Composing a Further Life

subject to subject, suddenly becoming aware of parallels, moments of seeing things in new ways and moments of recognition, responding with “Yes, and …,” whether the juxtaposition is one of expertise or generation or culture, and even when the juxtaposition is one of different faiths.
    It may be that the word
wisdom
refers not so much to what one knows but to a quality of listening, both internal and interpersonal. In other words, the willingness to learn and modify earlier learning is itself a component of wisdom, and the word refers to a process rather than a possession. What then would
active wisdom
mean? The ability and willingness to contribute to society by putting a lifetime pattern of experience and reflection to work—often, above all, by listening.
    We do what we do and we learn what we learn and each of us has done some teaching. We would like to pass on what we have achieved, including the wisdom developed over years of experience. Few people die without leaving loose ends and uncompleted tasks that will wait for someone else to cope with them or take them up.
    Yet as I look at my notes, the question that strikes me is this: What would have been left undone if the men and women I interviewed had lived only the years they might have expected a century ago, when average life expectancy was under fifty? They would all have been potentially bright and creative people, I feel sure, but some of them—most of the women—would have had their potentials limited and undeveloped. Poverty and ethnicity would have limited others, who benefited from being born later. Even more striking is the difference that ten or twenty years after age fifty has made in these lives, whether you look at achievement or wisdom or contentment. In many of these lives there is a visible watershed as they move into Adulthood II, but the transition that it represents often occurred later than the time at which their ancestors would have been dead or incapacitated.
    Richard Goldsby and Barbara Osborne will make no more than a dent in understanding the immune system, but they will have contributed as scientists do, taking for granted that there will be more to learn, and they will have been part of developing the technology to produce needed supplies of human immunoglobulin as part of the battle against disease. When they met he was approaching forty, with two toxic and failed marriages behind him. Now in his seventies, he has had the happiness of his relationship with Barbara enriching every aspect of his life. He has had time to help his children establish themselves and has arrived at a warm and tolerant equanimity that seems to have been absent in his younger years.
    Ted Cross sold his business in 1980, at sixty-eight, devoting himself to eliminating bias from the American system of higher education and protecting bird populations from habitat destruction. Neither of these problems is resolved, but he will have encouraged dozens of concrete steps in those directions and made the need visible to others. He founded his journal at sixty-eight.
    Dan Jepson saw himself as “professionally dead” in 1973, but eventually found the contentment he had dreamed of in his life with Michael and the satisfaction he enjoys now in teaching music to autistic children. I imagine, although I cannot know, that without that his sense of frustration would have been acute and he might have died embittered.
    If Jane Fonda had died at the height of her antiwar activism, when she visited Hanoi in 1972, she would not have shifted from protest to positive advocacy and philanthropy or discovered an inner peace and a nourishing faith. She could not have written about her life as she did in her 2005 memoir and I doubt that she could have played the part she played on Broadway in 2009 in the play
33 Variations
, an aging woman in a wheelchair discovering the meaning of her life.
    So it goes. The early missteps remain, the tasks are uncompleted, perhaps necessarily so, yet each of these people and each of the others that I spoke to has grown and learned and deepened in the last decade. Some of us will leave behind scientific or artistic achievements, books written and organizations established, fortunes amassed or human suffering alleviated, but what we cannot fully pass on is what we have learned from experience and from reflecting on experience, because the living was necessary to the learning. All of us went in directions sufficiently different from our