Composing a Further Life

for the sake of the next generation or to make a move to smaller quarters possible. Lightening up and giving stuff away is easier to do in the context of a move, with a deadline ahead by which time everything must be sorted and its future designated. But it isn’t easy to determine what will be of value to the next generation or to know how to divide familiar treasures among multiple children. Sorting gets harder as time goes on—it requires a sort of ruthless decisiveness, while indecision results in endless dithering. Five moves, they say, equal a fire. But those who haven’t moved may begin to need a fire.
    Each of these strategies involves questions about relationships and how to manage the partially reconstructed relationships of previous decades. My husband once commented to me that in his Armenian tradition, the main way adults form new friendships is with in-laws when their children marry, but American children tend to marry peers met at residential colleges or in start-up jobs, far from home. Grandparents who move to be close to grandchildren, even when they get separate housing, are giving up their networks and support systems, rather like young brides in patriarchal societies, who cease to be full members of their own families while becoming probationary newcomers among their husbands’ kin.
    Hank and Jane are happy with their housing arrangements and the circle of friends they have developed. With proprietary hospitality, they took me to see the sights around Tucson: an old Spanish mission, Saguaro National Park, the edges of the Sonoran Desert. As I tried to see the desert and the mountains with their eyes, I found my imagination shifting. I have always felt uncomfortable with the metaphors that compare God to a rock or a mountain: mighty, yes, as close to eternal as we can get, perhaps, but static and lifeless. So I have instead conjured up the ocean or the atmosphere that moves around our planet, supporting life and never still. Now I see the mountains and the desert differently—kaleidoscopic with light and life.

CHAPTER III
Liberation Time

    T HERE IS CHANGE ALL AROUND US , more rapid change from year to year than in any previous era. In some cases one can simply say of changed perceptions that they arise gradually from new experiences and cumulative learning, but in other cases one may feel a deeper change, a change of consciousness. The entire picture shifts, sometimes very rapidly. The world changes, becoming suddenly different. The idealism of one era may become the common sense or the nightmare of another, and common sense may be revealed as illusion.
    Some of these shifts have been global. The twentieth century saw the breakdown of colonialism around the world, the liberation of many nations, and the affirmations expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Some of these shifts were the results of technology creating new possibilities, others of new forms of expression or understanding.
    There was a change of consciousness for great numbers of Americans in the sixties and seventies, who suddenly saw the world around them and their place in it differently. This kind of change is comparable to a religious conversion that has a “before” and “after” quality, punctuating experience and infusing it with new and different meaning. It’s like falling in love or suddenly seeing one’s life in relation to a newborn child, perhaps like learning that one has only a short time to live. The Copernican revolution must have felt this way to those who understood it, as human beings were forced to see their position in the universe in a new way, or Freud’s demonstration of how much goes on in our minds that we are unaware of. For many people the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the potential threat of nuclear annihilation, altered their understanding of the human condition forever. To describe a shift in consciousness affecting an entire society or civilization, some writers have borrowed from the history of science the metaphor of a
paradigm shift.
1 In speaking of individuals, a more common term is
transformational learning
.
    The American social revolutions of the twentieth century were based in experiences of this kind that offered to group after group a new sense of possibility, with the potential to grow into a new sense of responsibility. First, African Americans took a new look at the way their situation had evolved since the Civil War, and large