Composing a Further Life

didn’t matter much for several centuries while change was gradual. But eventually, as styles of clothing changed, instead of conveying modesty, dedication, willingness to serve, the habits began to look grotesque and weird to people. Children were even frightened of nuns, or thought they didn’t have feet, things like that. The rules didn’t allow for other kinds of adaptation, so they snuffed out creativity and new learning. 6
    “The external symbols of the commitment the nuns had made changed in meaning because of the change in context, so it was time to ask, What is the message that’s supposed to be conveyed by what we wear or how we live or whether we live in community or can live in separate apartments? How, in a new context, can we communicate a commitment that remains unchanged, instead of inadvertently communicating something completely different? Many nuns were upset and had a profound sense of loss. They didn’t take the change as an invitation to reaffirm their basic commitment, because they mistook the externals for the commitment itself. This happened with liturgical reform also. Some people were really upset. The form of the service suddenly became different. Whoa! It was gone! It didn’t mean the same thing! You have to stop and think to see that maybe changing the form was getting it closer to the meaning it always had.
    “Those are two examples that I have in fairly developed forms. More personally,” I went on, “my husband and I have lived and worked in different countries, and each time I have had to ask myself who I am and what I can do to use my experience and skill and express my continuing commitments in a new way in a new context. This is a kind of translation. After all, just to say ‘good morning’ or ‘thank you’ to someone, I may have to switch from familiar to unfamiliar words. It seems to me that if you don’t have to deal with a change of context, you can skim along feeling that the specifics of a particular era, whether it’s how you dress or the rituals you use or where you show up for work in the morning, are what life is about, without asking what the details of my day-to-day life refer back to. When the context changes, you need to rediscover what it’s all about.”
    The tightrope walker analogy is a way of looking at evolutionary change, seeing that a change that seems adaptive in the short term might lead into a fatal cul-de-sac, as excessive size probably was for the dinosaurs. In the evolutionary context, the constancy that is preserved is survival. For human beings, we may want to consider individual survival as meaning something more than minimal brain activity in a vegetative state, looking instead for some surviving identity and connection to others. For human communities, the survival of value systems and ideas may seem more important than specific populations or customs. During the fifties, when we had air-raid drills at my school, crouching under our desks, and my father pointed out that this charade was an absurdity in a nuclear world, I asked him, Didn’t he think it was important for Americans to survive and win the next war? He said all he “could really hope for was the survival of ten thousand relatively untraumatized human beings, regardless of nationality or race, who could start again.” And yet the politicians were preparing for such a war as a way to defend the nation. Furthermore, the notion that nuclear weapons can be used for defense is one in which the technological means defeat the purpose.
    What does it mean to survive? This is really the basic issue that faces everyone in growing older, the issue of how to affirm what is essential to one’s identity in a context that includes both cultural changes and changes in one’s own physical being. How do I grow older and remain myself—or rather, how in growing older do I become more truly myself, and how is that expressed in what I do or say or contribute?
    I learned forty years ago to put my daughter to sleep on her tummy, but the changing context of knowledge now says that, to avoid crib death, infants should sleep on their backs—so my expression of love and care has been reinterpreted as a hazard. 7 Again and again, I find myself in situations where I know what “I” would typically do and find that, at seventy, I’d better do something different. My seven-year-old grandson wants to look over a fence to see a construction site, and the behavior that naturally expresses my