence from which all life sprung.

The next few lines of the song talked about how a person's viewpoint affected how they acted in life. Was being kind a foolish idea? Did the world really belong to those who were strong, the people who exercised their control over others without care or concern? Did the golden rule hold any importance in this day and age? 

As these questions came up in her thoughts, Elizabeth saw a parallel with the idea of relationships being a mirror reflection of herself. She could ask herself those questions in regard to how she thought about and acted toward herself. A new idea also surfaced. “Have I ever applied the golden rule to myself?” Elizabeth wondered. “No,” Elizabeth thought. She had only used the golden rule to govern how she treated others with the full expectation that she would receive like treatment back. For a long time, though, she hadn't understood that the return treatment would not necessarily come from the person to whom she had applied the principle. Now, she was seeing the golden rule in a new light. The treatment she received from others was the golden rule reflecting how she thought and acted toward herself. Elizabeth was amazed at this discovery.

Elizabeth returned to the song lyrics. The next few lines proposed the idea that whether someone believed in a greater power (God/Source/All That Is) or not, there must be some guiding force existing in our world that could help people live their lives. The next line reveals what that force is: Love. And Elizabeth's own sentiments echoed that line: “I believe in love.” For her, Love was simply another name for God/Source/Life/All That Is and even magic. The song also pointed out that there was a “true love,” a kind of love that takes us from simple existence to real, vibrant life; from emptiness to an understanding of the value of every life including one's own. Elizabeth understood already that what the world called love was often a counterfeit emotion, equated with sex or used to exclude other people. The true love the song talked about was nonjudgmental and all encompassing. That Love excluded no one and allowed people to live their lives and still be embraced as worthy. At some level, Elizabeth knew that was the Love that everyone was at their core, whether it appeared that way or not.

The last two lines of the song advised the way to find that true love each day: “When you walk, let your heart lead the way, / and you'll find love any day.” What Elizabeth found amazing was that same advice had been echoed in teachings she had read and heard for years. Stacy, for one, had always mentioned about living and thinking from one's heart, about taking the High road and letting Love lead the way. Elizabeth had aspired to live that way, although she wasn't always successful. These last two lines seemed to be offering Elizabeth a goal for this new season and perhaps offered the answer to her quest for the flow of magic. “If I let my heart lead the way,” Elizabeth thought, “then I will be aligned with Love and more open to flowing effortlessly with the magic that is synonymous with Love.” She drew a deep breath of the cold, new spring air and let it go.  

The song had helped her to discover that it was Love that fine tuned her awareness, revealing the flow of magic in each moment. She realized that the pieces of magic she had experienced in the past had been showing her moments that she had been aligned with Love, which was always within her grasp and always her choice.

Elizabeth turned toward her apartment. Her meditation walk was completed and she now knew that the song had indeed been sent as a message, helping her to understand the journey she had begun last October. 

As she walked home, she enjoyed hearing the birds singing joyously, seeing the deep blue of the sky, and experiencing the feeling of anticipation for what this new season would bring her way. She felt gratitude for the long winter, where new thoughts and discoveries had lain dormant, gathering strength and energy in preparation for their emergence in her heart and mind. She also felt the bubbling spring of Love arising inside her heart, and she resolved to remain open and let love lead the way as she looked forward to the new path that stretched ahead.

Copyright © 2011-2012 by Vicky Lynn Macchione.
All Rights Reserved.
No reproduction of this text is allowed without the written permission of the author.

Chapter 10: The Worry-o-meter

This manuscript is both a memoir of sorts and a work of fiction.  The stories and events included are based on my life experiences and memories but I have changed names, details, event sequences, and outcomes throughout the work.

Read Chapter 1       Previous Chapter       Next Chapter

Chapter 10: The Worry-o-meter

As Christmas crept ever closer, Elizabeth had just finished creating some cards for her kidlets and assembling two packages of gifts to give to her granddaughter, whose birthday was two days after Christmas. This year she had managed to get everything together in plenty of time for the parcel to arrive in time for the holiday. She put on the many layers it took to go outside during the cold December days and went to the post office. Of course, there was a line, and she did her best to wait patiently. (Patience was a virtue that was in short supply in Elizabeth's life.) Finally, she arrived at the front of line and was served. She paid the fees and received the tracking number for the package. 

Later that evening, Elizabeth began what would be a daily exercise of checking on the transport of her precious package. The clerk had said the package would arrive in five to seven days. But Elizabeth had her doubts since there had been other years that the annual package took much longer. As the days went by, Elizabeth fretted and fumed more and more. The tracking information was not being updated, and she had no way of knowing where the package was and when it would actually be delivered. 

Since this obsession with package delivery was a regular occurrence, Vincent asked her yet again why she got so worried about the situation. "After all, there is nothing you can do to change it," Vincent would remind her. Elizabeth would bristle inside, knowing he was right but somehow feeling that her worrying increased the odds that the package would arrive on time, certainly a thought that lacked credibility.

This idea that worrying protected her or kept "bad" things from happening was one of Elizabeth's mental challenges. She would try not to worry but it seemed like the whole process was built into her very being. As she considered that idea, she knew, of course, that made no sense. Her "very Being" would never be worried for there would never be any reason for her "very Being" to worry in a Reality that was created perfect and unfolded perfectly. Nevertheless, worry ended up being her best friend or her worst enemy.

Elizabeth remembered one day when she decided to investigate the word worry to find out what it meant and from where the definition had come. She discovered that the word came from an Old English word that meant to strangle and an Old Norse word that meant rope. Elizabeth had immediately pictured a hangman's noose as she thought, "How appropriate." After all, if someone wanted to strangle or choke the joy, life, and peace out of a situation, worry was the way to accomplish that task, which Elizabeth knew from numerous personal experiences.

Elizabeth found that she worried almost constantly about almost everything, including the most banal situations, as in the case of on-time postal delivery. She noticed that words like worried or concerned often made their way in her daily conversations, in her writing, and, most importantly, in her thinking. Elizabeth was sure that if someone looked up the word “worrywart” in an illustrated dictionary, a sketch of her face would be found there.

Worrying the way she did exasperated Vincent. She had so many concerns about daily life and rules about how things should work. One time (and this had happened more than once in their ten years together), Elizabeth opened a jar of jam (and you could substitute mustard, applesauce, salsa for the word jam) and was extremely concerned because the lid did not pop exactly as she thought it should. Instantly, she heard her mother telling a story about botulism that had occurred in some home-canned string beans, and somehow Elizabeth would connect her situation with the story her mother had told her all those years ago. Elizabeth would grow more and more uneasy and worried and then she would approach Vincent to get some peace of mind. Vincent never understood her concern and eventually began to tell her, "You are going to die," which didn't bring Elizabeth any measure of comfort or peace. So she would do a search on the Internet to see if the food that was now suspect had been recalled. Remembering this series of events, Elizabeth realized her worrying was out of proportion with the actual situation.

For Elizabeth, worry was just a way of life. She didn't want to have it be that way but she felt powerless to change. She tried to analyze why she worried so much. She understood that she felt worry gave her some measure of control. She believed that the act of worrying somehow guarded her against the very thing she was worrying about. And she knew she was not alone in that idea. She had once watched a television interview with Michael J. Fox and his wife in which his wife had mentioned her own worry problem. She said that she used to worry about Michael and their children getting sick from all sorts of diseases. But she had never been concerned about Parkinson's disease, the illness from which Michael was afflicted. Elizabeth often thought about what his wife had said, and some part of her would whisper, "See, worrying works; if you can just worry about all possibilities, you will be protected from them." But even Elizabeth could see how ridiculous that premise was.

So Elizabeth took steps to change. One idea she had read about in Oprah's magazine said to look at a situation about which you are worried and develop it to its most dramatic and extreme end. Of course, most situations about which Elizabeth worried had death as the final result and most often a painful death, full of suffering. Although she tried this method, she didn't find that it helped much. She did discover, however, that she was more afraid of pain and suffering than she was of death.

Another method she had tried was a kind of hybrid of the previous idea. She would allow the worry to play out in her mind to its final result. Then, she would try to take an I-don't-care attitude. "The lid didn't pop right. Could there be botulism in a jar of jam? Oh well, I guess I am going to die." Sometimes this method actually helped her to let go of the worry. The only difficulty with this method is that she had to, at times, keep repeating the process. She had tried adding one more phrase: "I don't care any more." And that last phrase was never really the truth, which was glaringly obvious.

Elizabeth had become more aware that her worries were always about future happenings, not about what was necessarily occurring in the present moment. Of course, when she opened the jar and thought about botulism, that was happening in the now; but all the thoughts that came rushing in about what she would experience if she had botulism were a future projection. Her thoughts were creating a dire prediction of a dramatic, undesirable, even horrific future. 

Elizabeth also noticed that she had a sort of scale or meter to measure her worrying. She called it the worry-o-meter. Those situations on which she could apply her technique successfully were low on the worry-o-meter. But those with which she had to repeat and repeat her technique or those that filled her heart and mind with paralyzing fear, those measured high on the worry-o-meter. 

Elizabeth knew that at some level there was a part of herself that never worried. She also knew that all her worrying was only about trying to control anything and everything that could possibly cause her distress, unhappiness, discomfort, or that simply did not fit into what she think should be happening in her life at any given moment. She realized that she could have more peace if she could just accept that life was unfolding exactly as it should. For her, though, acceptance looked more like resignation. She struggled with the idea that letting go of her worry and her need to control what life brought her way somehow meant she would be giving up the dreams or wishes or ambitions she had for her life. This struggle made her life feel like she was engaged in a no-win battle at times just as much as worry made her life feel like hell, if by hell one meant a place of torture and torment. And both situations were in her control. That was the truth some part of her failed to realize. The very control she was seeking was the ability to control her mind and her thoughts! The irony was not lost on her.

Elizabeth often wondered if struggle and worry kept magic from occurring. Or perhaps it kept her from "seeing" it or perceiving the experiences when they happened. After all, if she sometimes could see pieces of magic in her life, wasn't it possible that magic was all around her and she just wasn't aware of it? She contemplated that question for a few moments. What would it mean if the magic was already part of her life, or even the very river in which her life moved? What if she only saw "pieces of magic" at certain times because those were the times when she let go, ceased struggling, and simply flowed with what was happening, not worrying about future results and outcomes?

Elizabeth had grown weary of worry's energy-sapping grip. She wanted to stop feeling like she was strangling the magic from her daily life with her own hands. She desired to know the freedom she believed she could have if she learned to embrace what arrived in her life each day. She longed for peace of mind. Now, all she had to do was figure how to do that.

Elizabeth's thoughts returned to the parcel. She sighed as she checked one last time to see if she could actually tell where the parcel was. Amazingly, she discovered that the parcel had finally arrived at the post office in her children's home town. "What a relief!" she thought. That was one worry that she could lay to rest. Now it was time to face her day.

Copyright © 2011-2012 by Vicky Lynn Macchione.
All Rights Reserved.
No reproduction of this text is allowed without the written permission of the author.