BREATHING FREELY
Celebrating The Imperfect Life


CHAPTER ONE

I sat in the darkness of the movie theater after seeing the film Sunshine,* tears streaking my face. The credits rolled, and people around me started filing out, but I was frozen, stunned into recognition of the terrible beauty of this saga, a beauty I'd been seeking in my own life for a long time.

Since my early thirties I have been on a journey of self-discovery, a process of untangling the snarled strands of my sometimes unmanageable life, the quintessential quest of a Baby Boomer trying to find meaning in a cynical time. Along the healing path I have found emotional resolution, returned to my childhood faith, and charted a new course in my creative career, more in keeping with my true, God-designed gifts. And yet I have often felt more overtaken by the disappointment and losses in life than enthralled with its joy and possibility.

I identified with Ivan, I suppose, who speaks in the film's final narrative of the human desire for an enduring enjoyment of life. The only surviving descendant of three generations, Ivan is desperate to find meaning in the midst of the great modern age that wiped out his Hungarian-Jewish family, the Sonnenscheins, who suffered years of fascist rule, the Holocaust, and Stalin's Communist regime. Ivan muses on what's mattered in life and sorts through the belongings of his beloved grandmother, Valerie, who has just died from heart failure in old age. As he studies pictures from the piles of beautiful photographs she'd taken since the turn of the century, her remarkable life emerges. Ivan remembers how she'd always urged him to find joy in life and how he'd always struggled through layers of existential cynicism to simply endure it. He remembers the words of encouragement she'd spoken to him shortly before she died: "Politics has made a mess of our lives. . . . still I've enjoyed waking up every morning. I've tried to take pictures of what is beautiful in life, but it hasn't been easy." His grandmother had sustained many losses-her husband to illness, her sons and all but one grandson to the Holocaust-and was forced to live her final years in one small room of the family home. And yet, with her resilient spirit, she chose to delight in the music she played on the piano and the taste of coffee with cream.

Try to photograph what is beautiful in life. As Valerie's words resonate with Ivan's own desire to live, he realizes that of the three generations of Sonnenscheins preceding him only she had known the gift of breathing freely in life.

The gift of breathing freely. The clarity of this idea-to breathe freely-was as startling to me as the lights coming up after three hours in a darkened theater. I thought of all the mornings I'd awakened without a sense of enjoyment for the day at hand; the long desert times when I was waiting for the right circumstances to line up so I could begin to live; the lonely years I'd spent away from my faith in futile attempts to carve a meaningful life for myself without the shelter of God, the years I'd lived by the credo, "My will be done." I thought of the beauty I'd not photographed because I was too busy taking pictures of things that didn't exist, snapshots of perfection, preconceived images of soon-to-be-forgotten achievements. I thought of all my years of frantic questing, trying to become someone other than myself.

The weight of it seemed unbearable-a weight of many layers of protection that I'd accumulated along my life journey-layers that made my shoulders droop toward my heart and my whole chest feel so heavy it was difficult to breathe.

I took a deep breath and then another and another, letting them out in a huge sigh.

Suddenly I began to understand a moment that had startled me years earlier in my thirties-why, when I returned to the neighborhood of my childhood, I sat on the curb across from the house where I grew up and cried. I'd seen the ghosts of my past-the children I'd played with and myself as a child and how I'd been blissfully engaged in a moment at hand, not invested in any outcome. It was a snapshot of life before I'd assumed the agenda of being perfect or learned the grown-up lessons of shame and fear and not-enough-ness. It was a moment of living life like the gift that it was, created for me. I cried then, like I was crying in the theater now, grieving a resilience of spirit I'd once enjoyed but that now often eluded me.

I thought, All I ever really wanted is to breathe freely in the gift of life.

Later I began to look for those free-breathing moments. I wanted to recognize and seize them in the present. But first I would need to retrieve them from my past. I realized I needed to sift through memory like Ivan with his grandmother's beautiful photographs. By doing so, I reclaimed the free beauty I had experienced when galloping on horseback across the plains of Montana with the wind whipping the hair across my face or when playing my fiddle under the stars on the banks of the Ohio River with my mentor and friend John Hartford-unfettered by the demands of classical perfection, stage fright, and my own ego needs. Most surprisingly I found beauty in the flawed moments, when the horrible darkness, such a contrast with loveliness, made the lovely moments clear-lovely moments I might have otherwise missed. The contrasts struck me: The agony of losing my favorite aunt, eased by holding her hand as she passed and sensing the ethereal release of her spirit in a golden haze; the painful bewilderment over career failures, illuminated by the creative integrity that could manifest itself in no other way; the heartbreak of loving unwisely and too well, tempered by the richness of it all and an enhanced capacity to feel.

In the ordinary landscape of every day, a remarkable picture began to emerge and along with it a reminder of the resilient spirit that I longed to recapture. This is how I found the way back to myself, how I embraced and learned to celebrate the imperfect journey of life.

Breathing Freely: Celebrating the Imperfect Life by Ruth McGinnis is used by permission of Fleming H. Revell, a division of Baker Book House Company, copyright © 2001. All rights to this material are reserved. Materials are not to be distributed to other web locations for retrieval, published in other media, or mirrored at other sites without written permission from Baker Book House Company.

Living The Good Life by Ruth McGinnis is used by permission of Fleming H. Revell, a division of Baker Book House Company, copyright © 2001. All rights to this material are reserved. Materials are not to be distributed to other web locations for retrieval, published in other media, or mirrored at other sites without written permission from Baker Book House Company.