Growing up while growing old

The following material is an attempt to clarify some awareness I have been developing about myself in recent years. I believe that whatever understanding one develops, whatever insights I have, are essentially meaningless and potentially dishonest unless and until they are expressed to another person who respects my attempts at honesty. Basically this is therapy for myself.

I began to realize several years ago how much of my life was devoted to attempting to win admiration from others. I see now that the original impetus to this attempt was from my mother, who seemed to need desperately for me to accomplish something noteworthy in order to make her own life seem more meaningful and worthwhile. She constantly told me how wonderful I was and how it was certain that I would accomplish "great things". The tone and body language, however, was more than simple encouragement. It spoke of a desperate need for me to achieve in some kind of public way that would bring credit to her. I needed for her to be happy, so I tried to bring credit on her. Fanita English would have described the mechanism as the "hot potato game", in which the unpleasant affect is transferred to another (usually a child) who deals with the affect in an attempt to make a parent happy and loving.

Almost everything in my life since then has been colored by that need. I sought recognition for every accomplishment. I felt the need to be seen by others to be "great", and that this recognition by others would somehow magically lead to happiness and contentment. Moreover, I thought that others would first envy or admire me, and then would like me as a result. I was incredibly blind for many years to how my public parading of my accomplishments led to resentment, led me to an arrogant and superior attitude, led people to dislike me, all while I was doing "the right thing" and thought that they would appreciate me.

Right after graduate school, for instance, when I had my first real paying job since the service, I bought a Porsche. Never mind that this car was spectacularly inappropriate because of its expense, but I also had a wife and 3 children, and we needed a very different kind of transportation. My first wife, a very supportive and loyal person, never said a word of objection, and it never occurred to me to ask. But I loved the idea of driving the car to visit friends and "showing it off", by which I meant that I thought they would admire me and my car, envy me and recognize me for having acquired a much-lusted after machine. It never once occurred to me that they might resent my flaunting of my new money, or envy the car. It never crossed my mind, even for an instant, that they might resent me for my arrogance and self-centeredness.

I loved music, for instance, and my mother encouraged me to take up piano and to become a "concert pianist". I had no idea what one of those was, but I got the picture of me on a stage being applauded, with my mother in the audience, vindicated at last, her superiority as a mother publically acclaimed. If I wasn't that good a pianist (and I wasn't) then I should try harder, because success was inevitable. It didn't matter that I actively hated being on a stage in front of others, where my inevitable mistakes meant I had failed her and me.

My life has been full of tasks undertaken not for their intrinsic value to me but for their potential to satisfy my mother's dreams. Not at all incidentally, it's only in the last few years that I have begun to recognize that my mother's dreams are not identical with mine. There's no end to the amount of trouble I went to, nor the difficulty of the tasks I undertook. Many of the tasks were successful, but they were no more satisfying to me than the ones that were unsuccessful. In fact, unsuccessful tasks kept my attention longer than successful ones, because the potential was still there, in the future, untapped. But if I did a good job on a particular task, and then got no recognition for it, I rapidly lost interest in it and abandoned it.

This recognition was not a sudden one. It developed gradually over the years. I learned, for instance, that I do love making music, and that having started seriously studying cello at age 60 I am NEVER going to be more than marginally competent at it. But I do love with a genuine passion playing in a community symphony orchestra. I love being submerged in all the instruments, no-one really noticing me personally but knowing that I am a part of that wonderful sound. Can there be a purer pleasure in the world?

There have been, over the years, a few things that I have learned to love, uncontaminated by the desire for recognition, or at least my desire for recognition was minimal. The problem with the search for admiration, recognition, envy, whatever, is that it is ultimately and always unsatisfying, and I know that. I have only to look at the papers and magazine covers to see famous people who have all these things and who appear to be desperately unhappy. But even if I'm mistaken about that and they are happy, when I have gotten recognition for some accomplishment, it was surprisingly unsatisfying and empty. I think now that perhaps I would have gotten some satisfaction from seeing my mother enjoy my "performance", but a second's reflection about my mother reminds me that she was never "satisfied" with anything I did. It was always "really good" but there was always something more that could and should have been done. A family joke (not really so funny) was that if I became Emperor of the World, she would view it as a steppingstone to better things. I suspect (more than suspect) that she was afflicted with chronic dissatisfaction with herself, and that each achievement by either of us was not enough, so she kept casting about for the flaws that she must have thought robbed her of her reward. My reward was although I was inadequate in providing her with what she needed, the promise of greater success sometime in the future kept me on the hook and in her regard.

I'm sorry for her, though she is dead many years now. I wish for her that she could have let something be good enough, that she could find some completion and satisfaction somewhere. It was clear she would never find that satisfaction through me, no matter what I did. She was in many ways an excellent mother. I, however, am done with her task, which leaves me with a new task, and the hardest question of all: What do I want? I have asked that question of my patients many times over the years. We all have to struggle with that question until we die. What do we do when the script runs out? Where do we look for new satisfactions? It's clear that the reward has to be in the process itself, or it is nowhere.

Freedom and how to avoid it

Some years ago I recall listening to a woman patient complaining about being "trapped" in a bad marriage. She said she couldn't leave because "of the children"; she said her religion forbade her from leaving him; she said his drinking and abuse were intolerable. "I can't leave him," she said. "It would be too hard on the children". Clearly, however, staying in an abusive relationship was equally damaging to the children, so this choice was essentially a dishonest one. The fact that her religion "forbade" her was simply a rule she chose to follow, rather than a physical necessity.

My attention was drawn to her use of the word "can't". In fact, "can't" is supposed to be used to describe dealing with a physically impossible act. I "can't" lift the house to put a brick under a corner (what a bad idea!). I "can't" fly by flapping my arms. The patient implied by her use of the word that her choices were limited by physical impossibility. She justified not making a possible choice by saying "I can't" which took the choice "off the table". If she had been more honest with herself, she could have said "I don't want to leave him", which would of course raised the question "why not?". She denies herself the freedom (and responsibility!) of making a choice by denying the choice as if it were a physical impossibility.

We do it all the time. "I can't find the time to work out"; "I can't leave my wife/job/kids"; "I can't lose weight"'. When we "can't", we don't have to think about the problem and consider solutions. We have closed the door on that choice; it's just not possible. We don't want to, so we say we can't. We don't want to say "I don't want to".

Many years ago I was whining to a friend of mine about my difficult personal situation and how "trapped" I was. He pointed out that when I left I could drive to Seattle, change my name to Smith and have a new life. He offered me money to pay for the gasoline. He reminded me I had credit cards. I found myself stammering with excuses: "That would be irresponsible! What about supporting my family? my kids?" He replied "I didn't say anything about being irresponsible. That was in your head. I assume that when you get to Seattle or Mexico or wherever you'll get a job and send money back to family. So what's stopping you?" The reality was, of course, that I didn't want to do that, but it was so much more pathetic and pitiful to say that I couldn't. There I was, poor me, trapped helplessly in my own pretense. Of course he was right. It just now occurs to me that about 15 years later he did exactly what he suggested to me. He left town, family, wife, kids, went to another city and never returned.

I think that once you discover that you are in fact free, it's hard to go back to the pretense that you are trapped or enslaved. The fact is, it's terrifying to experience freedom. We actually have to face and recognize choices and consequences. We can't just proceed in our little thoughtless ruts. On a moment to moment basis we have to choose our rut or to leave it, and there are prices to pay both ways. There's no guilt in being a helpless victim, I suppose.... hey, it's not our fault! But every door you walk through is a choice, and so is staying put. And there's always Seattle.

Imagination

Do you remember from your adolescence or early adulthood how difficult it was to imagine being... OLD? We couldn't picture it, or at least I couldn't. I recall that at 19 I tried to imagine myself as an old person, but I ran into a blockage: I couldn't seem to picture myself much beyond my early 30s. Naturally, I thought that my inability to imagine myself in the future meant that I had no future, as if not being able to imagine was somehow (magically) an ability to predict the future.

In fact, my later life has been completely different than I imagined, or even could imagine. Here I am, an old person, and I completely and consistently failed to imagine how it might be to be this particular old person. Just when you think life has no surprises for you (or at least no good ones), it turns you in a direction you could not possibly have foreseen. And that means that as (if) I get older, my imagination will not now reach all the way to that me that then will be (if I make it that far) when I am 80 or 90.

I hear younger people going through a version of this frequently. I heard a young (30s) woman say that she saw no point in "going on", as she couldn't imagine living in the future without whatever it was she thought she had to have, like her husband or coffee-pot or whatever. What could life possibly have to offer me? she said. I can't imagine going on without [whatever], she said. So what's the point? she said. It's as if she were saying to the Universe that if she couldn't have what she now wanted, she would just resign. She couldn't imagine a different life, so she didn't believe she could have one.

It's hard to think of a kind response to this kind of shortsightedness. I don't mean to trivialize her pain, but her failure to imagine was only part of the problem. The future is not only difficult to imagine, it is impossible to imagine. Which of us could have imagined 25 years ago that we would be living as we do now? That our lives would be as changed as they have been? And how could we have imagined it? People have gone through unimaginable changes and made a wholly different life for themselves. I wonder how many people have lived through tragedy and unimaginable loss and suffering, and who later made gold from the straw of their lives? Not only have they conquered the bad changes and transmuted them, they have made total changes in direction and concept and made them work too.

The next question for us to consider is this: Why should we think we have to imagine something good to be able to look forward to life? When our imagination fails us, as it must inevitably, why should we think that this gives us no further goals? What do we need goals for, anyway?

I can now imagine that my life 20 years from now, assuming I make it that far, will be entirely different from anything I CAN imagine. I don't need to imagine it, in fact, I just have to keep living it one step at a time, and I can certainly imagine that some of those steps will be difficult ones. But some of them will be wonderful. Perhaps it's our task to take the things that happen for good or for ill and to create something better for ourselves from them.