Prime Time (25 page)

Use doing a life review to poultice the wounds of youth with the forgiveness of age.

Understanding comes first, before forgiveness is possible. Before letting go is possible. Understanding requires honesty, and honesty requires courage. So with honesty and courage, in the spirit of forgiveness, as you feel your way through each stage of your life, think not only of the difficult experiences, but of the people who touched you and guided you with kindness and love. Acknowledge them and thank them, in your heart, your body, your writing.

Remember the ones who hurt you, the way Nat did when writing his book. This will not be easy, and you may find yourself forgetting to breathe. Breathing keeps your body open, your muscles relaxed, so that understanding can come. When your body is tight, new realizations and developmental breakthroughs will be harder.

This is why meditation can be so helpful. While you’re doing some deep breathing, try, without forcing it, to imagine the pain that those who hurt you must have experienced in their own lives, the self-hatred that may have led them to hurt you. Try—again, without forcing it—to open your heart and send forgiveness their way. And then commit yourself to never doing these same hurtful things to others—or to yourself. Be the one to break the cycle!

In his book
A Year to Live,
the poet and teacher Stephen Levine wrote, “Even an unsuccessful attempt at forgiveness has the considerable power of its intention. We cannot force forgiveness because force closes the heart, but we can explore its possibilities, its capacity to heal the forgiver, and sometimes the forgiven.” Levine also said that forgiveness “is mercy in action in the same way that compassion is wisdom in action.”
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The author James Baldwin wrote, “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hate so stubbornly is because they sense, once the hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” Some people also cling to their pain. It defines them. Who am I if not a victim? Such people do not do well in their Third Acts.

A life review can be a way to shed both hate and victimhood, to let the pain out, and to uncover one’s true identity.

Zalman Schachter-Shalomi vividly describes what it does to us when we are unable or unwilling to forgive:

For example, when I refuse to forgive someone who has wronged me, I mobilize my own inner criminal justice system to punish the offender. As judge and jury, I sentence the person to a long prison term without pardon and incarcerate him in a prison that I construct from the bricks and mortar of a hardened heart. Now as jailor and warden, I must spend as much time in prison as the prisoner I am guarding. All the energy that I put into maintaining the prison system comes out of my “energy budget.” From this point of view, bearing a grudge is very “costly,” because long-held feelings of anger, resentment, and fear drain my energy and imprison my vitality and creativity.
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If one or both of your parents are alive, sit down with a tape recorder and notepad (don’t rely on just one or the other) and interview them—separately. If they are together, they may tell you what’s comfortable, the standard, bought-into script of their lives that they are both familiar with. Your goal is to gently nudge them beyond their comfort zones. They may actually welcome this interest on your part, and they are at an age when there’s little to lose and much to gain from finally revealing (to themselves, as well) memories that hold the key to who they became.

Ask them about their parents: Did their parents love each other? Were they loving or cold and strict with their children—that is, with your parents? Try to tease out painful things your parents may have buried, such as abuse, rape, emotional distance, failures, deaths, addictions, depression, or guilt. All these things may have affected how you were treated, how you felt growing up. And, if you are like most people, you probably thought it was your fault. Now is the time to separate who your parents were—or who they wanted you to be—from the person you are.

A man might explore what he was like before and after he started formal schooling. Remember what I said in
Chapter 3
about how this is the stage when boys tend to shut off emotionally so as to “fit in,” to not be called a “sissy” or “momma’s boy”? Try to remember how you felt at that age, what messages were sent to you either implicitly or explicitly about how you were supposed to act. Many psychologists today feel that societal pressures on little boys to fit a macho stereotype cause a bifurcation between head and heart that does damage to their emotional development. Research seems to show that the Third Act of a man’s life is when the nurturing, empathetic, sensitive aspects of his psyche can make a comeback, allowing his final decades to be happier and his relationships healthier.

Unlike boys, girls begin to feel pressure to conform to gender norms at the onset of adolescence. A woman will want to closely explore those early teen years, when she may have become disembodied, when her true self might have gone underground, her voice become muted.

As I said earlier, I have found that when you make yourself write things out, whether in longhand or on a computer (which is how I write), you are forced to be more intentional and you learn more deeply than if you simply
think
about your life.

Getting your story published—or even read—is not the goal. Just write. Commit yourself to paper—with all the truth and courage you can muster. Try to interview the key elderly people in your life now, while they are still alive. But even if your parents and grandparents are no longer living, there are probably relatives and friends of the family who remember things. If your life remains too busy for you to actually write, at least gather the information that is most at risk of being lost, as friends and parents die, so you’ll have it later when your pace slows down and you can address these things.

Try to identify the times in your life when you went through real developmental changes—when something inside you began shifting and you saw the world and your place in it differently. Adolescence was probably such a time, because that is when we begin to discover our identities independent from our parents.

The onset of the women’s movement may have been an important catalyst for many of us. Menopause can also be formative. Developmental changes can be purely internal transformations resulting from our realizing that how we’ve been leading our lives isn’t making sense anymore. Maybe we feel we haven’t been “leading” them, that they’ve been leading us, and so we commit to doing something significant about it. It may have been that external events triggered developmental changes—your parents got divorced, someone close passed away, you were fired from your job, you gave birth to your first child, your spouse left you. How you reacted and adjusted to these kinds of external events would have determined whether or not they caused developmental change and propelled you on to a new life course.

Don’t worry about allotting big blocks of time. Just start with Act I. Set aside an hour to begin the process. Get a notebook and a pen you like or, if it allows your ideas to flow more easily, use a tape recorder.

Think about the main events, the scenes that stand out for you. As you make progress, perhaps things will emerge in more detail.

Search out old family albums, scrapbooks, family trees. Study them carefully for clues. Spend quiet time visiting old haunts, like the houses and neighborhoods where you grew up, and try to conjure up how you felt back then. Attend school reunions, interview your old classmates, and explain what you’re doing. Who knows, it might inspire them to do their own life reviews! Play the old songs from your past. Music is an evocative way to call up forgotten images. A single stimulus may bring forth buried memories. In his masterpiece
Remembrance of Things Past,
Marcel Proust illustrated this beautifully: The protagonist eats a small cake he enjoyed as a child and memories come flooding back.

It’s good to carry a pad with you so that if a thought comes to you, you’ll be able to jot it down.

Maybe, like me, as you remember yourself as a child, an adolescent, a young women or man, and so forth, you will discover that to a significant degree, your developmental changes revolved around issues of gender. In my case, I rediscovered the trying to please; the needing to be authenticated by a man; the self-hatred, especially of my body; the responses to my mother; my remote, objectifying father; and the eventual emergence of my own voice. For me, the evolving metaphor for my life thus became that of a gender-role journey. I believe that many women and men doing a life review will find this to be true, too; or in any case, it may be a helpful metaphor for their own journey.

Other metaphors might be the challenges of poverty or violence or always needing to be the best at everything—competitiveness. If you come from a family where alcoholism played an important role, your metaphor may have involved being the hero or the clown—two common roles for children of alcoholics that may follow us into adulthood.

Discovering a metaphor for the story of your life can open you to internal growth, renewal, expanded self-definition, surprising energy, and healing, because your story will then resonate with the universal story.

It wasn’t until I was able to see my own life as a gender-role journey that I felt ready to begin writing my memoirs at sixty-two.

CHAPTER 11

The Importance of Friendship

…Alone, you can fight,

you can refuse, you can

take what revenge you can

but they roll over you.

But two people fighting

back to back can cut through

a mob, a snake-dancing file

can break a cordon, an army

can meet an army.

Two people can keep each other

sane, can give support, conviction,

love, massage, hope, sex.

Three people are a delegation,

a committee, a wedge. With four

you can play bridge and start

an organization. With six

you can rent a whole house,

eat pie for dinner with no seconds,

and hold a fund raising party.

A dozen make a demonstration.

A hundred fill a hall.

A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;

ten thousand, power and your own paper;

a hundred thousand, your own media;

ten hundred thousand, your own country.

It goes on one at a time,

It starts when you care

to act, it starts when you do

it again after they said no,

It starts when you say We

and know who you mean, and each