The world is round, life is flat: touching the edges of our existence
In the last issue of Mojo, Bruce Springsteen, who is now 56 years old, talks about mortality : “… the finiteness of your experience is real once you are in your late fifties. This is finite. There is a limited amount of years left in what you’re doing. (…) part of taking your place in the world is letting that clock tick. Letting that clock tick and being willing to listen to it tick and understand that your mortal self is present and walking alongside of you all the time now.”
[Thanks to Scott, who is also grappling with the issue of mortality, for directing me to the article.]
A couple of weeks ago I went to my gynecologist for my annual exam. I told her that my periods are getting shorter, 24 days or so.
“It’s because you are not ovulating,” she said.
I wasn’t prepared for that. Wasn’t I in my thirties just a couple of years ago? Isn’t menopause something that only our mothers had to go through?
“You still have a few years, maybe five or six, before you should start worrying,” my gynecologist told me smiling.
Dorothy, I am afraid we are not in Kansas anymore.
Today is my birthday. I am 45. I am the happiest I have ever been. I am almost comfortable with myself. I have around people I love and who love me. I do many things I like. At the same time, as Springsteen says, I can feel my mortal self walking alongside me. I can see the edges of my existence. And surprisingly, I don’t mind it.
When I was younger and I happened to think about death and mortality, I could only picture them as abstract concepts. I knew mentally they existed but they were not real, I could not feel them. Even in my closest encounters with mortality, death remained just an abstract possibility. It was so far away. But now I can feel it. I look at the horizon and I see that my existence is flat: if I stretch enough, I can touch the edges.
Barry Simmons, a gestalt therapist who led a therapist training group I attended many years ago in Rome, told us about a tibetan lama he met. The lama was very old and very sick. He was close to death and yet he wasn’t a bit scared. He was excited. He was getting ready for this great and fascinating event. He couldn’t wait to jump with all his childish enthusiasm into the new adventure.
So, this is my wish for my 45th birthday. May I overcome fear. May I be able to go through what is in front of me with the same spirit of adventure, discovery, curiosity, and wonder. As Betty Davis/Margo Channing said in All about Eve: “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!”
The rogue conventional wisdom of Freakonomics
In the introduction of Freakonomics - A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything, we are told that Steven D. Levitt is a young, successful, and serious–if controversial–economist. We should believe what Levitt writes because he has the right credentials: he is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. But soon enough we find out that Levitt doesn’t believe in “expert” opinions:
[The typical expert] is prone to sound exceedingly sure of himself. An expert doesn’t so much argue the various sides of an issues as plants his flag firmly on one side. That’s because an expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn’t get much attention. An expert must be bold if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into conventional wisdom. His best chances of doing so is to engage the public’s emotions, for emotion is the enemy of rational argument.
Paola has moved to paolapavese.com
English: To read my sister Paola’s most recent posts, visit her new blog.
Italian: Paola ha un nuovo sito tutto per lei a PaolaPavese.com.
Per leggere i suoi articoli, visitate il suo nuovo blog.
I used to have a dream (but then I asked for permission)
I’m just back from a week in Italy. Going to Italy always puts me in a strange mood; like meeting an old lover, memories of all the good and bad moments in the relationship resurface. And together with the memories of what happened, I start imagining alternative scenarios and how my life could have unfolded, had I been raised in different country.
One particular event came back to me this time, vividly and with details I had not remembered in a long time. Many years ago, I wanted to become a journalist. I’ve always loved writing and at some point I thought that journalism would be a good career for me. One thing only held me back: the unsettling suspicion that I wasn’t “good enough.” I don’t remember receiving impressing praises for my writing. Not enough, at least, to make me feel I would be a good writer.
Partly, it was because in my high school there were many sons and daughters of the Italian intelligentsia. I remember looking in awe at the infinite bookshelves in my friends’ houses, full of novels and books of all kinds. My father was an engineer, not an intellectual. My parents had a very small collections of books and most of them were science books. The most impressive display in our bookshelf was the 12-volume Encyclopedia of Sciences and Technology.
When I finished high school, I had more pressing issues to deal with than my conflictual relationship with writing. I needed to move away from the unhealthy family environment and to find some space to breath. After an eventful and almost fatal two-year break studing agriculture in Pisa, I started thinking about a writing career again .
I volunteer to work at the Press Office of a large political event that was held in Pisa that year. After that, I worked for free at a leftist newspaper in Rome. It was one of the most amazing periods of my life. I loved the newspaper life. It was a tiny newspaper, and we basically did everything ourselves, from picking the news to writing them, choosing photos, and designing pages. It lasted a couple of months. The newspaper closed, and I found myself once again jobless in Rome.
After the high of working in the newspaper, it was a very depressing period. I tried to use my tiny work experience to find another position in a newspaper. I was willing to work for free, but I could not find a job, not even at those conditions. And, in truth, I needed to be paid. Not only because I needed economic independence, but also because the only career path to become a journalist at that time was a paid internship in a newspaper. To become a journalist one needed to pass the professional exam; to take the exam, one had to demonstrate to have written and to have been paid for a certain number of published articles.
In Italy, most opportunities are born out of recommendations. You know somebody, and this person introduces you to somebody else, and at the end you get an offer or an opportunity. Don’t confuse this with networking: it’s not an equalitarian economy of favors, but rather a sophisticated form of begging the powerful. At the end, the practice of “favoritismo,” as Italians call it, leaves a bitter taste in your mouth: the position you achieve has nothing to do with your merit and everything to do with the magnanimity of your sponsor.
One of my closest friends’ father was a journalist, a very important one. When my small newspaper closed, I went to him with a collection of the articles I had written neatly organized in a yellow envelope and asked for advice. I can still see the two of us talking. We were sitting one in front of each other at the dining table, the yellow envelope between us: “Do you think I am good enough to become a journalist?” I asked. He was very nice. He said it was a hard profession and tried to understand if I had the drive and the passion to succeed. Did I have a passion for news?
When he asked me if I had passion, I felt all my doubts creeping in; maybe I didn’t have what was needed to succeed or at least to be taken seriously, after all.
What I really wanted from him was a reassurance that all was OK, that I could do it, that I would not fail. He didn’t do it, and I started doubting myself.
What I realize now it’s that it didn’t occur to me at the time to ask for help. I asked him for permission. I didn’t take the risk to believe in myself. I didn’t take the responsibility for the passion and the need that I had in me. The fear of failing was bigger than the ambition to succeed. All I wanted was to find somebody who would give me permission to be daring.
It’s not that I didn’t try. I went to a couple of newspapers, I talked to people, I asked politely for an opportunity. I tried, but I didn’t fight. I thought it would happen if I really deserved it. I didn’t.
I suspect that the memory of these events are coming back because I am reading Anne Fels’ Necessary Dreams. Fels talks about women’s conflictual relationship with their ambition and their need for recognition. She deconstructs piece by piece the myth of women’s difference as an essential, fundamental constituent of women’s identity and shows how much cultural conditioning there is in it. And how limiting women’s identity to this difference becomes a cage that constrains our ability to give ourselves what we need.
I think about my current situation, all the discomfort and pain I am going through now in my job, and I see the same mechanism in operation. I passionately and loudly ask for permission and reassurance rather than demanding recognition for what I have done and opportunities to do what I love. By now, I should know better.
What if I stop asking if I am good enough and start focusing my energy in making my dreams reality? What if I give myself permission to dare and to fight, if necessary, for what I want?
It’s not about becoming less empathic or losing sight of our interconnectedness. It’s not about starting to treat other people badly or just as an accessory to my ambition. It’s about taking responsibility for my skills, wants, and needs; taking the risk to do what I really want. Even if nobody gives me permission.
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