19 October 2017
Originally posted 19 October 2017.
My reading since retirement seven weeks ago began with some books about gratitude, one a Christian approach, one about education, and one tiny thing by Oliver Sacks. I gleaned some information from them, but they were all rather disappointing. Then after reading The Power of Habit and The Philosopher’s Diet and most of Simple and Direct (which I will get back to) my reading list kind of exploded: Julia Kristeva, Roman Jacobson, James Baldwin, more Richard Watson, James Hillman, a thing on Sufism, Harvard minister Peter J. Gomes, and a couple more on gratitude. All of it has been feeding me, but I am getting kind of lost and unfocused. I need to slow down, back off, and just read one of these until I am done and then go to the next. I also need to write a little bit here to remind myself where I was hoping to go.
All this madness in my method is predictable and illustrates the issues that my gut (and maybe my brain) tells me I need to confront. Retirement for me never meant and does not mean settling down, basking in my accomplishments, and enjoying being Lyman. Maybe that is what I wish it would mean, but it doesn’t. Even at sixty-four, I don’t really know who this Lyman is that I should enjoy being.
All my life, I have never felt that I was really who I really am. I have been, at various moments, a new age-y poet, a straight administrator, a man of letters, a devout, a stoic, the dude, a classicist, a post-modern). This is why Watson’s book on Descartes was important for me as one of my starting points. It is, in some ways, where Descartes starts also (although I think his issue was not “Who am I?” or "Which one am I?" but “Am I?”)
There are two ways I can think about how I think about myself and about my inability to be happy with who I see myself as being. Do you see how many layers I am shifting through here? To simplify: On the one hand, I look at my life and think I have lived a B+ life. I have been a pretty good teacher, a pretty good poet and writer, a pretty good swimmer and road biker, a pretty good administrator, a pretty good friend, a pretty good husband, and a pretty good father. I have not been great, or excellent, at any of it. Many people are much much better at all those things than I am. On the other hand, I understand that I have some sort of broken internal mechanism—something people might categorize as “low self-esteem”—that makes it impossible for me accurately to assess any of this. This issue is nothing new. I have been thinking this way for decades. I have tried to shake it to no avail. On a third hand, I feel as if I can intuit an intellectual/emotional promised land that I am ready to cross over into. On a fourth hand, I recognize that none of this matters because with three sons I have accomplished my one biological imperative and continued the species. Everything else is vanity.
My malaise is the reason I have taken on the study of gratitude. Instead of interrogating my past selves, I can decide to appreciate the present. You see, I am not going to be bitter that Bill Merwin and I are not best buds, trading first drafts of poems. I will not be angry that I did not find a way to become a college president, to write a national book award novel, or to be named Teacher of the Year. Maybe I didn’t have the smarts or talent, but I know I just did not have the energy or the focus to excel on those levels. Instead, I ate a bunch of salty carbs, watched too much television, and indulged in too much navel gazing. In short, I coped. I survived.
At some point in my reflections on this blog, I will get to James Hillman and his book on aging, The Force of Character and the Lasting Life, but I want to lay down a marker here—I do not want to be another Angry Old White Man. We have so many of those nowadays. I don’t want to be the sullen asshole that the wife, children, and grandchildren have to accommodate. And, given the fact that I have agency, if “I think: therefore, I am,” then it damn sure matters what I think and how I think.
So we have to be really observant here. I must think about what I think about. My friend and teacher Dan Jones had some bumper stickers that he passed out that said “Don’t believe everything you think.” Sticking with Descartes, let’s say I have a stimulation from somewhere—senses, outside people and authorities, parents, bosses, and ex-wives, or just a random idea floating in my head, an emotional sore I must poke—and all of a sudden I begin thinking the world has displayed some sort of cruelty toward me. I shout at the television, say something hurtful to my wife, refuse to talk to a friend who will disagree with me. I know what I think, god damn it, and I am not changing my mind; I am showing them!
A lot of the thoughts that float through our heads is just utter bullshit and does nothing but fortress our already isolated egos. We should remember that we don’t have to believe these thoughts. We have them and we can let them go. Then we can conjure and hold on to more helpful thoughts, thoughts that can help us become the old men and women that we want to be.
And for me, all this leads, I think, to a study of what Christian and Classical scholars called Virtues. Very old-fashioned stuff. But it is stuff that I have been thinking about my entire life, while I was busy not being my full self. I think my full self, or calling upon the Existentialists, “my authentic self,” is a much simpler person than I have tried to be.
Anyway, that’s what I say right now about the direction I want to go.