Excerpts from a Journal

My Career at HILR

HILR and this time of life have given me leisure to read and reflect in ways that I couldn’t or didn’t when I was a distracted single mother and career woman. I had floated along on my earlier education, the values I grew up with and modified only slightly in college, and a preoccupation with the immediate demands of mothering and work.

My fifties had brought significant changes: a second marriage, grandchildren, my son’s leaving home (in fits and starts), increased financial security and a shift from a high-pressured consulting career, the lingering death of my mother at 91, a new house, involvement in local politics, and physical strains requiring heightened attention to exercise and health.

By the time I started HILR at 61, I was searching for new meaning and purpose. Some of my friends talked about cultivating their spirituality, but I had little idea what they meant. I had begun writing poetry, which helped me feel much more control over my own narrative (though I wouldn’t have been able to put it that way before discovering postmodernism at HILR).

I have always loved learning and have been a successful student, so when a friend told me about HILR, I was eager to join. Besides, I had regretted not choosing to attend Harvard for college.

At first I wondered if I’d made a mistake. People were so old! I wasn’t yet over the hill. But I soon put aside that first impression and plunged in with zest. The depth of life and professional experience my co-students brought to discussions awed me. I felt freed by the absence of tests and grades and the need for references. I thrived on learning simply for its own sake.

Congenitally shy, I was much slower at finding my way socially. I had no idea at first how important the Common Room was. My habit was, and is, to arrive at the last minute so as not to waste time hanging around. Then I look forward to talking after something’s over. I didn’t realize for a long time that good conversations happen before class and everyone scatters fast afterwards to avoid parking tickets or just get home.

I made my first deep connection by accident. I was thinking about leading a study group on moral frameworks. Having grown up in a household where the dominant “religion” was socialism, I was not fluent in traditional thinking about moral values. I wanted to understand them better.

At a Curriculum Committee meeting for prospective study group leaders I met another woman interested in moral decision-making. Rhoada Wald and I decided to try co-leading. We worked for many months to develop a syllabus and resolve significant differences in our styles. We enjoyed leading a successful group.

Meanwhile, Rhoada was on the Teaching and Learning Committee (TLC) and suggested I join. Since I had professional experience training facilitators of management training and problem-solving teams, I had strong opinions about adult learning and was eager to apply my skills. Rhoada and I shared a commitment to participative learning—a value espoused at HILR, in theory if not always in practice.

On the TLC, I assumed an active training role. This attracted some attention and two years after I entered HILR the Council president asked me to chair a taskforce on membership at HILR. In this role I got to know lots of wonderful people much better and felt I had gained a real identity in the community. I became even more involved two years later when I chaired a strategic planning taskforce.

The teamwork was especially rewarding. I also enjoyed using my professional skills and drawing on the ideas of many members to help synthesize a creative and positive vision and plan for HILR. The Council has indeed implemented some of the key elements. I was disappointed, but not surprised, that more people didn’t quickly understand the opportunities we identified for making our community even more successful. I had already run for Council and lost. After doing what I could to encourage greater commitment to participation and self-governance at HILR, I’ve now decided to stick to learning, teaching, and other creative activities.

Old Patterns

My mother provided an excellent model for aging in many ways— finding new friends and activities, getting a comfortable place to live where she could move to higher levels of care, staying intellectually alive and engaged, confronting the realities of illness and death.

But one thing Mom did I’m determined to avoid: She left her community of 45 years because she couldn’t bear “to see more old friends sicken and die.” She felt extremely vulnerable to loss, a vulnerability she always connected to her father’s death when she was 11.

I’ve had a similar vulnerability, which I connect to my early hospitalization with pneumonia; I was isolated from my family for two weeks. My mother didn’t come even to wave through the window because she was afraid her distress would upset me.

For me, the biggest challenge of aging is staying passionately committed to people who may die before me. I’ve been through a period of playing it safe, with a loss in the richness of my emotional life. I want to nurture my passion, even if it means being more vulnerable to pain as well as joy, tears as well as elation.

I do not want to abandon my old friends nor do I want to hesitate to engage deeply with new ones. A new conceptual path for me is Buddhism, which I first appreciated by reading Mark Epstein’s Thoughts without a Thinker. I found most helpful the notion of hungry ghosts whose time has gone—a wonderful way to think about how I, like my mother, cling to feelings of loss. Now I try to make as many connections as I can, so that if one disappears I still have others.

Giving Up on Work

I was moved reading about Stan Davis’s struggle with shame, his feelings about the abrupt loss of status that came at retirement. I feel similarly about the end of my career, and his essay encourages me to revisit and share my experience. After I left the management-consulting firm I worked for, I never found a truly stimulating job. Partly I was conflicted about what I wanted. Getting remarried eased my anxiety over making money, and I didn’t want to work such long hours and travel so much. But I also felt that I didn’t have the personal qualities to compete at the level that interested me. I wasn’t good enough at forming instant relationships or sufficiently effective at selling myself in a business setting.

I’ve always struggled with meaning and purpose. Being so idealistic, I took quite seriously my work for quality improvement and participative management as a way of empowering employees and improving their jobs. When I look back, I fear that the result was more to empower the bosses to manipulate their workers, to bring more of their souls under the control of capitalism. I’m very uneasy about how much of our lives has been captured by various markets, and what this means for democracy, personal relationships, and our sense of ourselves.

After I left business consulting, I tried to use my skills in human-service jobs but was frustrated by the low salaries, lack of management skills, and lackadaisical attitude towards time and efficiency. My husband Steve had trouble understanding why I cared how much I was paid, but I connect that to my sense of self worth. I think it’s a major readjustment in retirement. I didn’t want to do volunteer work initially because I felt I was undercutting those who try to earn a living doing the same work and that I was devaluing my professional skills. I also was leery of betraying feminism by falling into a traditional, unpaid role. Fortunately, our town government relies heavily on citizen volunteers, and I have now found various ways to contribute whole-heartedly.

Another thought I frequently wrestled with was that I hadn’t sufficiently earned retirement. Unlike Steve or my mother, I hadn’t worked full time all my life nor had I accrued enough pension to support myself. I hadn’t done enough in the world to feel I could just relax. My mother said at 70 that she figured she had worked hard for the biblical span and could now enjoy herself. I don’t have that sense. Going to HILR to study is partly a joy because I love to learn and partly a balm to this sense of guilt about not doing enough “serious work.” Now I feel I’m growing out of that stage. Perhaps taking care of my small grandchild a day a week satisfies my need for purpose. I’m certainly more comfortable simply pursuing my own interests. Am I getting too selfish?

After discussing these notes with others in our self-study group and thinking more about my career, I realize that I can think about my work in a significantly more positive way: I made a valiant effort to tackle truly important and difficult problems. That I couldn’t have more impact says more about the immensity of the challenge than about my personal level of achievement.

Teaching and Learning at HILR

I want to focus more on assumptions. Because of my lifelong experience on the borders of different cultures, starting with my parents’ contrasting backgrounds (New York City Jew, North Dakota Lutheran farmer), I’ve always tried to understand the unspoken assumptions people make about how the world works. I also saw this in shifting careers between human services and business and back again, and not feeling fully at home anywhere.

One of the best things about HILR is the fact that members come from dissimilar backgrounds and have distinct ways of thinking. This is strikingly different from college or graduate school because at HILR the varied professional cultures are so much more entrenched. My favorite example is the member-relations taskforce’s surprisingly passionate conflict over naming the summary of our report. The academics argued for “abstract” and those with business experience argued for “executive summary.” I would like to understand more about how to identify and articulate such variety in assumptions and how we can foster our learning by understanding them better.

I keep questioning my own assumptions. My mother’s death ten years ago emancipated me in surprising ways. For example, I hadn’t realized how much I was content to view the world, at least on the political level, through her eyes. She was so smart and so experienced that I always respected her political sense. Now I’m much more actively trying to figure out the world for myself.

Several streams have fed my new political ideas. One is my involvement in local politics and seeing firsthand how people negotiate. Another is catching up intellectually. This began at a party when I heard people from the Harvard Kennedy School talking as if everyone knew that government was incapable of leading social change. I hadn’t realized how far political theory had changed. Of course my brother, a Federalist-Society type conservative, could have enlightened me.

Then 9/11 shook me, more than I initially realized. I wasn’t thrown as much by the attack itself (I have learned enough about war to put it in some perspective) as by its effect on American politics. For the first time I perceived our democracy as fragile, and lost my basic faith in American progress. This was a spiritual crisis for me because I think a lot of my sense of meaning and purpose was wrapped up in American politics.

My study groups at HILR enable me to search for answers along new paths in the welcome company of other pilgrims with diverse stories. In the fall of 2004 I led a study group, “Moralism and American Politics.” The simultaneous election amplified and enriched the experience for all of us.

Thoughts on Leading a Study Group

What are my responsibilities as a study group leader in teaching people our age? Do I just serve a tasty meal, or do I also have to cut up the meat, flavor individual portions, and coax each member to eat? What about those with little appetite for learning?

I’m thinking about how I led the discussions in “The Social and Political Power of Religious Belief.” I’m a good active listener and know how to draw people out and clarify differences. How can I encourage participants to probe deeper and read more closely?

The members, to my surprise, made much of how “courageously” I handled their passionate complaints about the difficult textbook I selected. I had found no better alternative and its ideas were central to my concerns so I was comfortable (or stubborn?) about sticking with it. I did cut back on some of the assignments, but I didn’t really know what else to do.

Sometimes I’m uncomfortable with exploiting the authority that some members project onto a study group leader—in part because I’m so naturally judgmental. As a therapist, I became acutely aware of such signs of transference and counter transference and worked hard to challenge them. Am I too readily throwing out this power, which may be an essential teaching mechanism?

I assumed perhaps lazily that it was up to each of the fifteen members to decide how much he or she wanted to get out of the group and consequently how much work to invest. I didn’t put people on the spot about whether they had done the readings, and some obviously hadn’t. The reports were optional, and only three members volunteered. At least one member slept in most sessions—not unusual at HILR—and I simply ignored that.

There’s also the question of expertise. We call our classes “study groups” because we’re theoretically learning together. The study group leader is not necessarily more knowledgeable than the members, certainly true in this case. I also feel that especially with such a personal and emotionally charged subject as religion, each member will work out his or her individual understanding of the material. I think this characterizes learning at our age, anyway, because we come with relatively fixed ideas based on long experience and tend to fit new material into those molds. Younger people are probably more open to identifying with professors as new role models. I sometimes think leading a study group is like conducting a rather discordant orchestra, where each player is writing his or her own part rather than learning a common score.

I devoted most of the class time to discussion. I encouraged members to draw on their own experiences with religion, which I had prompted them to describe when they introduced themselves in the first session. This did set the intimate personal tone I believe facilitates the deeper experiential learning I was aiming for.

But I may have presumed too readily that participants’ questions were similar to my own. For many years I had been puzzled by the obvious appeal of religion and spiritualism to many people I know. With my socialist upbringing to think of religion as the “opiate of the masses,” I had long been comfortable with the mid-century assumption that religion would soon fade away. I wanted to understand why it hadn’t.

Some members said that they wanted to know more about the mechanics of political power, mostly in ways that I consider fairly basic civics. But I sometimes too easily assume that everyone else already understands anything that I understand. This also makes me uncomfortable with lecturing. But I did start putting ideas on the board that helped structure the discussion, and people seemed to find this helpful.

A confounding problem was that I was sick with recurring walking pneumonia much of the semester. Though I didn’t miss any classes, it sharply reduced my energy level and interfered with my thinking as clearly and quickly as I would like. I didn’t tell the study group members, and I can’t tell how much this affected what happened. (There’s something of a norm at HILR not to talk much about illness, and my doctor told me I wasn’t contagious.) I know I’m not the only study group leader who’s felt physically impaired.

The rest of the group was also plagued by ill health. One member never came for that reason and died a few months later. Another came to the first session, then got sick, and died near the end of the semester. A particularly well-informed sociologist, who knew the author of one of our books, became too ill to continue after three or four sessions. This amount of illness and death was unique in my experience at HILR.

My goal was to examine the compelling power of religion from as many angles as possible. The richly varied religious (and anti-religious) experience of the members gave me the appreciation I sought for the quality and importance of different people’s searches for values and meaning. I think that those who participated actively also achieved their aims.

Reflections on My First Seven Years at HILR

Thinking back, I’m most struck by the unexpected wealth of opportunities for learning about being an aging woman, and for my continued development as an individual. My early impression that HILR would confront me with more of the frailties and drawbacks of aging than I was comfortable with has proved all too persistently true. I hadn’t realized, however, how I would be more than compensated for my occasional distress through frequent contact with outstanding role models of brave, intelligent, and lighthearted companions.

I had also underestimated the value of membership in a new community of peers, with as much risk and reward as I can take. I find more freedom to grow and do new things than I ever imagined—as long as I make the commitments.

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