In the good ole USA we've spent a lot of time psychologizing ourselves, but I haven't been aware of a lot of time spent looking at our lives as they fit into the web of life around us: what we've learned from our place in that web, what we've seen, how we've come to think what we do in a non-psychobabble way. Below is part of an article in Tikkun Magazine that Kim Chernin wrote upon hearing about a program in which you could get a PhD from some place called the University for Integrative Learning by writing a book for a thesis and fifteen essays (Yikes! and Groan!) "describing the particular ways in which [your] life had been [your] university. So Kim considered this challenge. Since I have yet to figure out how to directly import stuff from the web into this blog, below I have typed some selections from her essay.
"For my thesis, I wanted to work on a historical novel about the first neighborhood in Los Angeles to attempt integration, a work based on my own experience growing up in that neighborhood in the 1940´s where I had for many years come to believe that I was a Negro girl.... This project would be an unusual doctoral thesis, but it seemed to fit in well at this University that encouraged a reinterpretation of traditional forms.
"The most fascinating prospect would be the writing of the fifteen essays....Mel had encouraged me not to think simply in terms of book-learning, courses I had taken or formal studies I had pursued, but to spread my conceptual net, so that an opera I´d heard that had been influencial could qualify for an essay, especially if it had led to further investigations into music or voice or an interest in singing. The important principle was the integration of the experience with a reflective understanding of its meaning and influence in our lives...."
She continues with a wide range of experiences which you can read at www.tikkun.org I think and then she continues:
"My life, thus examined, became more serious, more weightyt. It seemed to hop onto the shelf next to the large books, to acquire a dignity, a kind of leather binding. I began to think of people whose children had left home or whose careers were not yet the self-fulfilling endeavors they might still become. Suppose, at a certain age, it was customary to enter a university to earn a doctorate in our life's meaning? The very idea okf middle-aged and growing old would be transformed, wouldn't it, by this expectation? At the threshold of supposed diminishment, a serious endeavor would await one, to impart, discover, find or impose meaning on the seemingly random events of life. Would one live life more reflectively knowing this review was ahead, or perhaps with more daring, more spontaneity, in an effort to amass a rich store of experience upon which to reflect?
"I imagined a brigade of older people who had earned their doctorates in this way. How much there was still to do with these longer lives we were qcquiring. Lives of service, education, consultation, community-building, tutoring, fostering, discoursing, and organizing. That inverted pyramids about which economists and social scientist had begun to worry would be usefully transformed. Instead of generations of young folks earning the money to support the legions of passive, aging elders; instead of retirement meaning isolation and the loss of productivity, "doctored" elders would be ready to form themselves into an Elder Brigade and take on all sorts of work for which they, with their life experience, their capacity to reflect on life, would be uniquely fitted. The doctorate would represent simultaneously a summing up and an opening forward into virtually uncharted advanced-life eexpriences. It would prepare the way for elders with a meaningful role to play, whose contribution was respected, sought, cultivted, required. We, tomorrow´s elders, I thought, are moving on into a culture that has not yet recognized the need for elders or created the forms by which we can usefully contribnute to it. Surely that means it is time for us to create them?"
