Pressure Cooking
By the time we enter our Medicare years, most of us have accumulated a great deal of information about an enormous variety of subjects. Access to the internet cubes the quantity with no guarantee of quality. We all know this.
It is especially a problem in groups.
Around here we have many groups convened for purpose— charity, good works, spiritual encouragement or just plain fun. And every one of the participants in those groups is a cauldron of simmering knowledge.
Remember pressure cookers? The old kind that used to blow its gauge, once in a while? My mother’s kitchen ceiling bore the scars of several such surprises.
People handle the pressure of so much percolating information with varying success in groups.
Some participants are cool and smooth, paragons of grace and ease as they address strangers in a stressful situation. We are thankful for them, always.
Once in a while, of course, someone who seems cool and laid-back will turn out to have mislaid his or her pause switch. That happened in a grief support group I went to once. Normally, the facilitator steps in at the appropriate interval and all tension releases.
Facilitators know how to do that, and when. It’s a gift as well as a skill to be learned.
But there is also the group member who’s like that little pot of soup at the back of the stove where the burner got turned on accidentally. She’s sitting there, unnoticed, with her simmer rising. Her lid has just begun to vibrate.
All too often that would be me. Simmering life experience is a force of nature that clamors to find its expression, or pop.
It’s a problem I know well, unfortunately. But why does that pressure build? Ego is surely involved. Here we are, getting older, facing the end of ourselves—so much closer now. Facing the end of ego, the annihilation of the self.
Some folks may have found a way toward peace and comfort with this reality. Some may be very good at avoiding the thought through acts of giving to others or in the civic dimension.
I can wish for this. The pressure increases, though, after you lose your life partner. After you lose that forty-year daily dialogue with this person who actually wanted to hear what you have to say—well, most of the time.
When he’s gone, suddenly you have no one to talk to. To exchange ideas with. And the ease of the exchange is nowhere to be found. With him, you could blurt a sudden thought, give voice to a wild notion, and he enjoyed it, as you enjoyed the way he thought.
You can’t do that anymore. Not with anyone. It’s a difficult lesson to absorb and practice.
A writer’s ego can be like a complicated dog who can’t be entirely trusted not to bite its owner. That dog pulls hard on the leash, yearns to keep on moving up the trail. Publication tosses him or her the occasional treat or meal, but it’s never enough to satisfy.
Maybe that’s why receiving a literary award from a distinguished organization of writers like the Texas Institute of Letters means so much to me.
In any event, I’ve been asked to talk at the Round Top Library, on Sunday, February 26, at 2 p.m. about how the real places and people of Fayette County influenced the fiction in my prize-winning story collection, “A WALL OF BRIGHT DEAD FEATHERS.” There will be a reception and all of it is free. Hope you’ll come.
Readers can contact Hale at bfhale2017@gmail.com