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A New Chapter of Life

By Charles Rush

September 14, 2008

[ Audio (mp3, 6.4Mb) ]

know we make ‘resolutions' on New Year's day but so often in our actual life, it is the fall that portends a change in the chapters of our lives. I'm standing in the dorm at the School for the Visual Arts with all of the Orientation Counselors bouncing brightly in these coordinated T-Shirts, pushing a cart full of gear, surrounded by freshmen from China, freshmen from Korea and from the Long Island Expressway somewhere.

Everything is technically out of the truck and there is actually no reason for my presence but I'm taking in the living space, caught up in that sense that time overtakes you occasionally. This was the last time I'd be doing this. I had a palpable memory of walking the baby up to Kindergarten at Franklin School and her just blowing a kiss back as she ran inside, the memory of her wanting me to drop her off across the street on Middle School first day so that people wouldn't know we were related. I remembered the pep talk before High School to bolster some flagging confidence. She sees me across this crowd of freshman with a pre-Verklempft pensive gaze and she parts the crowd, gives me a big bear hug and says, “Daddy you're going to be fine”.

My children have been worried that we are going to be bored with just each other. I don't know where they got this idea. I've been thinking that I'd send them an e-mail that ‘we don't need outside entertainment to find ourselves amusing' but I haven't done it. The truth is that I keep walking around this orderly house waiting for Ashton Kutcher to tell me that I've been “punked” and I have four more kids to raise…. And they all come pouring out with a TV crew behind them.

Just a couple days before that I had another chapter-changing goodbye moment. I'd been down to stay with my Mother while my Father was in the hospital. She can no longer live independently because she's had a series of mini-strokes and suffers from dementia. I was elected from the family to introduce Mom to a care taker, a very nice woman, but my Mother neither wants, nor thinks she really needs, a care-taker. I tried to tell her that everyone who is anyone has one, like Donald Trump on TV… She is incredulous but ultimately she knows she can't really win this argument. She can't remember how to drive, how to use the telephone or the microwave. She can't find anything, including nouns- which she cannot retrieve- making elementary conversation an exercise in ‘mind-reading'.

She spends a good deal of her day looking for something. This slow degradation could continue unabated for years to come. But somewhere in the past few months, she has become confused by the very fact of her own existence. She stands in the middle of her kitchen and I know she is thinking to herself, ‘who am I? And what am I doing here?' She is nervous and anxious, not about anything in particular, but about everything.

I have to go back to New Jersey, back to the rest of my life, and I can see the distress building in her demeanor as she anticipates being adrift from the anchor of my presence. I walk towards her to give her a hug. She burrows her head in my chest pretty much the same way my granddaughters burrow when they are afraid of the thunder in the storm and they want me to really wrap them up. I'm standing there with the distinct portent that I am at the front end of a long series of goodbyes with her (that could go on for years), as she slowly vanishes from my sight…

What chapter of life have you just opened? What is it that God wants you to do in this chapter? How is it that you need to grow? What is it that you need in the near future that is different from what you needed in the last chapter of your life?

I was reminded of how important it is to have this conversation with yourself, with God, with your significant other- every so often. This summer I read a short book ‘Stumbling on Happiness' by Daniel Gilbert[i]. Professor Gilbert teaches psychology at Harvard University and the book essentially summarizes his research in the past 25 years.

It is fascinating that we humans are such poor predictors of what will make us happy in the future. Almost all of us have an image of what we want to be like when we are 40, what we will be like at 50. Sometimes you can give it voice, this vision can be part of your active imagination, like those first year Business students who tell you confidently that at 50, they plan to be retired and living in Maui.

Sometimes, you don't really know that you had this image in your head until you get to that age and you turn around and you realize that what you had presumed lo these many years will not come to pass, like you just presumed you would have three children and the absence of them is suddenly overwhelmingly sad, even though you never really brought the subject up directly.

Gilbert points out that we are remarkably poor predictors of what will make us happy in the future because our brain functions with regard to the present and only after that with reference to the past and the future. What this means for all of us, is that when we project imaginatively into the future, we tend to think of it as pretty much what we are at the present, only older and a little richer. We completely fail to incorporate just how much we will change over the course of time. We simply underestimate the degree to which we will become quite different people over time.

I can only use a stupid example to illustrate this fairly complex phenomenon. Most of you know the maxim, never grocery shop on an empty stomach. Retailers aren't stupid, so they pipe the smells of fresh baked goods in the air to stimulate your appetite when you are shopping and they hand out little samples of something good to eat. That way, when husbands are shopping, they will buy 12% more than they need, all the while imagining a wondrous meal they will have in the future that is actually being exaggerated by their present day urges.

That isn't a big problem with food but it is with boyfriends. Routinely, when we pick out our spouses, we way over estimate that the needs and desires that we have at 22 will be the same that we will have at 42. We presume that we will always be attracted to this edgy, ruffian type that loves to defy authority and is just a hottie. We presume that because we are libidinally attracted to this now, we always will be more or less, perhaps just a little less intensely in the future.

Furthermore, we way underestimate just how much we will change, say, when we have three children- and all of a sudden, probity and even demeanor become traits that we really need in Mr. “naughty hottie”. You even start to notice that the very qualities that really attracted you to him, that independent streak, is actually becoming annoying at the PTA meeting. It is during this time that you find yourself listening to other clueless people complaining that their spouses have just changed and that they really can't stand them anymore.

And we often initially put it this way, because this tendency for our present-day feelings to override or correct the future, also overrides the way that we remember the past. We've done studies on college students asking them sets of questions about their politics over a series of years. Routinely, if they hear a stirring political speech, like one that Senator Obama might give, and it really influences them, if you ask them shortly after that speech, they will tell you that they've always thought this way. You can show them documentation that they have just reversed their position from 4 years ago and they will not remember that so clearly.

As it turns out, this tendency of the mind to read the present into the future, also reads the present into the past. So we actually remember things laden with meaning and that meaning is the meaning that comes from our present-tense.

So because, we are really unable to imagine the degree to which we will change through our lives, and because we tend to presume that the things we desire at 25 will still be the things we desire when we are 65 (more or less), we are remarkably bad at knowing what is really going to make us happy in the future. That is why so many of us go through what we call a ‘mid-life' crisis.

Certainly, there is this dimension of reflection on the fact that death is growing near enough that it becomes an existential reality in your 40's that it never was before. But for most of us, what we are responding to in the ‘mid-life crisis' is this vague sense that what we thought was going to make us happy is not really panning out. For most of us, it is the vague realization that the spouses we thought we had married are somehow just not fulfilling us right now and we know that we don't have but a short window of time to make a substantive correction. We've changed more than we realize that we have changed, and we have a new set of needs that we can't really define, even if we are emotionally aware that they are very real.

So, Professor Gilbert says, that the truth of our emotional lives is that we ‘stumble' on happiness. Our first goals are almost always facile and do not anticipate what we will actually need later on. Our lives are a process of discovery of this new person we are becoming and we need a flexible life-plan.

This insight about our emotional development is described spiritually in the scriptures when they say that our life is a pilgrimage. We are on a journey. We have a good idea of the direction that we are headed but what we don't know so outweighs what we do know that we have to make this life journey through faith. We have to trust in ourselves, in our spouses (and spiritual friends that go with us), in our God who is through everything.

You've had this experience at some point. I had a college friend that was hiking up in Maine. He sees Mt. Katahdin in the distance, takes a look at his map, stops his vehicle and starts walking. Well, it was much further away than it looked and his map didn't list the bogs on the trail leading up to it that put you waist deep in water when you are on the trail. And no information prepared him for the intense bugs that really, really bite. He did finally make it but it was not the Hallmark card moment that he originally imagined. And when he got there, that beautiful postcard picture of a mountain, was really freezing on top.

So there is a place for setting these broad goals up front, from knowing where you are generally headed. That is important. But you have quite a bit of flexibility built in as well, understanding that these goals are not only going to change because you change personally, but they also have to take into account the ways that your spouse is going to change. In the words of the gospel of John, we must all become born again- we will change enough spiritually through our lives that we must embrace this as a fundamental spiritual part of what it means to be human.

I do a lot of weddings and I love them. I love watching couples starting out with the blush of deepening romance, so full of hope and promise. And we surround these events will lovely words about the true wonder of love and fulfillment.

But I should probably require them all to come back exactly one year later for another ceremony, when they might be able to hear another word of insight on what they will need in order to actually keep their relationship fulfilling through the years as they go. Unfortunately, this insight is not gauzy, fluffy, drizzled with chocolate, or ecstatic. For here our psychological insights on how the mind works and the spiritual insights of the bible make a parallel suggestion.

The single most important commitment that you can make to yourself and your spouse is a fundamental commitment to profound personal and interpersonal change towards maturity. And this commitment has to be mutual and reciprocal. The real key is that you are growing together in mutually compatible ways. It helps ever so much if both of you can be an inspiring spur for the other one to bloom. Pray to be open to change and not simply threatened by it. Pray to be an inspiring catalyst for change in your spouse.

I love getting those first shocking calls from my sons, after their wives have crossed over that point in pregnancy where the hormones kick in. “Dad…. (long pause)… can you tell me where my girlfriend went?” And the honest answer is “No son I can't.” The children phase… The not having children phase, sometimes… The teenagers, the Judge… college visits and that huge day, graduation from college, the empty nest, grandparenting or waiting forever to be grandparenting… parents with declining health… or that plus needy children with grandchildren to boot… retiring or having to retire too early with not the assets that we had actually presumed would be coming our way… growing old, the real kind of old… and, one day far, far in the future, letting go…

Nothing stays as it is…

What chapter are you in right now? What do you need in this chapter that you didn't need in the same way before? What are the challenges in the short horizon- say the next 7 years? Where are you headed as a couple? As a family? I know we are not all married and some of us have to reflect on this as single parents through our spiritual friends and our spiritual families? What is opening before you? How does God want you to grow?

I know that for many of us, the fall is already rushing around us and you feel lucky just to get homework done, kids to church, and outfitted for soccer. Everything is gearing up around us in a whirlwind. But I hope you can take some time to be reflective at some point, maybe especially in the midst of the rush, because sometimes it is only in the middle of the rush of the new chapter that it suddenly becomes achingly clear that some new things have to be addressed, new areas in our soul have to grow. I hope that you can share your hopes and dreams, your fears. I hope you can be safe enough with each other to be honest, with love, to support, inspire, challenge, and bloom one another. In truth, this is the great, wonderful, profound love that transcends romance- it doesn't obviate romance or take the place of romance, but it does transcend it. This is the spiritual point of our lives, to be growing, maturing, healing.

My wife was sitting on the beach with her sister's family. They adopted our foster children about 7 years ago. They were sitting on the beach remembering stories of living with us, remembering the dog, being afraid of 1st grade, the time whipped cream was thrown all over the kitchen… We got them when they were about 4 and 6… they were remembering stories that my wife didn't really even remember.

My wife is sitting there thinking that their family was their present and their future and it suddenly occurred to her that our family is their only past, at least the only past they can consciously recall. And so are you!

Open yourself to change and growth. Lay down some memories that everyone around you can draw from. Be filled with the Spirit of God and become a meaningful person. Live your life profoundly. Amen

[i] Gilbert, Daniel. ‘Stumbling on Happiness' (New York: Vintage Press, 2007). I don't recommend actually reading this book unless you are particularly interested in the way that neurology impacts psychological studies at the moment. It contains half a dozen insights that are probably better developed in my sermons in the next few months. However, for an academic, Professor Gilbert is better than most at making relatively nerdy research relatively accessible to the average reader. But there is still enough detail that the lay reader can lose the forest for the trees.