HomeHomeAlso, read Teresa's companion essay, The Illusion.February 2001
Greetings from cold, snowy, icy Minnesota! We're at the point where winter weather (and our fuel bills) are wearing us down a bit. The Bush Administration is in its "honeymoon" phase, and we're all nervously watching the daily economic reports. To top it off, on Groundhog Day legendary prognosticator, Punxsutawny Phil, predicted six more weeks of winter! This is not news to Minnesotans--we're used to long winters--but each day the light stays a bit longer and brings us that much closer to spring.
February is a turning point in our northern winter, and a month that represents love and romance, with Valentine's Day smack dab in the middle. We're already seeing lots of advertisements reminding us to buy gifts for our loved ones. Retailers are hoping to cash in on this sentimental "holiday", with sales of jewelry, flowers, candy, and whatever else sends a message of love. It's a romantic day, and meaningful to most women who have dreamed of meeting their own special "Mr. Right" since childhood.
For many people, however, Valentine's Day is just another day. These days, more women are on their own than ever before, either by choice or circumstance. In a Time Magazine article from August 28, 2000, writer Tamala Edwards described this growing phenomenon when she interviewed several women from Houston, Texas:
"All of them, nevertheless, are part of a major societal shift: single women, once treated as virtual outcasts, have moved to the center of our social and cultural life. Unattached females--wisecracking, gutsy gals, not pathetic saps--are the heroine du jour in fiction, from Melissa Bank's collection of stories, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, to Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, the publishing juggernaut that has spawned one sequel and will soon be a movie. The single woman is TV's It Girl as well, not just on Sex and the City, the smash HBO series in the midst of its third buzz-producing season, but also on a growing number of network shows focused on strong, career-minded single women, such as Judging Amy and Providence.
The single woman has come into her own. Not too long ago, she would live a temporary existence: a rented apartment shared with a girlfriend or two and a job she could easily ditch. Adult life--a house, a car, travel, children--only came with a husband. Well, gone are the days. Forty-three million women are currently single--more than 40% of all adult females, up from about 30% in 1960. (The ranks of single men have grown at roughly the same rate.) If you separate out women of the most marriageable age, the numbers are even more head snapping: in 1963, 83% of women 25 to 55 were married; by 1997 that figure had dropped to 65%
Businesses are beginning to notice this significant trend, too. According to a Reuters report from August, 2000, U.S. women aren't the only ones affected by this major societal change. Ad agency Young & Rubicam's Intelligence Factory took a worldwide consumer survey, and produced a report called, "The Single Female Consumer". They found that:
In Britain, women's average age of marriage is now 27 1/2; In France, it is 30.
In the past 15 years, the percentage of Japanese women who are single has risen by 50%; it is also predicted that one in seven Japanese girls born after 1980 will remain single throughout their lives.
In addition, nearly a third of all Australian women from 30 to 34 are single.These facts can be construed as good news to businesses directing their marketing efforts toward women's purchasing power; however, this shift still represents a shocking adjustment for many millions of women.
We may have come a long way, but there is still a long way for us to go. Last December, while spending a week in Florida volunteering at the Pace Center for Girls via Global Volunteers, I was invited to a Christmas party which was held at the home of a local businessman. This particular home was incredibly beautiful, like something Martha Stewart would have decorated herself. I overheard one of the PACE Center girls remark that she wished she could marry someone with money, just as the lady of this particular house had done. This comment shocked me. At fifteen, I probably would have said the same thing. Today, I wonder why women don't dream bigger dreams for themselves?
The tendency for women to outlive men means that at some point in their lives, most women will be alone. And because women are more relationship oriented than men, the idea of on their own is truly astounding--empowering and yet frightening at the same time.
Here in America, we tend to look outside ourselves for validation, as if a relationship or material goods or a career could bring us the love and acceptance we crave. It's not that those things aren't good; it's just that we still yearn for something more--a life rich with purpose and meaning, and especially love.
We're also taught from an early age that we're second class citizens, with unrealistic images thrust upon us by the media. Most of us do not remotely resemble the women we see in magazine ads or the movies or TV. It's hard to find self-acceptance in a culture such as this. Just ask anyone who has ever worked in an American bookstore. The self-help section is always the most popular (and the most lucrative!)
However, we must find our paths to self love and acceptance on our life's journey, or nothing else will fall into place. The validation we seek from outside will never bring the peace that comes from knowing that you truly give a damn about yourself and where your life is headed. It's not narcissistic to love yourself fully; it is the way to finding love and romance in your own life. No one else can do this for us.
Debbie Ford, author of The Dark Side of the Light Chasers, acknowledges that, in our celebrity-worshipping culture, we tend to project upon others the qualities we wish we had. She advises:
"If you are enthralled by megastars and spend time and money reading about their lives, find the aspect you love in them inside of you.
You deserve to have whatever it is you see and truly desire. The only difference between you and the people you idolize is that they are manifesting one of the qualities you desire and probably fulfilling their dreams. When you are not living up to your potential, it's easy to project your positive traits onto people who are living up to theirs. When you start fulfilling your dreams and goals you'll become less interested in what other people are doing. We each need to become our own hero. The only way to do this is to take back the parts of us that are plugged into someone else, the parts of us we have given away."
Ford also knows that finding one's life purpose is difficult work. It requires going within for the answers:
Questioning whether you're on the right path may sound easy. The difficult part is hearing the answer from the heart. Your head will have one response, but your heart may have another. Fear may urge you to maintain your current direction, yet love may urge you to take a turn. You must quiet your mind to hear your highest calling. You must open your heart to find where love resides. If you choose to follow your passions and desires, then you must be still enough to hear the answers from your soul. Walk out only as far as you can stand with your head above water and the scenery will always look the same. Dare to venture into deeper waters and a magical world awaits you.
But we're afraid to drown. Afraid to be wrong. Afraid to fail. Are your desires important enough to make you willing to face your fears? Do you want it bad enough? The choice is yours. You can choose to change your attitude from resignation to commitment, from a state of fear to a state of love. The first step is to question yourself, to literally change your internal statements to questions. Change "I am a failure" to "Could I be a success?" Change "I am bored with my life" to "Could I be exhilarated?" Change "My life doesn't make a difference" to "Could I make a difference in the world?How do we find joy and purpose when we're alone? Sarah Ban Breathnach, Author of Simple Abundance and Something More: Excavating Your Authentic Self offers this perspective:
"Many of us confuse happiness and joy. Happiness is often triggered by external events, events we usually have no control over--you get the promotion, he loves you back, they approve your mortgage application. Happiness camouflages a lot of fears.
But joy is the absence of fear. Joy is your soul's knowledge that if you don't get the promotion, keep the relationship, or buy the house, it's because you weren't meant to. You're meant to have something better, something richer, something deeper. Something More. Joy is where your life began, with your first cry. Joy is your birthright.
However, reclaiming your joy as your birthright requires a profound inner shift in your reality. Most of us unconsciously create dramas in our minds, automatically expecting the worst from every situation, only to have our negative expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies. Inadvertently, we become authors of our own misfortune. And so we struggle from day to day, careening from crisis to crisis, bruised and battered by circumstances, without realizing that we have a choice.
How do we find our destinies when we're slogging along, trying to deal with jobs and bills and day-to-day living? And how do we live a better life and be all that we were meant to be? There isn't enough time in the day to "have it all", it seems.
Again, Sarah Ban Breathnach offers her thoughts:
"We'd love to think that our life's journey is linear, but we stumble in fits and starts on our way to authenticity. The writer, Franz Kafka, whose lonely and tormented characters came to represent twentieth-century angst, believed that destiny's true path 'seems more designed to make people stumble than to be walked upon.'
Certainly most of the stumbling stories I've heard have a kafkaesque quality to them--a bizarre inevitability. A long-distance runner discovers that the tingling in her legs is multiple sclerosis. She has to give up the career she's trained half her life for; she pours her pain onto the page and becomes a poet. A ballet dancer twists her ankle and seriously injures herself. She must top dancing. She's always dabbled in photography, so when her former troupe needs some pictures for a fundraising brochure, she's enlisted; she "knows" dance, and can convey a dancer's energy, passion and persistence. The pictures turn out so brilliantly she now photographs performers professionally. This woman literally stumbled upon her authentic path."Breathnach adds:
"All Rosa Parks was doing was 'trying to get home from work' when she stumbled upon becoming the symbol of the Civil Rights movement by refusing to go to the back of a bus. Did she feel 'that small shiver...when events hinted at a destiny being played out, of unseen forces intervening,' as writer Dorothy Gilman describes the inescapable? Perhaps not, but the powerful impact of her soul-directed, though unplanned action has resonated for her, and for us all, ever since. This is authenticity."
In America, we revere the concept of "Reinvention". We love to hear stories about lives turned around, as if it confirms the fact that there are, indeed, second (and third and fourth) "acts" in American lives. But it isn't so much that we're "inventing" anything new--we're simply rediscovering all the wonderful things about ourselves--our inner strength, courage and beauty--and the promises our lives still hold--no matter where we are in our journey. We must fall in love with the lives we were given, and cherish who and what we are, first and foremost.
Writer Anna Quindlen sums it up nicely:
I read and walked for miles at night along the beach writing bad blank verse, and searching endlessly
for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life.
It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.Happy Valentine's Day!
Teresa
Here are some interesting items for the month:February is also Black History Month, and the contributions that African-Americans have made to our culture are immeasurable. In every field, from dance to music to science and technology, African-Americans have made their mark, though they haven't always been rightfully acknowledged. Here is an interesting site which deals with Black Women's History.
Another interesting site which we've mentioned before celebrates the life of Madame C.J. Walker, the first African-American millionaire. Last year, writer Tananarive Due wrote a fictional biography based on Ms. Walker's life called, The Black Rose.
Turner Broadcasting will be featuring a TV movie based on The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Bradley's creative book "re-imagines" the lives of the women in the Camelot legends.
If you're in need of a winter "pick-me-up", you may want to view the following videos:
Shirley Valentine This is a story of a bored, middle-aged English housewife who runs off to Greece and rediscovers the magic of her own life.
Me, Myself I Australian actress Rachel Griffiths plays Pamela Drury, a 30-something Sydneysider who mourns the life that might have been, had she married her first love, Robert Dickson. Fate gives her the chance to see what that life would have been like.
Enchanted April Four Englishwomen spend a month in a castle in the Italian countryside. While there, they forge strong friendships, and gain a new appreciation for the men in their lives.Teresa
tcallies@hotmail.com
Also, read Teresa's companion essay, The Illusion.
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