Brain Food #696
Personal renewal
Thoughts of the day
Personal renewal, by John Gardner, is a speech on “why some men and women go to seed while others remain vital all of their lives.” I included it in this newsletter some months ago when I first discovered it, and have kept returning to it since, with a different part resonating each time.
As the speech unfolds, it becomes a treatise not just on how to live, but on how to be alive. We might choose to go through life thinking that by a specific age we will have it all figured out, that we will finally know everything we need to win at this game, but Gardner argues that those who think they have reached this nirvana are truly in a form of bored ignorance.
Personal renewal instead is the act of going through life while not knowing, and constantly learning how to face different challenges that can only be found by entering a new stage of living. The challenges we face at 25, 45, 65, will differ, but it is thanks to this that our potential continues to grow. And so, personal renewal becomes the result of learning from the challenges themselves, but also of learning to see the opportunities that every new year of living brings, while constantly rediscovering who we are:
“Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. By potentialities I mean not just intellectual gifts but the full range of one's capacities for learning, sensing, wondering, understanding, loving and aspiring.
Perhaps you imagine that by age 35 or 45 or even 33 you have explored those potentialities pretty fully. Don't kid yourself!
The thing you have to understand is that the capacities you actually develop to the full come out as the result of an interplay between you and life's challenges –and the challenges keep changing. Life pulls things out of you.”
To be ready to understand our own potential, we must first get rid of the ghosts of the past:
“I said in my book, “Self-Renewal,” that we build our own prisons and serve as our own jail-keepers. I no longer completely agree with that. I still think we're our own jailkeepers, but I've concluded that our parents and the society at large have a hand in building our prisons. They create roles for us — and self images — that hold us captive for a long time. The individual intent on self-renewal will have to deal with ghosts of the past — the memory of earlier failures, the remnants of childhood dramas and rebellions, accumulated grievances and resentments that have long outlived their cause. Sometimes people cling to the ghosts with something almost approaching pleasure — but the hampering effect on growth is inescapable. As Jim Whitaker, who climbed Mount Everest, said ‘You never conquer the mountain, You only conquer yourself.’”
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