The Fire That Can't Be Extinguished

it has to burn itself out

The view from my office

On December 18, 2015, at 5:00 p.m., I left my Fifth Avenue office for the last time. I would never again return to the venerable high office tower across from the Plaza Hotel and Central Park. I had worked at that building, the Estée Lauder global headquarters, for most of my life.

My work team took me for an early dinner at the nearby Regency Hotel on 61^st and Park. They said they did not want me to be alone on the first evening of my retirement.

I had sworn, time and again, that I was fine, but they persisted, and so we went.

I was starting a new chapter. It was an all-time workaholic transition to LIFE.  

Three years prior, at a desert spa in Tucson, Arizona, I’d made the decision to retire and pursue all of the things I’d wanted to do but had never had the bandwidth to pursue in my 24/7, 40-year career.

At the spiritual retreat I’d meditated, prayed and read plenty. I read Julia Cameron, Victor Frankl, and Annie Lamott, among others, but it was the memory of my mother languishing in a nursing home the last three years of her life that solidified my decision.

During one of my meditation sessions, I recalled, with stunning clarity, the image of our last reunion.

My mother never spoke the final time I saw her. Out of pure longing, I chose to designate one of her faint facial expressions as a smile of recognition. A dreadful car accident from a decade before had begun her downward spiral to a walker, a wheelchair and finally to a state of oblivion.

When I said goodbye, I kissed her on the cheek and backed out of her room, exercising the same protocol I would have used to say goodbye to the Queen of England. Closed door eventually between us, I rested my forehead on the back of the panel.

I prayed for my mother to die.  

At a certain age, what’s more important than the remaining length of our official, actuarial lives is the physical and mental vibrancy of the life we have left. Wheelchairs don’t roll easily on the cobbled streets of Europe, mechanical walkers and canes don’t effortlessly and safely climb Machu Picchu, and cloudy minds often don’t recognize the faces they love.

My meditative revelation about my mother, known by some as an encounter with light, crystallized my decision, not just to pivot but to pursue a new life, quickly. To retire and rewire was my mandate.

From childhood to adulthood, we plan in increments designed by a structured education system: kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school and college. We look longingly at the next step up. Whatever we don’t have in high school we are likely to pursue in college. Those educational timelines, defined by society and culture provide suggestions and boundaries that help us package and define our expectations.   

With the education ritual complete, all hell breaks loose and a forty-year free-for-all ensues. Hurry, hurry, hurry seems to capture the spirit of the time. What will I pursue and how soon can I have it and when can I have it all?

I was different. I never ever believed I could have it all, especially all at once.

As a child, it used to terrify me when my father set brush fires¹ in the fields close to our house, a common practice used to safely burn away obstructing and dry scrub. I’d run outside and beg him to put them out.

Sometimes he would acknowledge me, by instructing me to go inside while assuring me the fire would burn itself out. Other times he just stared at the blaze in front of him, holding tight to the heavy shovel in his hand, and saying nothing. On those occasions, I stood beside him, petrified that he was hypnotized by the flames and that he, myself and my ridiculously named dog, Bacon, would become a part of the inferno and be featured the next day in the local daily news.

To avoid being a news item I always stood perfectly still and quiet, and as close to the heat and to my father as I could bear.

In my twenties, I felt like a taller ten-year-old, standing so close to the mighty blaze, that I could no longer tell what was me and what was fire. Erratic and uneasy I tried different things. I was a teacher. I was a retail executive. I bit my nails, I fretted. There were times when I wished I could build my life around less challenging endeavors, but those choices did not give me the ability to leave my small town birthplace behind me. So I would begin again.

Perhaps my inherent disadvantages made some of my early choices easier for me. With my modest background, I knew that high level introductions from my family were nonexistent. I knew if I was to succeed, I had to do it all on my own.

That one circumstance, alone, pared the option matrix of my twenties down to a single pathway. I couldn’t afford a child and a career at the same time. I couldn’t afford as much as a sideways glance at the more poignant and sensitive side of life.

In my thirties, the biological clock ticked. I was aware of the ticking, but the alarm never sounded loud enough for me to respond. I had reasoned at an early age that even though I might later second-guess my decision, I had lived with a mother who loved her three children dearly, but regretted a life lived with no outside profession.

I think I felt compelled to avenge her sacrifices. When I spoke to her about my drive to succeed, she offered the standard 1950s mother/housewife reply,

“You can be anybody and anything you want to be.”

Underneath that aphorism rests a landmine of guilt if you don’t cough up the ambition to fulfill the greatness of the creed, but I didn’t have to cough up anything. I was born to leave my small rural town and programmed not to smile until I had succeeded. Succeed at what, I did not know. But, without word or deed, I felt that I was the family member designated to elevate our blood line.

Angela Duckworth calls it grit; others call it drive. Call it what you will, it’s a fire that can’t be extinguished; it’s a blaze that has to burn itself out.

Shortly after my fiftieth birthday, I was appointed to the position that I would always consider the peak of my career, Clinique Global President. And even though I was promoted again from that position to Global Group President the bigger title never gave me the same emotional attachment, maybe because I could hear the embers gasping as they spat out the last of their ruthless gumption.

Just as my father promised, the fire would burn itself out.

Up to that time, my life had resembled F. Scott Fitzgerald’s character in Tender Is the Night. Dr. Dick Diver, when asked about his plans, replied that he only had one, maybe to be the greatest psychologist that ever lived. Fitzgerald then added that Diver “wanted to be loved too, if he could fit it in.” 

In my late fifties, my husband, who was eighteen years older, died.

For the first time, I was alone. ALONENESS is spacious. It’s quiet. Random ideas tiptoe in without invitation. And with mortality’s shadow lurking in the corner, the setting is even more likely to take us from crisis to bounty.

With the help of my late sister, a library of books, meditation, and a spiritual retreat, I planned a new life.

By accident I viewed a TED talk by David Brooks, New York Times writer, who contrasted the resume virtues of worldliness and ambition with the deep character qualities of inner strength, faith, hope and love that are more closely associated with our eulogy summations.

I peppered my little room of alone with new aspirations that I heretofore must have presumed were not meant for me. I let myself love fun and laughter. I found myself dancing, sometimes, in crazy and silly ways, and most exceptionally, I left space for the ordinary. No guilty mind chatter scolded me when I played solitaire or read People magazine instead of War and Peace.

Today, more than a decade after I first pondered the softer side of life, everything is different. There have been both intentional changes that I have engineered and blessings that have fallen out of the heavens.

With purpose, I spent more time with my own Missouri and my late husband’s family. My attention and effort probably quadrupled, especially during my sister and nephew’s deaths. But even before those events I resolved to know them better.

I spent time with God. I prayed, I asked, I thanked.

And when I meditated, I listened, not for a voice, but for the sublime quiet to settle and for the soft light to emerge. There, by gradations, I have always heard His answers.

I have almost eliminated my business affiliations. My professional transactions have transfigured to like-minded friends, who talk easily about faith and hope and love. They talk about great books, great essays, not-to-miss movies and small ways to change the world for the better.  

And my accidental Blessing was the unexpected gift of the love of my life. There’s a he, there’s a me and there’s an us that I never imagined could or would belong to me. And in the still of a dark room without a sliver of light, he reaches out his hand and I know to respond in kind.

Some people might say that I have changed. I feel a good deal more like I have been revealed.

Michelangelo felt it was the task of a sculptor to discover the statue in every block of stone.

Most of us don’t have Michelangelo working on us, so we have to do the work ourselves.  

I have a friend in publishing who was a master at plugging tomorrow’s decisions into today. He literally chapterized his life into decades early on. He designated one decade to establish a career, one to run a marathon on all seven continents, another to accentuate his hobby of photography and writing and his final highlight was to create a philanthropic foundation.

WOW!! I always say when I write or hear the story. But what I most admire about the narrative is the patience the gentleman afforded himself to have it all.

If I take my life-to-date and write it in chapters, I think the character is more appealing if the plot is read from the end to the beginning.

But, then again, we can’t live backwards, we can’t ever touch the running water of a river twice. 

I am, today, the grown and wiser child. And when I question why or how I stumbled or tripped along the way, I remember that it is impossible to plug today’s wisdom into yesterday’s choices.

Only recently did I recall the family’s corn field that thrived on the land cleared by the fire. I superficially understood that the controlled fires set by my father cleared out the dead or decaying brush, making way for new plantings with the till of the soil.

But the main part I choose to remember is that he let the fire burn out on its own. We’re all born with some hankerings at the top of our list. Best to find a way to let them burn and then smolder till they’re gone.

1. I had just finished writing this piece when I closed my computer and ran to the gym to meet my trainer. On the way, I was mentally preparing to search later for photos to accompany the piece before it could be posted. 

As I was leaving the workout, my trainer opened her phone to show me the brush fire video, shown above, that she had captured on a recent visit to her sister’s Kansas farm. The offering was the first and only viewing invitation she had ever offered to me.  

Stunned by the God-Wink moment of synchronicity in front of me, I rushed home to include the movie in this piece.