Spring in the prairies this year has been a frustrating on-again/off-again affair. Every two or three days of temperatures mild enough to melt snow and quicken buds are followed by yet another snowfall or even snow storm. Even those of us who enjoy winter have had it with snow. Enough already! Our souls are starved for the sight of green leaves and blooming tulips.

            That feeling of “I am so done with this” reminds me of our first granddaughters who were taught some basic sign language long before they could actually say words. Simple gestures performed by pudgy baby fingers are unbearably cute, and my favourite was the sign for “all done.” That most useful phrase told parents when baby had had enough to eat and wished to be freed from the confinement of high chair or whatever other equipment can be used to hold a baby in place. “All Done!”: a quick flick of the hands as if tossing something away or warding off some onslaught. That’s the gesture I want to use toward Mother Nature: I’m all done already. Put the snow away until next November, please!”

            Actually, these days I could write whole lists of things that I’m all done with. Some of them were once chosen with pleasure and hardly deserve the wilful dismissal of the gesture (those will wait for the next posting). Others, unfortunately, whether I initially chose them or not, I have had, and have, no say in their current presence or their long-hoped for ending.

  As illustration, albeit an ambivalent one, take my retirement from university-level teaching. I had certainly chosen the teaching itself; it was never imposed. But at the end, it was not so much that I was truly all done with teaching as that various circumstances combined to make me choose to throw up my hands and dismiss my post. A good friend, now gone (see Stones and Flowers, “The Last Good-bye”) had told me that I would know, deep inside, when it was time to end something, whether a career or a participation in a club or a volunteer position. “If you pay attention,” she said, “and listen to your heart and your body, you’ll know.” And “sometimes,” she added, “it’s only later on that you’ll realize you were really done.” She was right. There came a time when I could acknowledge to myself that I was all done with classroom performances; as for the marking of assignments, that I had been done with long before I actually quit teaching.

            As I walk further and further into the domain known as “old age” or “eldership” (if language must be kept positive), I’m recognizing more frequently those moments of “all done now,”  not as a moment of choice but as a time of reluctant acknowledgement.

 To say aloud, finally, that my body no longer tolerated the degree of discomfort that is intrinsic to camping was bitter. Tenting, at first a financial necessity for us, had become our normal holiday practice, and then a matter of pride as well as pleasure. My soul felt at home in the forests and near the streams, and there was something mysterious and beautiful about being completely, literally, in touch with the earth. I had once felt the aftershock of an earthquake directly underneath my body; I had felt the earth move.

For so long now, the choice to pitch a tent had been part of my identity. It let the world know that I belonged outdoors. Now that I have said “all done” to our beloved tent, who am I? What is it, precisely, that has been declared “all done”?

            When held up against the large scale of world events, such questions are not exactly silly, just much smaller than I care to admit. Where I sleep remains a matter of choice; I can now afford other options than a tent. In other words, it’s not an issue of survival as it is for far too many people on this earth.

Here I want to say, loudly and clearly, that I am all done with political lying and side-stepping and excuse-making. I am done with the scape-goating of the vulnerable, the manufacturing of enemies, and the endless grasping for power. I am so done with mere posturing and ego-stroking and face-saving. I will not say that I am all done with death because death is an irrevocable part of life on this planet. However—and this is a huge distinction—we can be done with cruel and unnecessary death, stupidly violent death, undignified diminishment of human beings. Why aren’t we? That’s the question my soul cries out repeatedly, while my cowardly self whimpers that I’m all done with listening to the news.

There is another important hand signal for babies: it is the opposite of “all done.” The signal for “more” is not as dramatic as the disdainful flick of the hands for “all done”: fingers are brought together and then the tips are touched. It is a gathering motion, not a tossing away. And that, in one gesture, is the problem of our society. Babies, seemingly, know instinctively when they want “more”—more food, more play, more hugs, more water to drink—just as they know when they’re “all done,” for the time being, with any of the above. Greed is as yet unknown to them.

All those ugly things I said I was done with? they’re the result of too many people who have totally forgotten that the gesture of “more” should have limits. There’s a point when the floor is scattered with toys, many toys, and nearby rooms are piled high with toys, and no child alive can play meaningfully with even a fraction of them all. “All done” should have been signaled a long time ago. Somehow along the journey from babbling baby talk and happy hand clapping, something happened that sidelined self-awareness and good judgment, and now the adult is looking at power and money and influence and attention and just saying repeatedly, “more, More, MORE!”

Yes, I’m all done with “more.” Not that I haven’t vices of my own for which I haven’t always had the wisdom to signal “all done.” My children would point to my libraries and ask about how many more books I really think I need. They would be right. And I’m working on that. The question that troubles me is this: if I had had money enough early enough to get onto that track of wanting more and ever more, would I have had the discipline to say “all done now”? I should think carefully about that before I judge too harshly the choices of others.

Nevertheless, is it too much to ask that collectively we encourage our governments and our social institutions to teach us all the virtues of refusing the lure of endless “more”?

[I am aware that human societies are far more complex and

interconnected than my simplistic distinction between “more”

and “all done” implies. It will take much more than my helpless

 “all done” gestures to bring about change.

For the time being, may I keep my mental picture of a

grandbaby signalling happily “all done!”?]