Composing a Life

someone aggressively unwilling to share, you dream of being dismembered, cut up to meet competing demands. Children’s tantrums dissolve into sunshine, but the habits of exclusive self-interest are disheartening in highly educated adults. Still, when the combinations work, you can believe you have enriched the earth.
    There is a habit of mind that grows from this way of experiencing one’s own limits and potentials that may lead toward societal solutions. The fundamental problem of our society and our species today is to discover a way to flourish that will not be at the expense of some other community or of the biosphere, to replace competition with creative interdependence. At present, we are steadily depleting the planet of resources and biological diversity; the developed world thrives on the poverty of the south. We are in need of an understanding of global relationships that will be not only sustainable but also enriching; it must come to us as a positive challenge, a vision worth fulfilling, not a demand for retrenchment and austerity. This is of course what we do day by day when we refuse to accept the idea that we must reject one part of life to enhance another. Projecting a new vision is artistic; it’s a task each of us pursues in composing our lives. One can write songs about sharing; it is hard to write songs about limits.
    Solutions to problems often depend on how they are defined. If you look at unfolding lives, you immediately become aware of the processes of redefinition: shelters may come to be seen as constraining walls, interruptions are recognized as moments of fertilization, outrage becomes empowering and freeing. It is possible to look for pattern in seeming disorder and to propose a search for potential benefit in every problem. The strategies we follow are not strategies for victory but for survival and adaptation. Perhaps what we are learning today about the victims of homelessness will provide a clearer vision of the kind of support that every child or adult needs; perhaps celebrating diversity within the African diaspora will answer some of the questions about diversity in American society; perhaps a collection of broken beads can be joined in a necklace of elegance and beauty.
    The visions we construct will not be classic pioneer visions of struggle and self-reliance. Rather, they will involve an intricate elaboration of themes of complementarity—forms of mutual completion and enhancement and themes of recognition achieved through loving attention. All the forms of life we encounter—not only colleagues and neighbors, but other species, other cultures, the planet itself—are similar to us and similarly in need of nurture, but there is also a larger whole to which all belong. The health of that larger whole is essential to the health of the parts. Many women raised in male-dominated cultures have to struggle against the impulse to sacrifice their health for the health of the whole, to maintain complementarity without dependency. But many men raised in the same traditions have to struggle against pervasive imageries in which their own health or growth is a victory achieved at the expense of the other. We have perhaps a few years in which to combine these. The visions will be both like and unlike familiar religious visions: like, in that they involve the hesitation of reverence before acting to change, the attentive appreciation of the sacredness of what is; unlike, in that they are open. Instead of worshipping ancestors or deities conceived as parents, we must celebrate the mysterious sacredness of that which is still to be born.
    Meantime, the five women of this book continue in the microcosms of their lives, shaping our own lyric commentaries on the world around us. Each of us constructs a life that is her own central metaphor for thinking about the world. But of course these lives do not look like parables or allegories. Mostly, they look like ongoing improvisations, quite ordinary sequences of day-to-day events. They continue to unfold. Even as this book ends, the visions are still emerging, the five artists are still at work, as e.e. cummings says, “... placing carefully there a strange thing and a known thing here . . . and without breaking anything.” The compositions we create in these times of change are filled with interlocking messages of our commitments and decisions. Each one is a message of possibility.

* Heidi I. Hartmann, “The Family as the Locus of Gender,