Composing a Further Life

plan for the future, as well as the capacity to recognize and analyze sequences of cause and effect, a capacity that is amplified as knowledge is developed and passed on from generation to generation. 1 The invention of writing offered the possibility of time binding across millennia. Not only do human beings learn and teach but they do so across generations and across centuries.
    The accumulation of scientific knowledge and technological possibility, however, has created a process of accelerated change in which the challenge of keeping up from day to day has actually undermined our capacity for long-term thinking and vision even as it has increased the future costs of bad decisions taken in the present. Korzybski titled a famous book, published in 1921,
Manhood of Humanity.
2 I might have titled this one
The Second Adulthood of Humankind: adulthood
because females as well as males mature and continue to mature, often becoming less contrastively gendered with age; human
kind
—our kind—as a reminder that we are a species of mammal among other species, interdependent members of the planetary biosphere. Purposiveness, one aspect of time binding, can lead to disaster when narrowly focused and combined with high technology. Protection from the negative results of conscious purpose depends on a broader focus, an attention to side effects and collateral damage, and an awareness of the way effects circle back on causes, either for self-correction or for acceleration to disaster. 3
    As individuals, we live long lives compared to other mammals, and those lives are getting even longer, so that later adulthood is a time rich with memories even as it is shadowed by the fear of memory loss. Much happens in the course of any lifetime, and contemporary lifetimes are lived in the context of rapid social and cultural change. Yet wisdom is not simply an accumulation of information or experiences; it is the fruit of continuing reflection on encounters over time, a skill at drawing connections and finding similarities, looking for underlying patterns. It may be helpful to think of wisdom as a process rather than a possession, just as the strengths of several of the life stages—hope, love, care—reflect verbs as well as nouns. The bodily modalities of infancy that interested Erikson to begin with are verbs: taking in, holding on, moving, intruding. One of the weaknesses of English as a language of thought is our tendency to reify, to turn actions and abstractions into things. Perhaps all the basic strengths Erikson described should be rephrased as verbs.
    One of Jane Fonda’s first questions to me was about what changes and what does not: “You wrote, I think this was in
Composing a Life
, ‘If your opinions and commitments appear to change from year to year or decade to decade, what are the more abstract underlying convictions that have held steady, that might never have become visible without the surface variation?’ 4 That really struck me, and I wonder, could you give some examples of how the abstract underlying convictions can be made more apparent because of surface variation?”
    To answer this question, I used an example that my father often gave in discussing acquired and inherited characteristics: 5 “A tightrope walker traditionally carries a thin bamboo pole, so very small variations in angle will restore his balance on the high wire—like the small adjustments in steering when you’re riding a bike. Now, if you take that bamboo and freeze its position, so it ceases to be flexible, he will fall off the wire. That’s why you can’t inherit acquired characteristics. You have to have a range of possible adaptation, within which you are able to change, in order to stay alive when the environment changes or to correct for errors that might drive you off course. The variations preserve the underlying constancy.
    “I’ve done workshops a couple of times for groups of Catholic nuns, and this is the kind of question they faced with all the reform that was started by Pope John XXIII. Here were all these women who had gone into convents with very specific ideas of what nuns did and what they wore. They had set routines, and the rules spelled it all out, so that they knew what they were committing themselves to, and all of a sudden that was being changed. The habits that nuns used to wear started out as modest, clean, unpretentious versions of what women wore when the orders were founded. And they got frozen, which