This book touches on my next area of study, the post-work chapter of life and making the most of it. Curiously, a real mix of people recommended this to me. Some young. Some old. Some close. Some collegial.
This book definitely puts a lot of thoght-provoking conversations on the table you can have with yourself (and others). My sense is that the things that made us succussful and content when we were younger and working will not be as effective in the last leg of the run. I'm ravenous to find the blind spots and be able to proceed with some intentionality as one thing I've learned about this life is that being intentional with your time and actions in most situations wins the day.
Below are just a few, like maybe 3% of what I marked up. Just selected a few to give you a taste of the range and depth of the material. Veritable treasure trove of matters to contemplate.
"A life of ease is not the pathway to growth and happiness. On the contrary, a life of ease is how you get stuck and confused in life."
You can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but you can't be wise with other men's wisdom.
Who you marry is the most important decision you will ever make. Marriage colors your life and everything in it. George Washington had a rather interesting life, but still concluded, "I have always considered marriage as the most interesting event of one's life, the foundation of happiness or misery."
"Throughout my life," she wrote, after his death, "it has always seemed a kind of mystery to me that my good husband not only loved and respected me as many husbands love and respect their wives, but almost worshipped me, as though I were some special being created just for him. And that was true not only at the beginning of our marriage but through all the remaining years of it, up to his very death."
Divorce doesn't generally happen when the number of conflicts increases; it happens when the number of positive things decreases. Julie Gottman, John's wife, points out that masters of relationship are on alert for what their partner is doing right, and they are quick to compliment. According to the Gottmans, there are four kinds of unkindness that drive couples apart: contempt, criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling. The rule of their research is pretty simple: If you're tired and your partner makes a bid, turn toward in kindness. If you're distracted, turn toward in kindness. If you're stressed, turn toward in kindness.
"Character is the main object of education," said Mary Woolley, president of Mount Holyoke a century ago. When J. F. Roxburgh, the headmaster of the Stowe School in Vermont, was asked in the 1920s about the purpose of his institution, he said it was to turn out young men who were "acceptable at a dance, invaluable in a shipwreck."
It is a tragedy of teaching that sometimes the professors pour more into the class than the students are able at their ages to receive. And in that way good teaching is like planting. Those teachers like Weintraub were inserting seeds that would burst in us years or decades later when the realities of adult life called them forth. I don't know about you, but I felt more formed by my college education twenty-five years out than I did on the day I graduated. There is an old saying that if you catch on fire with enthusiasm people will come for miles to watch you burn.
David Foster Wallace grasped the importance of wanting well in his famous commencement address at Kenyon College:
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you….Worship power—you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
Frankl discovered that while the body grows according to what it consumes, the soul grows by the measure of love it pours out.
I suppose this happens to most of us as we age: We get smaller, and our dependencies get bigger. We become less fascinating to ourselves, less inclined to think of ourselves as the author of all that we are, and at the same time we realize how we have been the ones shaped—by history, by family, by forces beyond awareness. And I think what changed, in the most incremental, boring way possible, is that at some point I had the sensation that these stories are not fabricated tales happening to other, possibly fictional, people: They are the underlying shape of reality. They are renditions of the recurring patterns of life. They are the scripts we repeat.
eventually most people realize that something is missing in the self-interested life. They achieve worldly success and find it unsatisfying. Or perhaps they have fallen in love, or been loved in a way that plows open the crusty topsoil of life and reveals the true personality down below. Or perhaps they endure a period of failure, suffering, or grief that carves through the surface and reveals the vast depths underneath. One way or another, people get introduced to the full depths of themselves, the full amplitude of life. They realize that only emotional, moral, and spiritual food can provide the nourishment they crave.
