More of you responded to my last blog, on Sally Field’s spirituality of re-inventing ourselves, than to any of the previous thirty-two installments–it obviously struck a chord.
Your responses express a range of perspectives. They raise the question for me–just who (or what) is this “self” that may be re-invented? But I’ll return to that question after I describe the range of responses.
Some people have been reinventing themselves throughout their adult lives. For some, this means a frequent change in jobs, but more than that. A woman who has moved around in her lifetime, writes: “I reinvented myself every time I moved. The people I met in the new place had no idea who I was in the old place. I moved to different neighborhoods or different states at least eight times in my adult years. You can tell the new people about who you were in the former place, but they still don’t know you “that way”. So the moving reinvention is both a challenge/opportunity to be someone new and a disappointment that you do not have the reputation/expectations that you had with the people of the old place.”
An independent business man follows a calling to theology, while maintaining the business. After receiving his doctorate, he moves for some years into college and university teaching, only to find his way blocked by several factors. He then turned to law, specializing in civil rights cases. He recently began cutting back on his law practice to take on teaching online courses. He writes: “I’m in the process of reinventing the next phase. Life is full of possibilities still–an adventure as Whitehead reminded us all.”
There’s excitement in these words. Others feel pain and uncertainty in reinvention–they find it demoralizing. For example, reinvention hits with a jolt when a spouse dies–there’s no alternative. The close interaction, the symbiosis, comes to an end–sometimes unexpectedly–and life has to be reinvented–from scratch for many people, traumatic especially for many older people. People experience the same kind of loss when a partner falls to dementia.
Some are cautious about the idea of reinventing. Two women, both high-achieving women and over 70, responded with impressive accounts of the activities they carry on–the same activities they’ve been doing for years. I know others–men as well–for whom re-invention is not on the agenda. I was one of these until a very few years ago. I recall attending a retirement workshop 20 years ago, at which a counselor said to me, “If you aren’t prepared to create a new life for yourself, you will have a difficult retirement. I scoffed at this advice then–“What’s wrong with carrying on with the interests and activities that have been central for so many years–at least as long as you are able?”
“As long as you are able”–that may be the key. Things happen–good things and bad things–over which we may have no control; we simply must adjust. The world around us is key to our re-invention.
In her new book, Barbara Bradley Hagerty waxes eloquent about re-imagining life, as the title indicates, Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife. From a recent interview, I concluded that she is unrealistic when she speaks of midlife as a time to drop everything and simply reorient one’s life. She finished by saying, “I think my book may apply only to upper middle class persons.” Dropping everything and reorienting require a level of luxury–time and money–that most of us do not enjoy.
The world around us and our health prod re-invention. Re-inventing is adapting to what happens in us and around us. If it is true, as one of you suggests, that re-invention will be a way of life for millennials–as it has been for the theologian/businessman-become-lawyer I referred to earlier–it is caused by the changing nature of jobs and employment as much as anything else. Shakespeare caught this over four hundred years ago, his play As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players; / They have their exits and their entrances, / And one man in his time plays many parts.”
For me, as I said earlier, the big question that emerges is: Just who is this me, this self that re-invents? Philosophers have written a good deal about how difficult it really is draw connections between our various stages of being ourselves. Twenty years ago, I had a few free days by myself in Denver, my hometown. I rented a car and visited every house I had lived in, every school I attended. I walked the neighborhood that I lived in for fifteen years–the alley where we played Kick the Can, the vacant lot where my dad and I had a huge vegetable garden during the Second World War, the drug store that had a soda fountain where I enjoyed cherry phosphates, and many other childhood and teenage haunts.
I was amazed, that I felt no real connection with the boy whose life was shaped by those places. I still see no continuity, except the connections I create in my mind, with that boy and the man who traveled to other parts of the world and spent half his life in Chicago, earning a doctorate, teaching in a Lutheran seminary, and retiring–still in Chicago–on the shore of Lake Michigan. I’ve been re-invented so many times that continuity is blurred. I’d be interested to know if others share this experience.
Sally Field, whose comments prompted these blogs, said that since her new, 70 year-old, self has not yet appeared, she awaits the revelation who she will be. In his response, Rick Busse speaks in terms of his process of re-invention. One of you asked, “Does reinvention or the need for it cause depression–a sadness for what is lost? Can reinvention give new motivation and enthusiasm? What determines how a person reacts to this need to reinvent?”
My conclusion: there is mystery at the heart of who we are, always changing and growing, defying prediction, always deeper than we can fathom.
Who I am
where I’m going
only I can say
I form the image
draw the map
paint the picture
from the scraps
and puzzle bits
that surround me
no one can put them
together for me
(c) Phil Hefner. 30 April 2016
Martin Luther King: Apostle of Non-Violence
5 AprToday we mark the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in Memphis. King’s impact on our society was made through actions of militant nonviolent resistance in behalf of marginalized groups. He said his movement was an expression of Jesus’s love, specifically as it was stated in the Sermon on the Mount, while the method of this love was provided by Gandhi.
Interestingly, all three of these non-violent leaders—Jesus, Gandhi, and King—evoked sharp disagreement over their strategies of non-violence. All three were killed by their opposition, Jesus and King before they reached forty years of age.
Non-violence rests on the audacious belief in a “double conversion”—(1) the conversion of the militant nonviolent confronters to a trust in the persons they are confronting. They take the risk that the opponents, the oppressors, will in turn (2) undergo a conversion that will enable them to respond in a reciprocal trust. The nonviolent activists are converted to a desire to elicit the best from the ones they are confronting, while their opponents are converted to respond in ways that express own best selves.
“Double conversion” is a risky strategy; it can fail.
King said that he wanted his opponents to be able to say after the confrontation, “I did what was right and good.”
King had a keen sense that people need to be transformed. From the very beginning, the philosophy of nonviolent resistance
undergirded the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955-56. There was always the problem of getting this method over because it didn’t make sense to most of the people in the beginning. He wrote, “We had to explain nonviolence to a community of people who had never heard of the philosophy and in many instances were not sympathetic with it. We had to make it clear that nonviolent resistance is not a method of cowardice. It does resist. It is not a method of stagnant passivity and deadening complacency. The nonviolent resister is just as opposed to the evil that he is standing against as the violent resister but he resists without violence. This method is nonaggressive physically but strongly aggressive spiritually.”
He clearly set forth a spiritual basis for his movement:
“To meet hate with retaliatory hate would do nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe. Hate begets hate, violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love; we must meet physical force with soul force. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding.”
He enumerates six traits that the nonviolent resister must internalize.
First, the non-violent justice resister is spiritually aggressive, since “his mind and emotions are always active, constantly seeking to persuade his opponent that he is wrong.”
Second, militant nonviolence “does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent but to win his friendship and understanding. “The end is redemption and reconciliation.”
Third, the attack is directed against forces of evil, not persons. “We are out to defeat injustice and not white persons who may be unjust.”
Fourth, willingness to accept suffering without retaliation. “Things of fundamental importance to people are not secured by reason alone, but have to be purchased with their suffering.”
Fifth, internal violence of the spirit must be avoided as much as external physical violence.
Sixth, nonviolent resistance is based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice. In other words, a worldview is involved. Barack Obama frequently says, “The arc of history bends toward justice.”
The discussion goes on today—is non-violence the most viable strategy for overcoming oppression, injustice, and discrimination? Does the arc of history actually bend toward justice? Or will we meet hate with hate, violence with violence, and thereby intensify the evil?
(c) Phil Hefner April 4, 2018