Baby Boomers—A Better Endings Tale of Work and Love (You Can Change It Up!)

We are multidimensional Beings: multi-faceted, multi-faced. This is the essence of our composite archetypal identities based on the various roles we occupy in our lives. Our Life Themes—recurring KINDS of situations that form threads weaving a colorful tapestry through the Life Chapters of our Life Stories—lead us to develop an assembly or ‘ensemble cast’ of archetypal sub-identities based on our positive role models or from avoiding behaviors of our nemeses.

Work is a Life Theme that often brings routine or habits as well as financial security and productivity into our lives. At its best, our Work supports our vocations; then we love what we do for a living! But sometimes Work can become onerous, over-routinizing or bringing out our ‘worst’ rather than our best qualities, to the degree it may lead us to feel somewhat numb in our social life or personal relations.

As a 1950’s child myself, I can appreciate the ‘better endings’ tale of the 1987 movie Baby Boomers with Diane Keaton. J.C. Wiatt (Keaton) is a woman executive for a marketing agency in the City. When a distant cousin dies, she is asked to raise her cousin’s six-month-old baby. After accepting this new role as a parent, J.C. at first tries to maintain her high-paced, cutthroat sort of career, but eventually she comes to realize how this career is sapping her full identity.

After losing her husband because of her choice to raise the child and being offered a lower position to accommodate her changing persona at work, J. C. chooses to quit and moves with her foster daughter to a farmhouse in Vermont. Here she gradually allows her heart to re-open, to her daughter, new friends in the small rural community, and eventually to a handyman (played by Sam Shepard).  Meanwhile she develops a homemade baby applesauce recipe that eventually promises to be a million dollar business. When she is offered the opportunity to sell that to a major food chain and move back to the City to manage the business, she opts out, preferring to stay in Vermont with her child and new partner.

images are from pixabay.com

Life moves us forward, so long as we let it! Two days ago on my way to my own ‘retirement lunch’ (yep!), I read a bumper sticker I have been contemplating ever since:

Life Is Life!

Life is rich in opportunities for new experience, for learning to develop your talents and interests, for making choices at every turn as you compose your unique Life Story!

I welcome YOUR Comments and Story!

 

The Road Ahead

The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the Door where It began,

Now evermore the Road does lead

And I must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with weary feet

Until It joins some larger Way

Where many paths and errands meet,

And whither then?

I cannot say.

–  J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

I had some difficulty formatting this poem from The Hobbit for my recent post on “Better Beginnings,” yet it is so apt to our monthly theme of “The Call to Adventure” that I repeat it here as I recall the poem from my initial reading of The Hobbit some 43 years ago.

I first memorized and used this poem when I was 19. I was adventuring for the summer of my freshman college year in Yakutat, Alaska.  I worked at a crab and salmon cannery there that summer. I was traveling with a good friend, Barb. One day—which became one of many similar days—we were hiking some five miles along a dirt road through a primeval Ponderosa Pine forest that led to a beach unpeopled for hundreds of miles.

The Forest was higher, I realized as I walked along that primitive pathway, than the skyscrapers of New York City. In the City I would feel daunted, but in the Forest leading to the Ocean I felt connected with the whole of Nature and Life Itself.

I started reciting “The Road” song that Bilbo Baggins wrote (as I recall the story from way back then) in The Hobbit. It mirrored directly the experience I was having as Barb and I trekked through the primeval Forest.

The ROAD goes Ever ON and ON…

Down from the DOOR where IT Began…

And EVER MORE the ROAD does lead,

And I must FOLLOW, IF I CAN…

PURSUING IT with weary feet

Until it joins SOME LARGER WAY

Where many paths and errands MEET,

And whither then?

I CANNOT SAY.

Reciting “The Road” song from The Hobbit over and over again like a mantra while walking hours through a remote Alaskan pine forest became prophetic for me of my entire lifetime of spiritual adventure and travel. Within a year of returning from this Alaskan odyssey I discovered a spiritual path (Eckankar, which does not necessarily endorse the ideas I express in this blog) which has brought much freedom, love and joy into my life.  I discovered this path first in a dream of returning on a bus from my Alaska adventure, then connected outwardly with my spiritual path less than a week later after encountering a woman who was in my dream! I have followed that Road ever since.

Here is a creative technique I offer that I have been using myself this week.  Close your eyes as if to daydream (enter a light contemplation state). Imagine THREE ROADS leading off slightly to your left, ahead forward, and slightly to your right (imagine more than three if you choose; this is for you to develop as you please).

Explore each pathway with your imagination; where does each Road lead? If these represent alternate futures (which is how I have been envisioning them this week), which is the Way for you to go forth in your life in order to realize and fulfill your deepest sense of life Purpose and Mission?

images are from pixabay.com

Maybe one of these pathways is your current best way forward, but the others might hold potentials to integrate into that direction, so your path forward does not have to sacrifice one set of qualities or values in order to embrace a greater Whole.

I welcome your comments and stories!

 

Bury the Hatchet

As a final post about the Warrior archetype in relation to the life metaphor Life is an Ensemble Cast of Archetype Characters, it seems fitting to recall the story of Deganawida, the Peacemaker who along with Hiawatha established the great League of the Iroquois that served as a model of peaceful governance for the Articles of Confederation that presaged the US constitution.

The phrase “bury the hatchet” derives from an Iroquois ceremony whereby the Six Nations peoples literally buried their hatchets of warfare under the soil while planting a Great White Pine tree so as the tree grew they would be covered by its expansive branches spreading across the four directions.  Thus a warring, feuding peoples were united for peace and prosperity that lasted many generations. Warriors became peacemakers amongst their own peoples.

The Iroquois League came about after many years of intertribal blood feuding amongst Iroquois speaking Native Americans at a time that predated the settling of White peoples in northeastern North America. As one version of this legendary story describes, Hiawatha was an Onandaga warrior whose wife and two daughters were murdered by a chief of his own village. Hiawatha wandered bereft in the woods in a state of desolation and grief; some say he feared he would become a cannibal, so great was his despair.

In the woods, some say while in a canoe on a lake, Hiawatha looked into the water and saw a godlike figure, Deganawida, looking back at him. (Another version says Deganawida was a man with a speech impediment that Hiawatha encountered while in the woods.) In any event, Deganawida shared the Condolence Ritual with Hiawatha to help him deal with his grief and to bring back to the Peoples to help them to allay their own grief. He also described how the tribes could unite to form a great League, with lifelong, wise delegates or sachems to be installed or deposed by the women of these matrilineal tribes. Deganawida also inspired the ritual for burying the hatchet, a symbolic putting aside of warfare for the sake of coming together as one Peoples, uniting in strength against their common enemies and fostering internal peace.

This great League forged peace among the Six Nations of Iroquois that joined it; this peace lasted for many generations and still embues these Nations with deep principles of peace and democracy.

It has been said that the ceremonial act of burying the hatchet by the Iroquois peoples is one of the greatest examples of peacemaking in all of human history.

It took a Warrior who allied with and became himself a peacemaker to put aside warlike habits and attitudes in order to embrace unity, peace and the greater Good. If only West and East could BURY THE HATCHET today. At very least, you and I can do so. We can bury the hatchets brandished by any of our own feuding sub-selves, or within our outer community of fellowship. It takes only a CHOICE for the Warrior within you and me to stand up for Life and Peace, not Death or War.

Better Endings…or Better Character?

Re-Blog of Guest Blog (I feel this one is so appropriate to our topic of Fictional Better Endings that I want to re-post it for anyone who may have missed it in our thread.-LW)

I do not believe it is fruitful to play ‘woulda, coulda, shoulda’ about past choices in the pursuit of hindsight identification of a better ending. I believe that every person does the best they can, based upon who they are at that specific time and within that set of circumstances, which will never exist in that precise combination again.

Of course, we would make different choices now – – the ‘bad endings’ of our past have made us into the wiser person we are today.

So what is the key to creating a life of better endings?

If you have studied creative fiction, you understand “action always follows character.” In other words, the choices and outcomes of a story are not laid out artificially: they organically flow from a character’s set of fears, passions, insecurities, personality and history.

You don’t find apples on a peach tree. Who you are determines what you do and what follows.

Our character is a stew of ideas and reactions steeped in conditioning from childhood, ethnicity and culture and personal aversions and preferences, wrapped in the ego or persona we have chosen to build and present to the world around us. It changes with time, but we can make conscious changes so it does not hinder future choices and actions.

When I meditate, I become aware of some of the internal, automatic themes of my thinking that color my choices and behavior. Unfortunately, they are not all positive; many are defensive (the role of the ego). But once I am conscious of them, I can choose to not act out of them. Over time, they may weaken from disuse; I may even succeed at replacing them with more positive ones.

The truth is I will always have an ego whining about the world, and it can lead me down a less happy path. But I am not powerless before it. I can work consciously to build a kinder, more aware and honest character. Will I still make poor choices? Yes, since I am not perfect and life appears to be a school of learning in which we can learn from our unhappy endings. With sincere effort to become wiser and more compassionate, I will make wiser and more compassionate choices.

Gandhi said it best: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Create a better character within you and better endings from your reactions and choices will follow outside of you, as day follows night . . . naturally.

Rebekah Shardy is a geriatric social worker, hospice manager, author of “98 Things a Woman Should Do in Her Lifetime,” (Andrews McMeel, 2003) and recipient of three short fiction awards.

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Personal Decisions…Better Endings?

Imagine how might your own or someone you are close to’s life be significantly changed if some on-the-spot (or even well deliberated) personal decision were altered?  We’ve all heard stories about how one’s parents would never have met were it not for some split second decision to walk into a particular coffee shop or to take a particular bus on a particular day.  The movie Serendipity explores this premise as a romantic comedy where, after a couple does accidentally meet, they spend most of the rest of the movie trying to find each other again.

What if you had accepted some job you were offered rather than the one you took instead? Or if you had chosen to attend a different college or move to a different town when you had the opportunity? Some of our life-altering decisions were made by others, such as by our parents while we were young. I am more interested for our weekly topic to explore those decisions you made yourself.  How might things have turned out differently?  Now, of course, it could very well be that the decision you made resulted in the ‘better ending’ pathway that has brought you to where you are, quite happily, today. Or, if as they say, ‘hindsight is 20/20’, maybe altering some decision might have created a very different set of outcomes, maybe even with a ‘better ending’ scenario possible along a path you did not choose.

This topic of Better Endings in light of Personal Decisions is not meant to be merely a futile exercise in hindsight or a matter of second guessing yourself. Certainly we all usually aim to make the most we can out of any decision we have committed ourselves to, and it is important to consider all we have gained and learned from any decision on which we have followed through.  The value of exploring–through journaling, writing an autobiographical memoir, contemplating, or just sharing with a friend about–our earlier life decisions, is to remind ourselves of how we have approached major or minor transition points in our lives. This way, when a new opportunity arises or when we envision a new opportunity, perhaps we can act with a bit more mindfulness or clarity of intention while considering which path to take. Reminding ourselves of how our decisions have empowered us to establish life-changing new directions shows us how much flexibility and awareness we are capable of as we navigate our life choices. So, have fun with this one!

Related articles

• Insights from the Pavement: Being Decisive (cyleodonnell.wordpress.com)
• I made a wrong decision… (martijncastelijns.wordpress.com)
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