As I approach my 30th college reunion, this morning I shall speak on my generation's continuing preoccupation: adolescence.
In his prologue to the novel Damien, Hermann Hesse says that our individual lives constitute a story. Each of our stories, unique and remarkable, happen once, never again. Of his own life, Hesse writes, "My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; [my story] has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams-like the lives of all who stop deceiving themselves."
In the 1960s, Hesse was acclaimed by a generation who greeted his writings with quasi-worshipful enthusiasm. He was appealing because he was an "adolescent" author, one who dedicated his novels to the angst of self-discovery. With Nietzschean flourish, he pitched to his audience, I among them, wonderful images of climbing to the mountaintop and standing alone, naked in the storm, defiant against the fates.
Shortly after Hesse became my all-time favorite author, I concluded that I would die before the age of twenty-five. My father had cancer when he was twenty-five. Given three months to live, he staged a remarkable recovery and then went on to serve for twenty-four years in the U. S. Senate. By cultivating this death fantasy, I may have been substituting myself as a sacrifice due to the Gods in exchange for his life. More likely, I subconsciously determined that the best way to avoid competing with my very successful father was to check out before I had a chance to fail.
Knowing that I would die before the age of twenty-five had distinct advantages. Untrammeled by the responsibilities of growing up, I could skip class whenever I wished and devote my brief life to the pleasures of marijuana and the writing of incomprehensible poetry. I had only one goal: to seize and exaggerate every opportunity for pain and joy. By the way, they were wonderful years. I wouldn't turn them back for anything.
If we are lucky enough to enjoy and struggle through life's stages- infancy, youth, adolescence, young adulthood, maturity, old age-we get many opportunities to discover who we are. Not that this is even possible.
In fact, the search for individual identity is far more promising in concept than it is in actuality. Most answers in response to the question "Who am I?" load the coffers of our understanding with fool's gold. This is because "Who am I?" is an adolescent question.
Adolescence is not a bad thing, by the way, it consists in breaking free. Adolescents jump from goal to goal, responding to this stimulus or that, embracing one idea and then another. Adolescents are "indiscriminate evaluators." Over time, we winnow our experiments into more sustained endeavors-often from many sexual relationships to one dedicated relationship, from many vocational possibilities to a single job, from quicksilver intellectual passions to a more sustained set of values about the world and our place in it. At the end of this process, and for very good reason, ideally we will ask "How am I doing?" and "How can I do it better?" rather than waste time pondering who we are.
During my own adolescence, my father once told me that a bumblebee is biggest when first hatched. This may be true of bumblebees, but I certainly didn't feel that big. My father forgot that he was still far bigger, as all parents are. Undeniably, to discover sex and practice freedom, to break out of orbit and explore the world on one's own, is a heady thing. As long as it is age appropriate, there is nothing wrong with adolescence. Leash the passion of adolescence to the experience of adulthood, and we might infuse practicality with excitement while tempering excess by prudence. Exuberant, well-grounded people manage to do this. Most of us err by curbing adventure or, conversely, by failing to grow up.
It is useful to remember that, in harder times, adolescence barely existed. People often began working during childhood, tended to marry early, (assuming the mantle of adulthood without enjoying the pleasures and experiencing the pain of untrammeled youth) and then died in what passes today as early middle age. Those who profess nostalgia for a simpler age might contemplate this. Things may have gone to hell lately-each succeeding generation has thought so since the beginning of time-but today's hell is far preferable to yesterday's imagined heaven. We forget how short the lifespan was before this century. Some two millennia ago, meeting death at the age of thirty-three, both Alexander the Great and Jesus beat the odds. In the United States, at the turn of the last century, life expectancy was forty-seven.
Born into a less demanding world, my friends and I extended our adolescence late into our twenties, sometimes well beyond. The baby boomer generation knows more about adolescence than any generation in history, because we had the opportunity to prolong our adolescence further into adulthood than any previous generation. Bumblebees stay big longer today than they once did. Questions like, "Who am I?" can preoccupy us for years.
If from late childhood, I had to get up at five in the morning and work without ceasing until dark simply to survive, I'd consider supper and a beer to be a bargain. In this light questions like "Who am I?" and "What does life mean?" are a luxury. People may have asked them since the beginning of time, but today we have more time to ponder them. If seducing from our lives an extended measure of adolescent angst, the luxury to ponder ultimate questions is not a bad thing. On the other hand, since, by its very nature, adolescence is marked by self-absorption, our answers to these questions may be further from the mark than were those of our less privileged ancestors.
I interrupt this critique of adolescence be sharing a story of my own. To aid my search for meaning, thirty years ago, while interning at Stanford University's Memorial Church, I followed a strict ascetic regimen. I went to bed at one, awoke at five and spent each morning drinking Lapsang souchong tea and reading Greek philosophy. Every afternoon I served as guru and guide to a few ragtag disciples. Evenings I listened to Mahler and read Milton, which, together with the Viet nam War, were the primary sources for my budding eschatological vision.
Should you doubt that I was taking my life too seriously, for a week or two in the late spring of that year, I took off my glasses when walking around campus, so as not to lust after gorgeous half-dressed women.
Since I am almost blind, this plan proved impractical. I lapsed and returned to lust. But I maintained my other disciplines. My goal was to learn Latin and Greek and to read all of Western philosophy in two years. What better way to discover the truth! I cut off all my hair, grew a foot-long beard, lost thirty pounds, made it to the Stoics and collapsed. Positive that I'd contracted consumption or some equally romantic nineteenth-century disease, I went to the university health service. My doctor was not impressed. She said that I had been behaving like an idiot. There was absolutely nothing wrong with me that a little more sleep and a little less tea wouldn't cure. She told me that she never wanted to see me again. I never wanted to see her again either, so I abandoned my quest for perfection.
Recently, my Stanford boss Wayne Rood, told me, "When you were on your ascent of the mystical mountain, I considered firing you because you weren't doing your job, forcing the rest of us to cover your work in addition to doing ours." Even had I recognized the impact of my search for meaning on other people's lives, my then overweening sense of self-importance might have led me to take offense at his concerns. I understand them now. When we follow our own bliss at the expense if interpersonal responsibilities, we must measure personal gains in one project against shared losses in others. This is not a zero sum game. When duty is sacrificed on the alter of self-absorption, even the worshipper loses.
At lease my adolescent behavior had the charm of being age-appropriate. Such antics are less appealing when the search for "self" in adulthood leads the seeker into the thicket of self absorption. Even as adolescents need to become "themselves" to gain autonomy, adults discover meaning by connecting. As long as we confuse the search for meaning with the search for selfhood, we are wanderers in the woods.
Inexorably, such a search leads to narcissism. You surely know the story of Narcissus, who refused to love others and was therefore condemned to love no one but himself. In one version of this ancient myth, Narcisis wasted away longing after his own reflection, mirrored in a still, deep pool, in another, he leaned over to embrace it, fell in, and drowned. In both tellings this picturesque Greek legend warns against the dangers of self-love.
Drawing on personal experience and insights from my counseling, I know now that narcissism is more than self-love. Since, by definition, narcissism reflects unhealthy self-absorption, the narcissistic danger most of us face springs not from self-love but from self-doubt, even from self-hatred. Suicide is a narcissistic act. People become so completely absorbed in their troubles that the only way they can imagine solving them is to paint themselves out of their own self-portrait. We are far more likely to be absorbed by negative self-images than positive ones.
"What will he think of me?"
"How do I look?"
"If I speak, will I say something stupid?"
And then, an hour later:
"He must have thought I was an idiot."
"God, I looked terrible."
"How could I have said such a stupid thing."
This is narcissism in its most familiar form.
As long as we perceive ourselves as a fixed self or identity rather than as a consortium of personae that take turns appearing on our stage, we will lapse into narcissism. We will think too highly or too lowly of ourselves. Both misperceptions throw us out of balance. If each of us is made up of an amalgam of selves, they are also composed-not perfectly but tellingly -by memory. We remember-literally "put back together"-who we are. So, if one of your selves misbehaves, don't overreact. Just call for reinforcements.
You may have seen this article in the paper. A Wisconsin psychiatrist convinced a patient she had 120 separate personalities-including those of a duck and the devil-and then charged her for group therapy." Happily, most of us are less interesting than this patient, and most therapists less creative in their billing. But when it comes to past lives, even multiple lives, we don't have to trace our lineage back to Cleopatra's court to encounter a full array of predecessors.
Half hidden here is a theological point, the point I wish to leave you with. None of us is an individual pure and simple. We each are a nexus of relationships and roles. By the same token, our bodies are a colony of cells and organs, with every part, unbeknownst to the others, stamped with the same DNA. Perhaps the living system on this planet, both the human ecosystem and the whole shebang, is also a collaborative, if not always mutually cooperative whole, each part intimately related to the others, shaped and changed in relationship. "One body, many members", as St. Paul put it. Together we constitute an interdependent web of being. Perhaps the most capacious sense, from sagebrush to sage, these multifaceted colonies and systems are related in a way that neither they nor we are conscious of, each living part and living system marked, perhaps, by the DNA of God.
In more practical terms, no $10 million house has as much intrinsic value as a barn raising, where all the people in a community gather for a day and build a barn on one of their properties. At the end of the day, folks don't go home and feel diminished because one of their neighbors' barns is now bigger or newer than their own. They go home and feel good about the ways their community has been enhanced, and about the part they played. When neighbors get together to raise a barn (or more often these days through Habitat for Humanity or the Enterprise Foundation to raise a house, or even here at All Souls to balance our budget), they don't save the world. All they do is help their neighbors. But the meal at the end of the day or celebration at year's end is far more festive and satisfying than that of a billionaire who will never have enough. As John Ruskin wrote, "The ultimate reward for human toil and human generosity is not what we get for it, but what we become by it."
That's all I have to say this morning this morning. The key to identity is not selfhood but integration, the question "How am I doing (or connecting)?" speaks volumes more than "Who am I?" even with respect to who we are. When we integrate our values, projects, and relationships, our lives cohere.
The great French impressionist Cezanne said that "We live in a rainbow of chaos." So long as the rainbow is in place-a trajectory from who we are to whom we are striving to become-the order in its arc and pattern of its colors will temper the chaos around us. When we temper the chaos around us, we begin to grow up. Copyright AllSouls, 1999.