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By Root 600 0

gifts of language and communication, she said, and with them a responsibility to use them to benefit others, to bring darkness to light, to illuminate circumstances that otherwise might be left hidden, unnoticed, and unexplained. (Whether or not I believe in the art, astrologers are frighteningly accurate when they read my chart; the last one took one look and whistled, “Wow, you have trouble staying in relationships, don’t you?”) Taking inventory, I accomplish my purpose occasionally, recently by writing about women in Naples, Nicaragua, and Rwanda and sometimes by describing the challenges of my personal life to benefit others working their way through similar circumstances—there’s no way I’d reveal myself otherwise; I’m too shy. But that purpose gets muddled with my personal issues and campaigns and often detoured when I need to take on work I don’t care about to pay my rent.

Purpose is important to keep in mind, especially at midlife, when it’s so easy to get mired in routine, when checking e-mail, day to day, seems to take precedence over the big projects and the big picture. My mother was struggling to find purpose when she was in her forties, breaking beyond the social expectation to raise children and moving toward making a broader social contribution. So was Maya after her divorce. Both succeeded brilliantly (though neither had to make her own living). Martha found her sense of purpose after she was diagnosed with her progressively debilitating disease, her husband left her, and she considered suicide; she decided she needed first to live for her daughter and then to help other people figure out how to turn seemingly insurmountable difficulties in their lives into opportunities.

After we’ve scribbled down our purpose, Martha asks us to write a few goals that will support that larger life purpose and make commitments to stick to them, i.e., spending more time writing and researching good stories. The results in our lives, she says, reveal what we’re committed to. This makes uncomfortable sense to me: if I’d absolutely wanted children, I would have had them; when I really want to go to Italy, magically I find a way to get there. If being well off were important to me, I could’ve gone into business or law school or married one of the wealthy men who’ve crossed my path. I could have gotten married and settled down and had the companionship and stability I’ve been seeking, but I guess I didn’t really want it that badly, not if it interfered with my bigger interest in traveling and writing. Still, I’ve spent the past five years with an ongoing writer’s block, as if I’ve needed to settle some internal issues before I could turn my attention back out to the world.

If we want to change the results in our lives, Martha says, we have to change the beliefs that have led us to take specific actions and behaviors. Thinking it’s impossible to be both independent and settle down means I have no partner, saying I can’t afford a house means I have no permanent home; if I turned those assumptions around, things could turn out differently. Maybe.

I’m not sure how much I believe in this notion of manifesting your reality. At a certain point it can start sounding very New Age, like seminar leaders who convince you to spend your last thousand dollars learning about abundance. But Martha is more practical, and everything she says makes a certain amount of sense. Yet I can’t get beyond agreeing intellectually with what she’s writing on the flip charts to feeling and believing what she’s putting forth. Nor can I get past the thought that sometimes shit happens, through no fault of your own.

Then Martha brings up the notion of accountability. We are all at some level accountable for the events that happen in our lives, she says. We play a role and need to acknowledge that role in order to see how our participation affects how things end up. It’s only when we see how our actions have everything to do with the results in our lives that we can start to change them.

Though this makes a certain amount of sense, I can’t help thinking it’s