Pluck of the Irish
Posted by Mimi Meredith at Friday, April 1st, 2011 6:54 pm
Note: This is a reprint of a previous post.
Today I’ll celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, with some wisdom from my Great Grandmother Rees, a delightful Irish woman who came to the United States to be a missionary in the wilds of Kansas and Oklahoma.
My Great Grandmother was interviewed on her 90th birthday for a story in the Miami Chief, the local paper in Miami, Texas. The story begins
“Jeanie Dowling Rees of Miami was 90 years old Sunday. Her friends say it is pluck, not luck, that has brought this little Irish-woman to the nonagenarian milepost on the highway of life. With her never-failing sense of humor , she smiles, and says, ‘It is my frivolous nature. I never took things too seriously.’”
Other favorite quotes from the story include…
“‘I think it was about that time Dan [her husband who was a preacher] cracked his one joke. He was a quiet, serious-minded man,. But, he said, ‘Jane, you are like a cork in a pail of water, when they push you down one place you bob up another.’”
“‘Music was my talent, like my father’s…I never was a cook. I couldn’t sew, and I have always been an indifferent housekeeper. It doesn’t take a bit of sense to keep house, I always said. Anyone can learn to do that.’”
And best of all; when asked to what she attributed her longevity she replied…
“‘Mainly to my cheerful disposition. I have never gone out to meet trouble. When I met it, I did not hug it to me. I have always been able to laugh at myself, and that helps a lot sometimes.’”
“I didn’t hug it to me.”
We love our troubles and our worries. We cling to them like a buoy in choppy waters. If we don’t hang onto them, perhaps we’re afraid they might grow beyond our control. As long as we can identify that which threatens us and keep it within our grasp, surely we can control it.
Sometimes our troubles and worries become our story and the way in which we interact with the world… “there’s so and so, he hasn’t worked for months…there’s a single mother….there’s a cancer survivor….there’s that nice man whose wife left him…”
Or maybe we hold our troubles even closer, where no one will guess of their existence, but where they can do the most harm. The worries over things we can do absolutely nothing about; the heartbreak over deep and serious injuries to our hearts; the perceived injustices heaped upon ourselves or our family…We don’t talk about these troubles, but they cloak us like a second skin. And no matter how heavy or how tight they become, we rather cling to the familiar feeling of what we think we know than shed our troubles and risk taking on something new. And we don’t want to be exposed as a trouble-hugging, paranoid, self-involved, ego-driven person…which is what we become when we’re in that state.
How can worrying be egotistical? Because it is all about you! You may think you’re worrying on behalf of another, but you’re not really. If you look honestly at your worries, you learn that most of them come back to some kind of avoidance of pain or embarrassment to you. For instance, if I continually worry about my child’s grade reports, I can couch it all in terms of worry over him. But truly, he will be just fine. It is his path, they’re his grades and his choices. However, in my unbalanced state, I worry that I am raising the first family member who may have to choose an alternative means to complete high school and I wonder what I did wrong as a parent in comparison to all the other parents who don’t wrestle with similar worries. You can probably see clearly what I, in my trouble-hugging, worried state, might not. It’s not really about my child. It’s all about how trouble will leave me feeling/looking/living/lacking…whatever the case may be.
Recently, I have had some big breakthroughs in trouble release. Not only did I feel liberated, but I became a better channel for the Spirit. I could see more clearly what I could do vs. what was being done to me. When we quit wrestling to keep our chin above the water and let go of that buoy, we might find out we can stand up and walk right out of the troubled waters. We have to have confidence that we’re not alone, that there is a greater force that will sustain us and hold us up. I know this to be true.
My great grandmother had many troubles she could have strapped on each day. But she didn’t. Long before terms like stress management were vogue, Grandma Rees found herself finding beauty in life around her—in music, in her grandchildren and community. My father remembers her with great affection. So you see, she knew what mattered most, and that’s what she hugged to her heart.
I think she lived this Irish expression “May the sons of your daughters smile up in your face.”
May this Irish blessing also grace your comings and goings
today, my friends.
May the raindrops fall lightly on your brow.
May the soft winds freshen your spirit.
May the sunshine brighten your heart
May the burdens of the day rest lightly upon you.
And may God enfold you in the mantle of His love.
The photo at right was taken when Grandma Rees was 85. The photo above was taken when she was in her thirties.
Listen to Mimi's interview with the Get Real Gals on Minneapolis myTalk 107.1
