A product of circumstances

My great-grandmother was 93 years old when she died.

Every morning, she would get up at 07:00, have breakfast, sit at the window, knitting dark grey stockings, watching the world outside. She would have had lunch at some time before 12:00, have a nap on her kitchen sofa, flip through a magazine and sit beside the window again. As she found it hard to walk (she had gained some weight), she didn’t go downstairs in her late years. She had dinner at 18:00 and watched TV until she switched it off at 20:00 to retire to bed (no matter what program she had been watching); to argue the next morning that she hadn’t slept well in the night.

She would never have overstepped a radius of, say 50 km, maybe even less, from the place where she was born.

She lived a regular life. A uniformly continuous life.

Although sometimes I wish that my life was a little calmer or more quiet, I would never want to have a life like hers. I know I never will. I daresay that it is impossible today to live like that.

It’s funny: She is already quite old in my first memories of her. But then again, who isn’t, in the thoughts of a small child? She seemed so old, so strange somehow, so far away, almost like a (sorry!!!) dinosaur. Her lifestyle and mine are worlds apart.

Even though, when I look at her picture, I can see a young woman who has so much potential about her. But it wasn’t meant to be used in her times.
She adapted to society, to circumstances, and by the time she had reached my current age, she wore black or dark grey dresses and apron dresses over that (except for anniversaries, when she wore a dark blue dress and no apron) and a bun (chignon) at the back of her head.

She had given birth to two girls and that was all that life had provided for her, it seems. And in this state, she remained for more than 50 years.
Maybe she was happy with that, I don’t know.
I wouldn’t. But then again, my life started differently, it developed differently, and the decades that lie between our lives provided more freedom for anyone. Freedom to think, freedom for our heart’s desires, and the chance to make it come true. So, she and me, and anyone, we are products of the circumstances we live in.

Somehow, I feel a bond to her. It’s a loose bond, nothing like that one I feel for my grandmother who is 95 years old now, but a bond anyway.

And I ask myself: Do I use all the potential I’ve got?
Do I make the best of my life?
I don’t think so...