Fight

"The best thing one can say of anyone is that they fight," Doris Lessing, British novelist. She wrote this in The Golden Notebook, her 2007 novel that won her the Nobel Prize.

I found the quote above in this week’s Newsweek article about Doris Lessing. It spoke to me. I think that you should fight until you haven’t the strength to take one more swing, and then after a good night’s sleep, get back in the ring and start swinging again.

I was often chastised in my early days of the widow message board by my “elders” for not accepting the status quo, but I have since come to realize that making a plan and executing it is too much a part of who I am. Doing nothing has never solved any of my difficulties or made my life better. What it leads to, in my opinion, is frustration and bitterness, and a deep sense of helplessness. Some of my battles have been long. Some were short. Sometimes I received assistance. Often I was expected to go it alone. The point is though that I came out of the other side of the struggle better for it whether the outcome was preferred or not.

I think that it is Dylan Thomas who writes about “raging” against the coming of death, but his comparison is not too much different from Lessing’s advice. Life is meant to be lived and forcefully if necessary.