Birthday reflections

It’s my birthday. I’m 53. Thanks to the excellent medical care that I’ve had access to throughout my life, I’ve survived the birthing and raising of three children, all of whom are now fine adults whom I admire and love tremendously. I had a great education (not least, because it was one that taught me that continuing to educate onself and stay open to new insights from all kinds of quarters is a continuing responsibility.) I survived six years of living in a war zone– something that involved a lot of luck as well as some local smarts– and have ended up as someone with a voice in the global discourse.
I have a wonderfully supportive spouse; am part of a very supportive and enriching faith community, the Charlottesville Friends Meeting; live in a peaceable and intellectually stimulating town here; have easy access to the internet and to great libraries; and can get together with my kids very easily.
I am so blessed. Very few female people in history– or even today– have the advantages that I’ve been given. Yet every person on the planet deserves to have them!
… For a long time in my youth there, I chafed hard against my father, James Cobban, who had to try to raise my three elder sisters and me on his own after our mother died when I was eight. (Later, his sister, my Aunty Katy, came to help finish the job. I was pretty wild and alienated by then and no doubt tried her sorely.) Later, though, I came to realize that I’d inherited from JM a distinct concern for social justice; it was just that each of us just manifested this concern in different ways. Yes, I still remember when I was 14 or so, him coming home with a little booklet titled, “Why not apartheid?”
Basically, though, he was concerned about social justice issues. He just thought about them in ways different than I did. I’m so glad he lived long enough that, after I’d reached my late thirties, we started to build a really close relationship. We still disagreed on many things, but not nearly as much as before; and anyway, we’d found ways to talk about our disagreements. (He died in 1999.)
From him, I think I also inherited– in the osmotic way that such things can be inherited– a strong sense of social obligation… So if I’m 53 today, I can probably hope for another 35 years or so of strong social activism. We have several very inspiring people in our Quaker meeting and elsehwere in our community here who are strong social activists well into their eighties.
I guess I’m feeling a little unclear, today, on what direction this future activism should or will take. Maybe it would even go via a more quietist period, if I need to go deeper into myself and do some introspection? I don’t know. Anyway, being part of a good Quaker community gives me lots of resources to find out how to go forward. I can simply pray/reflect/ ponder on the question on my own. (Or perhaps, in Buddhist style, work harder at not pondering on it?) I can listen more closely for the leadings of the spirit. Or I can ask the folks in the Meeting to form a clearness committee to help me in my discernment.
In the end, though, knowing I have all these resources available for discernment makes the uncertainty I’m in right now much easier to bear. So instead of spending today sitting around angst-ridden and uncertain I can spend it giving true appreciation to my blessings. Plus, it’s a beautiful day. This afternoon I’ll go for a run along my usual route, checking out how the amazing fall colors of the trees along the route have all developed during the five days I was in New York. There will be normal, non-war things happening all along the way, and I as a woman will be quite safe running along the sidewalks on my own. Later, Bill the spouse and Tarek the son will be taking me out to dinner at one of our favorite local eateries…
Meantime, I actually have a ton of other stuff to blog about today, so maybe that should be my birthday treat to myself. To work, Helena!