The Choice

There was once a hundred year old man. Everyone who met him marveled at his vitality and the vibrancy of his mind. He radiated joy and people wanted to be near him. When asked the secret of his long and happy life, he replied, “When I turned fifty, I was determined to find a way to stay youthful and young at heart, so I decided that every five years, I would study something new.” And so every five years, this man embraced a new activity and poured his energy into it, letting the joy of learning lead him in a new, surprising direction.

I don’t know what he chose to study, but let’s imagine what his trajectory might have been: fencing at 55, sailing at 60, Indonesian at 65. At 70, gourmet cooking. At 75, Shakespeare. At 80, a pair of knitting needles. It doesn’t really matter what he studied; what matters is that he started over again and again, and he never stopped learning.

I was intrigued by this man’s story; inspired that someone had embodied lifelong learning so completely. What an amazing man, I thought. What an amazing life he must have had! But then the wave of momentum that is my life crashed upon me, and I promptly forgot all about him.

Only I didn’t really forget him. Not completely. Because when I turned 55 last July, a confluence of circumstances led me to see two distinct paths stretched out before me. And to avoid the one I didn’t want to take, I decided to adopt this man’s strategy as a compass for my life.

Until I made that decision, my choice as an adult had been to do more of what I was already good at. I was a good writer, so I continued to write. I was a good communicator, so I kept communicating. I’d always been a transmitter of change and transformation, so I kept expanding my role as a teacher. There’s nothing wrong with any of these things. They’re wonderful, generative, creative things, and there are great rewards in going deeper and deeper into something you love.

But that wasn’t working for me anymore. I never created the time or space in my life to try anything new; I limited myself to well-worn paths worn into familiar grooves long ago. I didn’t have hobbies. I had drive. I had ambition. I had accomplishments. I had busy down pat. I had my share of successes—and some spectacular failures as well. And it’s not that I was risk aversive. But the risks I took were calculated. They were all in the same bailiwick. And because of that, my world was getting smaller.

Fear was starting to narrow the margins of my life. Repeatedly, I heard myself say things like, “I can’t do that.” “My brain doesn’t work like that anymore.” “I can’t remember anything.” “I’m not good at that. I’ve never been good at that.” Or, “That’s just not me.”

I had started to sound old.

10 Things I Know the Truth About: Part 2

A couple of months back, I gave my students assignment, "Write about 10 things you know the real truth about." Once we honed our list of subjects, we wrote wrote a piece that succinctly summarized what we knew about each of the ten topics--what we knew deeply about them.

Last month, I shared a couple of the subjects I'd put on my own list. Here's another: how to make peace with a mother you're estranged from.

This is a subject I know a lot about, mainly because I've successfully reconciled with (and have an excellent relationship with) my own mother, from whom I was estranged for seven years.

I got so interested in the topic of estranged relationships and how to mend them, that I wrote a whole book about it, I Thought We'd Never Speak Again: The Road from Estrangement to Reconciliation. Of the seven books I've written, it's my personal favorite, though it wasn't the most commercially successful.

If you have someone you're estranged from in your life, I suggest you check it out. It will help you find your own answers--without telling you what you should do or how you should do it.

I know how to make peace with a mother you are estranged from:

1. You have to become comfortable with the elephant in the room.
2. You have to learn to let go of things you cannot change about your mother.
3. Stop being surprised every single time she acts like herself. Rather than being offended or hurt, cultivate a sense of humor instead.
4. Widen your focus away from the things that drive you crazy and the things you think you can't tolerate until you can see that there is a much bigger field that the two of you are standing in.
5. Remember, you're not the only one stretching here. Chances are your mother will be making the same adaptations in relation to you.
6. You have to see your mother as more than just your mother--with all her strengths, liabilities and failings. You have to see her as a human being shaped and formed by her environment, a mother who was also a daughter and a granddaughter and a sister and a worker and a teenager and a young woman and now a grandmother, someone coping with aging and loss and the vicissitudes of her life.
7. You have to make your viewpoint so large that you both become part of the human family, a family much more powerful and encompassing and spacious than the narrow human family you were born into.
8. You have to give up being right.You have to give up proving your point.
9. You have to focus on the positive things between you, even if they are tiny and seemingly insignificant. If you both like to bake ruggelach, focus on that. If you both like to read the Sunday New York Times, focus on that. Build a connection based on the small things you share or the tiny things you can agree upon. From that tiny foundation, a new relationship can grow.

10 Things I Know the Real Truth About

I gave the assignment in class a couple of weeks ago to, "Write about 10 things you know the real truth about." Once we honed our lists (which was quite a process in and of itself), we wrote lists--or a paragraph that succinctly summarized what we knew about the topic at hand--what we knew deeply. I loved this exercise and wanted to share a couple of the topics I wrote about:

I know the truth about being a famous author:

2. When you are at your most famous, you will feel the most invisible and unseen and you will crave being around people who knew you before you became famous-in fact, you will prefer the company of those who could care less that you are famous and don’t take your PR seriously at all.

3. Once you have published a successful book, there will be immense pressure on you to publish another one and another and it is very hard not to crack under the pressure to repeat your genius. People will want you to repeat what you have done and if you want to do something different or take a risk, this will not be allowed because people will want you to keep doing that thing you are famous for.

4. If you make money with your books and you were just a scraping along kind of person before your unexpected success, you will suddenly be very different than all the people you’ve known and loved until that point and it can create some real problems when suddenly you don’t have to think about whether or not to fly to Hawaii to take scuba diving lessons and your best friend is still wondering how to pay the rent.

5. It can be very lonely at the top.

6. You are only as good as your last book. No one is interested in the development of your writing career; they are only interested in how you can influence their bottom line and once your famous period is passed, you will go back to being the same nobody you were before you became famous.

7. The good thing about being a famous author is that no one can ever take that amazing accomplishment away from you-especially if what you did really made a difference in people’s lives and wasn’t just a fluff piece that happened to catch the national fancy.

8. The real danger of being a famous author is that you can get caught in believing your own PR and forget that you shit just like everyone else. That's an occupational hazard and it can result in you becoming very obnoxious and unreal. Avoid that at all costs. Come home from your book tour where you stayed in fancy hotels and ate room service, where everyone  fawned all over you and asked for your signature, and ask your spouse to tell you to wash the damn dishes. It works like a charm every time.

The Liberating Failure of Learning Something New

I got this hair-brained idea last summer that I wanted to learn a language. It all started when I went to Paris with my daughter, who happily chattered her way through Paris cafes and department stores, through the Uzes market negotiating for AOC goat cheese and brightly colored napkins, ordering the bits of duck we cooked on a grill at our table outdoors in the plaza in front of our glorious, sun-drenched apartment. There she was, petite and lanky and gorgeous, perfectly dressed and coiffed in that casual but perfect teenage way she has, ordering le chocolat chaud and canard-being told everywhere what a great accent she had-while I couldn't even ask where the bathroom was.

One day in Paris, queued up to commune with the vast collection of human bones in the Catacombs, I was desperate for a bathroom, so I left Lizzy to hold our place in line while I tried to find one. I couldn't ask anyone, so I spent five desperate minutes trying to figure out how to open the door to a shuttered transit information shed, before I finally realized it wasn't a public toilet.

I was completely dependent on Lizzy, who, at 14, translated when it was something she wanted to do, and if she didn't-well...I hated that. Hated how vulnerable and isolated it made me feel. I hated that I had forgotten my dismal grasp of 7th grade French. All I remembered was bonjour and au revoir and Ou est la biblioteque? The only new phrase I mastered during our vacation in France was, "L'addition, si'l vous plais"-the check please.

"I should learn a language," I decided. I want to travel more as I move in to this next phase of my life. I know I used to suck at languages and I probably suck more now, what with chemo brain and all, but why not try it? It will at least exercise my atrophied brain. What have I got to lose? Besides my pride, my dignity, my self-esteem, and my former image of myself as a "smart cookie"-not much.

So when I got back to Santa Cruz, I actually did something about it. I contacted the language school downtown: Aux Trois Pommes. I think that means the three apples-and I signed up for a class. The first thing I had to do was decide between Spanish and French. At first, I thought I should study French since Lizzy speaks fluently. My reasoning went like this: "Well, we could talk French together over dinner. In the car on the way home from school. On walks to the beach." Not. Whatever was I thinking? She's a sophomore in high school and the last thing she wants to do is talk French with her pathetically incompetent mother, who can't remember anything and just doesn't have a clue.