Fall in Love with Life: A Piece by Betty Smith

Originally appeared in This Week magazine.

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 plan 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.

The author on her fire escape

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 plant 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 tree above my house and I have enjoyed its 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.

First piece published by the author