Composing a Further Life

seeing both as parts of a single pattern rather than as antithetical alternatives. The modern disability movement and the legislation it led to in 1973 and 1990 were primarily concerned not with mandating support and benefits but with the possibility for interdependence; 1 the basic theme was the effort to increase the ability of people with disabilities to participate and to become contributing members of society. The larger society has the responsibility to offer not handouts but the context that makes participation possible.
    Similarly, as parents, we can find ways to make our children aware that they are contributing members of the household and that the chores they are asked to do are tokens of trust and are received with thanks. From their birth on, we depend on our children for the joy and meaning they give to life, even though we are paying the bills. We could do the same with our parents and grandparents. As people grow older, some of the ways they have contributed in the past may no longer be possible, but the challenge to society is not only to provide help and care where these are needed but also to offer the opportunity to contribute and care for others.
    What strikes me as I remember the story of that trip into Sinai is that the culture in which I had grown up had prepared me not only to avoid needing the help of others but to resent being helped. I do not think I am alone in that; I think it is a pervasive attitude in American society. Yet if I so dislike the idea of needing help, I may turn that negative attitude onto others in that position and dislike or despise those who need my help, offering it only reluctantly.
    This notion of standing on one’s own two feet and needing nothing from others resonates with American concepts of masculinity and with the mythology of pioneers, frontier scouts, and cowboys, but it is by no means limited to males. It is a style that works against mutuality and that risks encouraging taking rather than sharing, exploitation rather than cooperation. Yet most people’s lives do provide opportunities to learn to value and practice interdependence and mutuality in some relationships, experiences that could be extended to other contexts. If we have had caring parents or caregivers, without which we would not have survived, we carry with us from infancy the experience of trusting others to nurture and care for us.
    The cost of our emphasis on independence is high. It seems to me logically impossible, for instance, to build a sustainable environmental ethic on the myth of independence, just as it is hard to see the rejection of interdependence as compatible with any faith except the lonely cult of the self. We need to do more to give children the experience of both giving and receiving, teaching and learning, helping and being helped—and make sure to include some of each in our own lives from beginning to end. We need to practice accepting kindness as well as giving it and to avoid reacting to the offer of help as an insult.
    At every stage, we are talking about learning. At later stages of the life cycle, we are learning to deal with the new circumstances of an aging body and a changing social setting, and drawing on a lifetime of experiences for helpful precedents. Not everyone has a story as dramatic as my Sinai trek, but everyone has had experiences of depending on and learning from others. Reflection on those experiences often reveals a degree of mutuality that offers a precedent for interdependence. Although children may not notice it, parents do learn from their children and teachers from their students, and often very young children find themselves cheering or consoling their parents.
    Human life expectancy at birth in industrialized countries has increased by some thirty years since the beginning of the twentieth century. We are living in new territory, drawing the maps that will give it meaning. Older adults are healthy and active decades longer than they would have been in the past, reflecting on their lives in the effort to understand who they are in a newly emerging stage of life and discovering the wisdom they have to offer. Composing a further life involves thinking about the entire process of composing a life and the way in which early experience connects to later. It involves looking with new eyes at what has been lived so far and making choices that show the whole process in a new light and that offer a sense of completion and fulfillment. This book is a