Month: April 2016

Hobie, the furniture restorer in Donna Tartt’s best-selling The Goldfinch: A Novel told young Theo that he had thought he would study history and become a professor at Notre Dame. That’s my road not traveled, said Hobie. Maybe by restoring things, he thought, I’m involved in history anyway.

The road not traveled. People of a Certain Age, how many such roads define the map of your life?

I recall a super-highway or two, a few freeways, more two-lane roads, endless dirt tracks not taken. Every choice I have made picked a path and left others unexplored.

In college, I had summer jobs with U.S. National Bank and Pacific Telephone. Each firm had programs designed to attract college graduates to join the ranks of management trainees. There were limited financial incentives for junior management, but as we all know, high-ranking officers of banks and communications firms have done well financially in the past forty years. Who knows? Maybe I would have been one of them.

Instead, I chose graduate school. When I was 14, my older sister predicted I would become a history professor (like Hobie). My dad, a minister, had, I think, hoped that I would follow in his footsteps. Either version of me required a graduate education. So, goodbye corporate titan me.

I was admitted to graduate school in Political Science at the University of Washington and the School of Theology at Claremont. The choice was really about the discipline in which I would be a professor: Political Science or Sacred Theology. I chose the former.

Did I mention there was a war going on then? Graduating from college, even though married, I was likely to be classified ready to travel, courtesy of the U.S. government. Instead, I applied for a couple of draft classifications other than 1-A and ultimately ended up flunking a physical for alternative service. That process offered a host of roads to take or not. Happily for me, the ones I took kept me out of the insanity of war.

When I finished my dissertation in 1973, I was offered the chance for a promotion in the administration at the University of California, Riverside and an Assistant Professor in Political Science position at California State University, Fullerton. I was mistakenly under the impression that the teaching job was a one-year replacement. I learned that I was turning down a tenure-track position when I called the department chair to decline the offer.

Not becoming a full-time college professor or a minister were a freeway-sized professional choice roads not taken.

Deciding whom to marry was a super highway choice and, of course, required another person to make a complementary choice. The 49 years we have been happily married suggest that choice has worked out well.

At one time, I thought that a parlor game, played with friends, in which each person described what his or her life might have been had a different road been chosen, might be a fun way to learn more about your friends. Hobie’s comment to Theo in The Goldfinch came with the hint of disappointment. I rejected my parlor game idea because of the danger of digging up deep disappointments buried under the years of making the journey on the road taken as rewarding and pleasant as possible.

There are roads not taken by others that you applaud openly. My mom could have pursued a career in radio in New York in the 1940s—she had the education and a growing body of experience—had she not left that option to marry my dad. Thanks, Mom.

There are roads you might like to have taken that were abruptly closed off to you. I wanted to attend the Air Force Academy for college and then fly planes. I found out that I was 25 days too young to enter after I finished high school at age 16 years, 10 months. I could not see myself waiting around for a year to start college. As history unfolded, being a military pilot in 1968 was a different proposition than it had been when I aspired to apply in 1963. I was in a different frame of mind, too.

And there are roads one dreams about taking that are completely irrational. It was only size, speed and talent that kept me from the goal of succeeding Mickey Mantle in center field for the New York Yankees. But in my mind…

I am among the fortunate who, at least at the conscious level, have no regrets about roads not taken. I admit to occasional curiosity. But, my life at this point, dotted as it has been by ups and downs, is simply result of the arc of my life, the facts that have resulted from thousands of choices made.

Thinking about the road not taken is ultimately an exercise in fantasy. Visiting Fantasyland can be fun, but most rides at the real Fantasyland go around in circles.

And you know? I teach classes at the university and pray periodically in public; little glimpses of my roads not taken.

Daniel E. White

April 18, 2016

People of a Certain Age, if you are retired, perhaps you have been party to something like the following exchange:

Acquaintance. Dan! How’re you doing? How are you liking retirement?

Dan: I’m loving it.

Acquaintance: Keeping busy?

Dan: (Lists a litany of activities that make his calendar so full.)

Acquaintance: Wow! Certainly an active retirement!

Dan: Seems like I am just as busy as when I was working. The difference is that I can choose what I do.

Why do I and countless others who have retired from active and successful careers feel obliged to be seen as doing?

I once described this as Newly Retired Syndrome. Said I hoped I would outgrow it.

It is going on three years now since I retired. That stretches the definition of new. There must be something else at work.

I asked Mom about this one time. She said that, at her age, she sometimes asks herself to “justify taking up space on earth.” I suspect you don’t need to be 95 to ask that question of yourself. There are books about purpose-driven lives written by people a lot younger than Mom.

Pico Iyer, the famed travel writer, gave a TED talk in 2014 called “The Art of Stillness.” He has made a good living going places and doing things, then writing about the goings and the doings in an artful fashion. He says, though, that his life has required stillness from time to time, not going, not doing, not writing. He spoke of “sitting still, turning sights into insights.”

Being still can serve a purpose. Can it be a form of doing?

“How’s it going, Mr. Spaeckle?” asks the little fellow in the comic strip, “Frazz,” drawn by Jeff Mallett. “More things to do than hours in the day,” replies Spaeckle. In the next frame, Frazz says, “For some reason, grown ups don’t think that’s a good thing.”

I mis-read Frazz the first time. I thought he said, “For some reason, grown-ups think that is a good thing.” That fit neatly into my mindset about the urge to be seen as busy, even when retired.

The correct reading of Frazz’s comment gets at Mom’s point. Having a reason or purpose to get up in the morning, as Judy puts it, makes getting up in the morning easier. Maybe the trick is to define purpose differently.

Many of us were raised to see as heroic those people who accomplished great things while harried and drawn in multiple directions at once. Yes, sister, you can have it all. Yes, brother, you can run the company, serve on three boards (two voluntary, one paid), play well in club tournaments, not miss any school event involving your offspring to which parents are invited, etc.

A work-life-career like that is bound to create patterns of living that influence life beyond the last day of a paycheck. The habits of a lifetime don’t disappear overnight.

“There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so” wrote Shakespeare in “Hamlet.”

Retirement gives us time: to think, to see, to hear, to turn sights into insights. If I need to come up with a purpose, could I come to see being, thinking, seeing, hearing as important ways of doing? If Shakespeare was right, I’m in control on that challenge.

The actress, Sally Field, stars in the movie “Hello, My Name is Doris.” Field says about her reason for doing the film the following: Doris is a “wonderful person to look at on entering one’s 70s. As human beings, I think our challenge is, will we be open to what is waiting for us to find out about ourselves?”

If we take the time to think, to turn sights into insights, we will find out about ourselves. I suspect that many of us who have lived the harried life, pulled in multiple directions, were quite comfortable putting off finding out about ourselves.

What we People of a Certain Age might discover is a purpose only we can serve, valued, perhaps, more than we had ever thought; the sharing of our experience.

In the March 25, 2016 edition of The Week, gerontologist Karl Pillemer advises readers about a way for them to ease their anxieties: “ask an older person.” Writing about the urge to find a purpose in life, Pillemer reports that older folks say “relax.” “They say that you are likely to have a number of purposes, which will shift as you progress through life,” he writes.

Pillemer recommends that younger people consider asking the advice of older people as they move through life for the simple reason that the older people have lived through more parts of life.

Have you imagined sharing your insights based on your experiences as an important purpose for you in later life? NPR’s “Story Corps” featured a man in hospice who was disappointed each morning he woke up until, as happened each day, someone sought out his counsel, even about small stuff. Who is waiting for your wise counsel?

Being still. Relaxing about this purpose-driven life stuff and simply sharing your experience with others, urging them to relax. There is a theme emerging here.

 

Daniel E. White

April 4, 2016