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Composing a Further Life

Composing a Further Life

Titel: Composing a Further Life Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Mary Catherine Bateson
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do, I go through this internal conversation where I say, ‘No, it’s not something you’re comfortable with but you have to do it.’ ”
    “And you have to do it
well.”
    “Mm-hm, it’s true. It’s true. One of the things, you know, that everybody says you must do as you get older and you’re retired is think about volunteering, doing something that you love to do. Well, that’s a terrific idea and it goes to exactly your point. What is it that I really love to do, that may not be what I have done for the last five years or ten years, but I may have done twenty years ago? Whatever that was, reconnecting to that confidence that I felt, so I can really offer that and feel good about it. I don’t want to volunteer to do something that I feel half-assed about. I want to do something that other people will feel is meaningful and that I feel is meaningful. And some of that, yes, is a process of rediscovering and reconnecting.
    “I say, well, I really do like to read aloud, which I did when I was seven and I do now with my grandchildren when I see them. Maybe I can find an hour or two to do that, in a library, or recording for the blind, and I know I do that fairly well, that would give me pleasure, and it would be helpful. And it’s a simple thing, but figuring it out … I think probably over time the simple things or little private things are going to be the most fun. The natural things. But then sometimes I lurch into the fantasy that it’s got to be a
big
project; if it’s not a
big
project, it’s not worth doing. And if you think about it, it really doesn’t have to be a big project. It can just be something I put my mind to doing and I do it on a regular basis and somebody else gets something useful from it.”
    “This book I’m working on now,” I told Ruth, “is something I know how to do, and actually the way I’m doing it is a lot like
Composing a Life
, so I’m doing something that I know I can do and I can do at my own pace. That’s the ambivalence that I feel about Granny Voters. There’s a really good idea there, but there are aspects of implementing it that I don’t see myself doing, so I need to think of some context that will give me some infrastructure for it.”
    “You and I keep going around and around on that,” Ruth said. “One of the things I’ve never done formally is to drive toward a steady result in a campaign style, which is my fantasy of what is necessary for Granny Voters. That’s what I don’t know how to do. I know how to organize folks, you know how to organize folks, but the question is how to find those people and infect them with the bug.”
    “As I listen to you, Ruth, I think we haven’t been clear enough about the goals of Granny Voters. I mean we’re clear enough about the conceptual goal of longer-term thinking but not about what we actually want to have happen to bring it about.”
    “Yeah. We know the end goals, but what are the activities that will get you there? We have to figure out how to make them come alive.”
    When the Next Step Women met in Washington in the fall of 2009, many things had changed. Ruth’s son, Irv, now divorced and remarried, had completed a foreign service assignment in China and was about to leave for Indonesia. Ruth had been in Washington for the Obama inauguration and was planning to stay on after our meeting to spend time with her grandchildren, but they were less likely to visit in Seattle. We were all energized and excited by the possibilities of the new administration and the new urgency about climate change, but I had been unsuccessful in proposing a new push for senior activism around the election, and we met as a smaller group because of disagreements that had developed two years before. The future we were concerned about was coming closer at a rapid rate, and the question was still unanswered whether our species—or even this small group of friends—has the capacity to arrive at and act upon a consensus for the protection of the future.

CHAPTER IV
From Strength to Strength

    I T WOULD BE INTERESTING to trace here the entire history of cultural versions of the life cycle, each one elaborating on biological potentials and cues with culturally constructed rituals and expectations. It is enough, however, to say that every human society takes note of the recurrent patterns of maturation and development and weaves them into a shared system of meaning, one that represents fulfillment for at least some members

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