Passages

Tomorrow is my last day as a full time teacher.  Next Fall I will begin transitioning to the last stage of my professional life. As much as I am looking forward to being a part-time teacher (three classes of AP Government), I must admit to a little anxiety about the impending closure of a major part of my life.  I would think that for most Americans life goes by in three predictable stages.  The first stage, which often seems like the longest, is the nurturing stage.  In fact, this is most often the briefest part of our life-journey.  It seems to be much longer in duration as it is the time in our lives where our deepest emotional imprinting takes place.  The nurturing stage is dominated by parental and educational mentoring.  We are, in effect, being molded for the next part of our journey, the professional stage.  Most important in the nurturing stage is our successful assimilation of a set of personal values along with the accumulation of a body of knowledge that qualifies us for certain opportunities in the second phase of our lives.  However, it is in the nurturing phase that many of us discover the absolute joy of experimentation and play.  For the rest of our lives, most of us will long to revisit those wonderful parts of our formative years.  Some of us, unfortunately, will be so drawn to those magical times that we will never fully commit to the next phase of our lives.  Thomas Wolfe writes about this in his epic tome, Look Homeward Angel, as does Pat Conroy in The Prince of Tides. It seems to me that the great allure of this first phase of our lives is not so much the pleasures of first discoveries, but rather it is the complete absence of any responsibilities for our actions.

For my peers and I, phase two began when we completed our formal educations and embarked on the lengthiest part of our respective journeys, our professional lives. This phase is often mislabeled the "adult" portion of our lives.  I say mislabeled because for most of us there is a transitional period where we are post-adolescents, rather than the fully mature beings we will discover during this, our longest phase.  Perhaps it is in the post-adolescent phase where we confront the greatest dangers of our lives.  For it is here that we continue to experiment and take playful risks, as if we were still our irresponsible first stage selves. But in this stage we find that the consequences of our actions and missteps, can have serious, if not devastating consequences. That which used to be passed off as youthful exuberance is now condemned as conduct unbecoming of an adult.  For most of us, it is here that we set aside our childish ways, and become that which we swore we would never be, facsimile copies of those who nurtured us during phase one.  For sure, none of us ever becomes an actual clone of any one of our mentors, but we become a unique amalgam of all of them, albeit in unequal proportions.

This professional phase is often referred to as our "settling down" period.  Perhaps settling-in would be a better way to put things.  Most of us find and take life partners during this phase, if for no other reason than phase two is so much more difficult than all that preceded it, most of us need someone to share the burdens and responsibilities of an independent life.  If we are lucky, as I have been, we find a partner who completes us and a life's work that sustains us. We also find that much of what seemed to be so important during phase one mattered very little, if at all.  For it is in phase two that we truly make our mark within our various communities.  Further, we discover that the formal years of our educational lives count for very little in comparison with the educational experiences of a life in full.  We come to realize that the absolutes we learned as children inevitably give way to the ambiguities and doubts of the truly enlightened.

Most of us spend upwards of forty to fifty years in this phase of our lives. Looking back, many of us see that this professional phase was divided into two distinct parts. The first, and longest part is our ambition phase.  Here we spend most of our time and energy trying to build an idealized version of what we believe to be a successful life.  Alas, for so many this quest for achievement takes up the lion's share of our professional phase.  I say alas, because so much of our remaining youthful energy is wasted trying to attain things we seldom really need.  All too often, this quest for achievement is driven by a failure to disconnect from our nurturing period.  Seeking the psychological approval of mentors, many of whom are long gone, we are driven by demons who can never be satisfied.  Too many unfulfilled lives are the result of unfinished childhoods, but unlike our earliest years, that which is broken in phase two often remains broken forever.

The lucky among the phase two travelers find that early ambitions are no substitute for the satisfaction of finding our true place among our adult peers.  Some time fairly early in phase two we begin to know, perhaps instinctively, wherein lies our true calling.  Be it humble or exalted, that calling becomes a perfect fit and carries us comfortably to the final stage.  Unfortunately, far too many of us reject this knowledge, and continue to opt for choices which might have pleased some who mentored us, but offer no sense of peace and resolution most ofus have been seeking.  But then, without these disfunctional life choices, what would psychiatrists do for a living?  Some years ago the Chicago-based social commentator, Studs Terkel, wrote a book called Working. In it, Terkel interviewd Americans, average and famous about the career choices they made and the consequences of those choices.  He concluded that somewhere in the neighborhood of eighty-five percent of us are miserable in our jobs. Having commuted for the entirity of my working life, I think he was wrong.  From the looks on the faces of of my fellow commuters, I think Terkel was overly optimistic.  Whatever the true ratio, I am glad to say that I found myself in the smaller group.

Finally, we enter the last phase.  Most people refer to this as "retirement," but I prefer to cll it something else. For me, this will be my reflective phase.  No longer burdened with work-a-day activities, I will be able to reflect upon all that I have seen and all that I have done. I do not dread this period in my life, but enthusiastically look forward to it.  For as my physical skills continue to decline, I find that my mental skills are are becoming more sharply robust.  I know that I am not smarter than I was in my youth, but I am indeed wiser.  I do howver have to work very hard to avoid an affliction that has become the curse of those in the reflective phase, chronic cynicism.  The closer one gets to the end of one's life journey the more one may be disappointed in the fact that all things did not work out.  It takes a great deal of effort to avoid adult-onset anger and bitterness as the reality of one's finite existence becomes all to clear.  But what choice do we have?  Everyone ends the journey with a rucksack full of disappointments, but not everyone wears them around their neck as did the hapless seaman in Coleridge's The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. Instead, this is the time where intellect is finally free of physical distraction and the possibility of some degree of real enlightenment becomes attainable. 

So barring some unforseen physicial anomole, I welcome this phase in my life with a warm enthusiasm.  I thank eveyone who crossed my path along the way, even if I cannot remember all of you.  For without all of you, I would not be me.