Wisdom from Betty Smith

About three weeks ago I finally finished what has come to be by far one of my favorite books (thank you, Bucket). I loved A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I discovered raw wisdom in it. I felt fulfilled reading it. I cried during it. I laughed a few times out loud. And the morning after I finished reading, I couldn’t wait to read some excerpts to Tyler. And so I woke him up to the blinding light of the bedside lamp and told him to listen. He did. With his eyes closed. 

One of the parts I read to eyes-closed Tyler came after the book finished. The publisher included a short piece, also by Betty Smith, entitled “Fall in Love with Life.” It originally appeared in This Week Magazine. I’m going to copy it word for word in here, because I think it is so applicable to our current stage in life, ours personally, and then to many of our friends’.  No matter how much we plan, life often times has a mind of its own, but despite everything not working out how we thought it would, it can still be so fulfilling…

“As a listening child, I often heard older people say: ‘Oh the plans I made!’ And ‘What dreams I had!’ And the inevitable: ‘If only I had my life to live over…’ I reasoned that these men and women had missed the fullness of life somehow.

But I wasn’t going to miss it, I decided at the age of fourteen. I planned. In a slightly used copy book, I made a full list of what I wanted from life. I vowed to attain those things, one by one.

The plans never worked out. Most of my adult life, I had to work to support myself and others. A lot of the fullness of life was expended in the competitive business world. But I was young and optimistic. This is only for the time being, I said. Someday it will all come out the way I want it.

But the years went by and then I was middle-aged and alone. My children had left to make their own full life somewhere. I, too, began to think: ‘If only I had my life to live over again…’

One rainy night, I went down to the drugstore to get a paperback to read myself to sleep on. I picked up an Emile Zola book and stood there holding it, waiting to remember something I had read long ago. Then it came to me: Zola had said: ‘To have a child, to plan a tree, to write a book.’ That, he said, was a full life!

A great stillness grew about me as I realized I’d had a child…I’d planted a tree…in fact, I’d even written a book, though when Zola said ‘book’ I am sure he meant it as a symbol for any constructive job, honestly done.

And so, according to the tenets of a great man, I had a full life. My children had given me a quiet, never ending ecstasy all the years of their growing up. A little thrown-away sapling that I’d planted twenty-five years ago is now a shade. My children and later their children played under it and, God willing, there will be great-grandchildren playing under it, too. And I was even able to make a book out of all my hopes and fears and dreams.

No one of these things had been set down in the notebook, because they were part of me – things I took for granted. For instance: When I was first aware that I would be a woman, I knew I’d have children. When I wept childish tears as they cut down the only tree in our tenement yard, I knew I would plant a tree everywhere I lived. And when at the age of eight, I got my first ‘A’ on a school composition, I knew I would write a book some day.

I came to a clear conclusion, and it is a universal one: To live, to struggle, to be in love with life – in love with all life holds, joyful or sorrowful—is fulfillment. The fullness of life is open to all of us.”