What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [114]
Robertson Davies, “The Essential Jung”1
14
Shedding the Skins
of Childhood
WHEN DOES TIME stop for you? Does it happen when you are making love, playing with your children, speaking at a meeting, looking at a masterpiece, or when you yourself are painting? Where are you truly at home—on a golf course in Maui, reading in your study, planting delphiniums, at a Springsteen concert, serving coffee in a shelter for the homeless?
These questions are not trivial. You must ask them and listen to your own answers. For they are pivotal in a transition that many of you are now making: the transition from the first season to the second season of your life.
There are, I believe, only two great seasons in life: the season of expansion and the season of contraction. This chapter is about these two seasons. The season of expansion begins at birth. Your overriding task in this season is to discover the demands of the world as you find it and to fit yourself to those demands: schooling, finding a mate, having children, embracing the values of your place and time, embarking on your life’s work, and, if you are lucky, mastering it. Evolution has ensured that this will be an extrinsic season, your time for learning what is expected of you and then doing what is mandated from the outside.
I suspect that the average reader of this book is between the ages of thirty and forty-five. You, average reader, are now coming into “the height of your powers.” You are roughly halfway through life. You are at the time when the first season ends and the second season begins.
In the second season, your life will be defined not so much by the outside world as by certain realities that have been coalescing inside you. Your task during the season of contraction centers around what you learned during the season of expansion. You discovered then the activities, objects, and people you love, things that were not means to any end but ends in themselves. When you sensed them and suspected what they meant, you probably postponed pursuing them. Their song has become more insistent lately. The second season allows you to postpone no longer. You will rearrange your life to fit what you have discovered you are. From now until very late in life, when so many of your options will narrow, you will pursue what your inner world demands.
What drives the transition from one season to the next can be—but rarely is—the sense of completion that comes from total success. Sometimes it is “topping out”—going as high as you can or want to. It can be your children grown to independence. But completions need not be the motive force: Failure, frustration, or sheer boredom can be marvelously productive in thrusting you from one stage to the next. Either way, the upheaval comes. You slowly and subtly stop doing what you used to do, stop being what you used to be, stop salivating to the old stimuli: You find an excuse to miss a party so that you can sit home in front of a fire with your spouse; you start wearing sneakers to work; you stop going to movies with subtitles; you let your New Yorker subscription lapse; you go to church for the first time since childhood. You become less and less what others expect.
Responding at last to what is intrinsic can mean self-indulgence, frivolity, or even emptiness. But it need not. An astonishingly large part of what is truly you coincides with old notions like duty, service, generosity, and nurturance: helping to build a community center—by both laying bricks and raising funds; running for office; guiding young people—your grandchildren—to maturity; giving back much of what you have so arduously won.
It is perilously easy to fail at making this transition—to allow what happened to you in the first season to cripple you in the second. But success is common, contrary to those who would have us believe