Composing a Further Life

numbers for the first time affirmed that it could be changed. They looked at each other and recognized not only beauty and strength but the possibility of assertion. With the glory years of the civil rights movement behind us, and continuing frustrations and economic woes in the black community, we sometimes forget that children defied their parents and students their teachers, taking their lives in their hands to affirm a new vision of themselves and of a possible future.
    Then, with the beginning of new-wave feminism, women went through the same process, identifying the methodology as raising consciousness by group discussion, a term that Marx had used earlier to describe the shift in vision when exploited laborers recognize their exploitation. The disabilities movement and the gay rights movement required similar shifts in the way people looked at themselves as well as the way they looked at others.
    It is already possible to discern two such shifts that have taken place in the United States and other industrialized countries in the first decade of the twenty-first century, but it is not yet clear how the newly unfolding consciousness will play out.
    The first is environmental—the awareness that we have brought our planet to the threshold of profound climate change, mass extinction of species, and humanitarian disasters, and that these changes are being produced by ordinary behaviors we have come to take for granted. Whereas fifty years ago many women ceased to define their aspirations as a house in the suburbs, two children, and a dog, today men and women are examining the way their self-definitions are anchored in their driving habits, the symbolism of high-powered automobiles, and the consumption of material goods that we use to measure success. At a deeper level, the awareness of a common vulnerability and responsibility is still in the process of inspiring a spiritual awakening that goes back to the first photographs that allowed us to look at our planet as seen from the moon, new affirmations of the ancient intuition of unity.
    The other shift upon us is the result of increased life expectancy. The assumptions that people bring to their own lives are connected to their general expectations about the shape of lives, yet the shape of lives has changed. For most of human history, average life expectancy at birth was less than forty years, and the “threescore years and ten” of the ninetieth psalm was an aspiration rarely met, certainly not to be counted on. Today, with life expectancies in industrialized nations reaching and passing the biblical horizon, another change is indicated in the sense of self, one that is just beginning to reach consciousness. Who am I? and What do I want in my life? are very different questions when life is neither sweet and fleeting nor “nasty, brutish, and short,” in the words of Thomas Hobbes. Here, too, the meaning of success is in question as we try to understand the meaning of a “successful life.” Scientific and technological change have stimulated new possibilities and new spiritual search.
    Thomas Kuhn, who developed the concept of paradigm shifts in science, discussed the way in which anomalous data begin to undermine an accepted theory. 2 For me the first such datum came when an American colleague working as a teacher in Iran told me that she was retiring at sixty and returning to the United States to look after her mother. Her mother? I was still in my forties. It had never occurred to me that a woman of her age would still have a mother to look after and be planning her life around that obligation. Shortly after my father died in 1980, his widow, Lois, who is only a decade older than I am, decided to relocate temporarily in North Carolina, where she had grown up and her parents were growing old, to contribute to their care, a responsibility that lasted fifteen years, long enough for her to grow new roots.
    Our assumptions about the shape of lives and how long they last are necessarily changing. Over the years, I have watched families who had rallied around a deathbed when doctors said it was a matter of weeks struggling to sort out their responsibilities as weeks extended into months or years. And I have listened to friends, who had made choices for retirement as if it would last no longer than a few seasons, revising those plans as their healthy span extended and golf or fishing or travel proved unsatisfying.
    In 2002, Ellen Goodman, author and syndicated