Composing a Life

nourishing breakfasts, of course, but the quality of the breakfast cereal is insufficient to explain how some people can work fifteen-hour days with increasing zest, while others stagger from one task to another. Once you notice that, you wonder why we have organized our society so that work that could be invigorating becomes depleting. This is as true of factory work as it is of housework. When women argue that going back to school or taking a job outside the home will not detract from their capacity to be homemakers, they are often proved right by infusions of vitality.
    The problem can easily be seen in relation to exercise. On the one hand, physical effort can be depleting, leading to fatigue and even exhaustion; on the other hand, regular exercise leads to the feeling of having more available, a more efficient metabolism and a more alert mind.
    Human sexuality operates by the same kind of double mathematics. We find arguments that sex can be subtractive and depleting, but there is evidence that sexuality is an important element in all creativity, perhaps in all productivity. Freud discovered the pervasiveness of sexuality in human life, beginning in infancy, and the waste and mental illness created by the repression or distortion of sexuality. But he betrayed his Victorian roots by tying his theory of creativity to sublimation, to the notion of creativity
instead of
sex. This idea is directly related to the metaphors from physics that underlie his psychology. If sexual “energy” is a finite quantity that is conserved like the energy of classical physics, then it may be dangerous to dam it up, but it could be redirected, say into building cathedrals, and it might be wasteful to squander it. If you believe in this strictly limited arithmetic, you will require cathedral architects to be celibate so they can focus their entire lives on the single task. This belief is likely to become part of a more general belief in specialization and narrow focus.
    The female life cycle, with its dramatic shifts in capacity, provides multiple metaphors for the arithmetic of vitality. Men don’t bear or suckle babies, but they do have to draw on physical reserves in many other ways, and they can use these metaphors to understand other aspects of their lives. When you think about stretching to meet a challenge or growing to the measure of a task, pregnancy is an extraordinary symbol of possibility, a reminder of the surprises in human potential. Then, when a woman gives birth, her body, which has been mobilized for the demands of pregnancy and delivery, shifts gears again for lactation. Women need to learn to nurse, as athletes need to learn to run farther and faster, or as couples need to learn to make love. Nursing mothers build up gradually to a shared rhythm in which mother and infant form a mutually regulating pair: as the infant grows and suckles longer and more strongly, the milk supply increases. It is the possibility of increase keeping pace with growth that makes wet-nursing possible. Logically, it is this possibility that allows mothers to combine nursing with other activities or to expand their capacities in other ways. Unfortunately, breast-feeding, partly because it can now apparently be easily replaced by bottle-feeding, is often subverted or undermined.
    At Amherst, I decided I had better learn some new techniques for handling the stress of the deanship, so I asked one of the coaches, Bob Williams, to help me get started running. I count that experience as one of the most valuable of the Amherst years, for many women of my generation slipped through school without effective physical challenges; stamina remains a problem for many of us. He taught me that I needed to start slowly, stretching and limbering unaccustomed muscles, since good intentions can collapse in the first week with sprains and charley horses. Once a rhythm is established, it needs to be built up gradually, so that the more you do the more you can do, but there is always the possibility of doing too much too soon. Susan Butcher has mastered the art of getting optimum performance from her sled dogs without wearing them down, so that with each day of the Iditarod they are stronger. This is the approach we need to bring to the sustainable use and care of fields and fisheries and forests.
    Experientially, the fact that the more you do the more you can do—up to some limit that most of us never test—shipwrecks easily. Without guidance and support,