Life is an ongoing expedition into the brambled tendrilled wilderness of ourselves, continually stymied by all we mistake for a final destination — success, superhuman strength, the love of another. Along the way, we keep confusing experiment and exploration. An experiment proves or disproves an existing theory; its payoff is data, fixed and binary. An exploration is a traversal of the unknown, of landscapes you didn’t even know existed, with all the courage and vulnerability and openness to experience that demands; its payoff is discovery — of unimagined wonders, of yourself in the face of the unimagined. Discovery, in its purest form, is nothing less than revelation.
On the pages of his posthumously published masterpiece The Book of Disquiet (public library), poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (June 13, 1888–November 30, 1935) considers the complex question of discovering yourself. He writes:
Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.
[…]
Everything is in us — all we need to do is look for it and know how to look.
It may be that we don’t know how to look because we are looking as tourists — passing visitors to the foreign parts of ourselves — rather than explorers. The spirit of exploration is something else altogether, requiring a total receptivity to experience — the mind uncaged from expectation and convention, the animal sensorium fully open to every channel of aliveness, the soul ready for the revelation of discovery.
Pessoa offers a brief, blazing set of instructions to himself for how to attain such revelatory receptivity:
To feel everything in every way; to be able to think with the emotions and feel with the mind; not to desire much except with the imagination; to suffer with haughtiness; to see clearly so as to write accurately; to know oneself through diplomacy and dissimulation; to become naturalized as a different person, with all the necessary documents; in short, to use all sensations but only on the inside, peeling them all down to God and then wrapping everything up again and putting it back in the shop window like the sales assistant I can see from here with the small tins of a new brand of shoe polish.
We spend our lives trying to see our own light, to catch its surprising refractions on the face of the world, to play in its waterfalling golden blue radiance until we are ready to lie down in the bright black of time as the stars go on spinning, their fractured hieroglyphics encoding the memory and mystery of being alive.
Sarah Williams — one of the five wonderful women in my intergenerational poetry group — offers a shimmering set of instructions for how to do that in her splendid poem “How to See the Milky Way,” read here by Rose Hanzlik — the youngest member of our constellation — to the sound of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” against a painting of the Milky Way by Étienne Trouvelot.
HOW TO SEE THE MILKY WAY by Sarah Williams
Travel far
from crowds. Leave
lit places that yellow the sky.
Bodies of water help.
Pick a cloudless night,
a new moon.
Find a place to rest your head,
perhaps on someone’s chest,
their heart keeping time.
Or float in still water
flecked with stars
rippling around you.
However you arrive
parallel to earth and sky,
settle your eyes in their soft sockets and wait.
Look up.
Disregard the march of satellites,
their plotted lines.
Linger here.
Drink speckled light
from billions of neighboring stars.
Some nights your life is like this.
Couple with “The Whole of It” by Hannah Fries — another of the five women in our poetry group — then revisit Ellen Bass’s lifeline of a poem “Any Common Desolation,” which has been an ongoing inspiration to all of us.
A self is a personal mythos — a story through which we sieve the complexity and condradictions of lived experience for coherence. The cruelest price of success — that affirmation of the self by the world — is the way it can ossifty the story of person, ensnare them into believing their own myth. In this regard, learning to live with your success can be as challenging as learning to live with your failure — both are continual acts of courage and resistance to the petrification of personhood into a selfing story, a refusal to measure your soul by the world’s estimation.
Rockwell Kent (June 21, 1882–March 13, 1971) labored at his singular paintings and prints in solitude, in penury, in obscurity for decades. When the New York art world declared him an overnight success, largely thanks to his transcendent account of nine months on a remote Alaskan island, he left the city and moved to a quiet farmstead uptate, then left the continent, returning to the austere solitudes of the Arctic to paint, write, and reflect on the meaning of it all. In a lovely passage from N by E (public library) — his altogether exquisite 1930 memoir of the year he spent in the far north, rife with wisdom on how to be more alive — he models that courage, recounting a thrift store encounter that stands as a scale model of the disorientation of success.
Fifteen years earlier, living in Newfoundland during WWI, Kent had adorned his doorway with a statue of a maiden he had found “weatherbeaten and neglected in the rubbish heap of a ship store,” which he had washed, sanded, painted, and bejeweled to restore her haunting beauty. When the time came for him to return to New York, he yearned to take her home, but could not afford the fees:
I offered what I could for her. But I was poor and it was little. So I left her there.
A decade passed. The gallery world awoke to the shimmering originality of his paintings and Kent became one of New York’s most celebrated artists. One day, he wandered into a thift store and there was his maiden, “hardly changed” — a ghost of the life that had changed so profoundly, yet in that moment Kent realized how hard he must fight to keep it from changing him, from turning him into a statue of himself. He recounts:
Out from among rare cabinets and chairs and clocks and porcelains, the frayed and mellowed chattels of decayed gentility, she stared — that sailor’s sweetheart — vacantly, as if the room, the city and the world were part of the wide sea and firmament that she was born to. And as I turned and ran to her, and sweet memories and almost love crowded and clamored in my brain and breast, as I reached out to touch her as I used to — suddenly I dared not. And I knew what changes time and affluence had wrought. And I reproached myself.
“Where did you find her?” I asked the salesman in a whisper.
“In Boston,” he whispered back.
So then — not even asking what her city price might be — I tiptoed out.
To be a true person is to be entirely oneself in every circumstance, with all the courage and vulnerability this requires. And yet because a person is a confederacy of parts often at odds and sometimes at war with each other, being true is not a pledge to be a paragon of cohesion, predictable and perfectly self-consistent — the impossibility of that is the price of our complex consciousness — but a promise to own every part of yourself, even those that challenge your preferred self-image and falsify the story you tell yourself about who you are.
There is a peace that comes from this, solid as bedrock and soft as owl down, which renders life truer and therefore more alive. Such authenticity of aliveness, such fidelity to the tessellated wholeness of your personhood, may be the crux of what we call “the good life.”
That is what the pioneering psychologist Carl R. Rogers (January 8, 1902–February 4, 1987) explores in a chapter of his 1961 classic On Becoming a Person (public library), anchored in his insistence that “the basic nature of the human being, when functioning freely, is constructive and trustworthy” — a bold defiance of the religious model of original sin and a cornerstone of the entire field of humanistic psychology that Rogers pioneered, lush with insight into the essence of personal growth and creativity.
Drawing on a lifetime of working with patients — the work of guiding people along the trajectory from suffering to flourishing — he writes:
The good life… is the process of movement in a direction which the human organism selects when it is inwardly free to move in any direction, and the general qualities of this selected direction appear to have a certain universality.
He identifies three pillars of this process:
In the first place, the process seems to involve an increasing openness to experience… the polar opposite of defensiveness. Defensiveness [is] the organism’s response to experiences which are perceived or anticipated as threatening, as incongruent with the individual’s existing picture of himself, or of himself in relationship to the world. These threatening experiences are temporarily rendered harmless by being distorted in awareness, or being denied to awareness. I quite literally cannot see, with accuracy, those experiences, feelings, reactions in myself which are significantly at variance with the picture of myself which I already possess.
The necessary illusions Oliver Sacks wrote of are a form of that defensiveness — they help us bear the disillusionments difficult to bear: that we are invulnerable, immortal, congruent with our self-image — and yet they render us captives of the dream of ourselves, unfree to live the reality of our own complexity. Rogers writes:
If a person could be fully open to his experience, however, every stimulus — whether originating within the organism or in the environment — would be freely relayed through the nervous system without being distorted by any defensive mechanism. There would be no need of the mechanism of “subception” whereby the organism is forewarned of any experience threatening to the self. On the contrary, whether the stimulus was the impact of a configuration of form, color, or sound in the environment on the sensory nerves, or a memory trace from the past, or a visceral sensation of fear or pleasure or disgust, the person would be “living” it, would have it completely available to awareness.
The reward of this willingness to be fully aware is profound self-trust:
The individual is becoming more able to listen to himself, to experience what is going on within himself. He is more open to his feelings of fear and discouragement and pain. He is also more open to his feelings of courage, and tenderness, and awe. He is free to live his feelings subjectively, as they exist in him, and also free to be aware of these feelings. He is more able fully to live the experiences of his organism rather than shutting them out of awareness.
Out of this “movement away from the pole of defensiveness toward the pole of openness to experience” arises the second element of the good life: “an increasing tendency to live fully in each moment” and discover the nature of experience in the process of living the experience rather than in your predictive models, which are only ever based on the past. When you are fully open to your experience, Rogers observes, each moment is entirely new — a “complex configuration of inner and outer stimuli” that has never before existed and will never again exist in that exact form, which means that who you will be in the next moment will also be entirely new and cannot be predicted by you or anyone else — that lovely freedom of breaking the template of yourself and the prison of your story. Rogers writes:
One way of expressing the fluidity which is present in such existential living is to say that the self and personality emerge from experience, rather than experience being translated or twisted to fit preconceived self-structure. It means that one becomes a participant in and an observer of the ongoing process of organismic experience, rather than being in control of it.
Such living in the moment means an absence of rigidity, of tight organization, of the imposition of structure on experience. It means instead a maximum of adaptability, a discovery of structure in experience, a flowing, changing organization of self and personality.
[…]
Most of us, on the other hand, bring a preformed structure and evaluation to our experience and never relinquish it, but cram and twist the experience to fit our preconceptions, annoyed at the fluid qualities which make it so unruly in fitting our carefully constructed pigeonholes.
By discovering experience in the process of living it, we arrive at the third element of the good life — a growing ability to trust ourselves to discover the right course of action in any situation. Most of us, Rogers observes, consciously or unconsciously rely on external guiding principles in navigating life — a code of conduct laid down by our culture, our parents, our peers, our own past choices. He writes:
The person who is fully open to his experience would have access to all of the available data in the situation, on which to base his behavior; the social demands, his own complex and possibly conflicting needs, his memories of similar situations, his perception of the uniqueness of this situation, etc., etc. The data would be very complex indeed. But he could permit his total organism, his consciousness participating, to consider each stimulus, need, and demand, its relative intensity and importance, and out of this complex weighing and balancing, discover that course of action which would come closest to satisfying all his needs in the situation.
What makes this process most vulnerable to error is our continual tendency to lens the present through the past:
The defects which in most of us make this process untrustworthy are the inclusion of information which does not belong to this present situation, or the exclusion of information which does. It is when memories and previous learnings are fed into the computations as if they were this reality, and not memories and learnings, that erroneous behavioral answers arise.
Rogers paints a portrait of the person who has braided these three strands of the good life:
The person who is psychologically free… is more able to live fully in and with each and all of his feelings and reactions. He makes increasing use of all his organic equipment to sense, as accurately as possible, the existential situation within and without. He makes use of all of the information his nervous system can thus supply, using it in awareness, but recognizing that his total organism may be, and often is, wiser than his awareness. He is more able to permit his total organism to function freely in all its complexity in selecting, from the multitude of possibilities, that behavior which in this moment of time will be most generally and genuinely satisfying. He is able to put more trust in his organism in this functioning, not because it is infallible, but because he can be fully open to the consequences of each of his actions and correct them if they prove to be less than satisfying.
He is more able to experience all of his feelings, and is less afraid of any of his feelings; he is his own sifter of evidence, and is more open to evidence from all sources; he is completely engaged in the process of being and becoming himself.
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