On individuation

Or, what happened when I opened up 'Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life'

When I was in my twenties, one of my writing heroes was Tom Wolfe, the author of novels like The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff, who before he wrote books was one of journalism’s best-known magazine writers, chronicling subcultures from NASCAR drivers in North Carolina all the way to the then-burgeoning hippie movement of the 1960s, over on the west coast.

His writing style was truly his own, filled with loads of exclamation points (!!!) and CAPITAL LETTERS galore. (I do a bit of this myself sometimes, actually!) Maybe my favorite story about him, though, is one where he couldn’t find the words at all — his first big magazine assignment, for Esquire back in the early 60s.

Wolfe was in his early thirties and, even though he’d done loads of research and reporting — in this case, on custom car culture in Los Angeles — he simply couldn’t find the words to actually write the story:

[I was] “too old to have gone through this,” and “had total writer’s block.” His editors finally told him to send his notes, “‘and we’ll give them to a real writer’—they didn’t say ‘real’—‘to put into proper form.’ And with a very heavy heart, I said O.K. and I sat down to write out the notes.”

He ended up writing a long, personal letter to his editor, Byron Dobell, who ended up removing only the salutation at the beginning and printing the rest of it exactly as-is, with every single capital letter and exclamation point intact.

So, why am I sharing this story with you? Because of a book I’ve been reading, James Hollis’s Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, which of course is very different from anything in Wolfe’s canon but has been equally compelling to me lately nonetheless.

I’m finding so much in the book that’s fascinating — and meaningful, especially as I approach my 54th birthday next month — but I’m also, at the moment, struggling to put it all into a single, coherent theme; right now I’m experiencing a lot of jumbled thoughts that yes, they connect, but feel not quite cohesive.

That’s when Wolfe’s experience on “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby” came to mind, and so I thought… why not share what’s jumping out at me right now?

Let me start by sharing a couple of things that got me curious about this whole topic, which the book’s subtitle — “how to finally, really grow up” — encapsulates so well:

• The first was this post by Jason Kottke, in which he shared a conversation he’d had with his therapist about a crisis he was in the midst of: “She told me something that’s had a profound effect on my life ever since: ‘Jason, what you’re feeling is appropriate for the developmental stage you’re in right now’… it hit me right between the eyes and I knew exactly what she was trying to say. Our growth never ends. We never stop going through developmental stages — we just call them things like ‘becoming a parent’, ‘mid-life crisis’, or ‘perimenopause’. The pain, confusion, and emotional distress we experience is because we’re growing.”

• And that reminded me of another, earlier post by Austin Kleon, on what the inner state of the average man is like, and what we can do about it: “build a network of friends, learn to listen to yourself, pay attention to your thoughts and feelings, authorize yourself that what you notice is important, and trust your intuition.”

Those posts — you can stop here and go read them, it won’t take long — set the stage so well for Hollis’s book, which opens by recalling the beginning of the epic poem The Divine Comedy, written back in the 14th century by the medieval Italian poet and philosopher Dante Alighieri.

Dante opens Inferno, the poem’s first volume, by describing what it feels like to be lost in the middle of life’s journey: “I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell of that wood, savage and harsh and dense, the thought of which renews my fear…”

As Hollis explains in his book’s first chapter, each of us reaches a point like this in mid-life, a moment when we’ve grown old enough to see that the demands we once put on ourselves don’t fit us anymore, yet we’re still young enough to fear what may happen if we act on that feeling:

“What brings us to our various dark woods is frequently interpreted as an external violation of the soul, an intrusion on a smoothly flowing life, whether from the acts of others, from the fates, or by our own choices. Yet just as often, inexplicably, it is the soul itself that has brought us to that difficult place in order to enlarge us, to ask more of us than we planned on giving.”

What was so interesting to me is that Hollis says this feels like struggling, or even suffering — and that, as much empathy as he feels for his patients when they go through it, this struggle is a sign that something deep down wishes to be heard:

“In the end, we will only be transformed when we can recognize and accept the fact that there is a will within each of us, quite outside the range of conscious control, a will which knows what is right for us, which is repeatedly reporting to us via our bodies, emotions, and dreams, and is incessantly encouraging our healing and wholeness.”

This journey isn’t about selfishness or ego, Hollis adds — in fact it’s the opposite, he writes, as it is “the lifelong project of becoming more nearly the whole person we were meant to be”:

“As Jesus is reported to have said in the Gospel of Thomas, ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’ This is the essence of what [Carl] Jung means by individuation. It is a service not to ego, but to what wishes to live through us. While the ego may fear this overthrow, our greatest freedom is found, paradoxically, in surrender to that which seeks fuller expression through us. Enlarged being is what we are called to bring into this world, contribute to our society and our families, and share with others.”

All of this — my own version of this, anyway — is what I sift through when I run, I think. It’s my time to figure out if I’m on the right path (or not), what of my gifts am I not expressing or bringing to the world, and what (if anything) there is that I can do about that, you know?

I don’t think a lot about my speed, my pace or my distance (though of course, let’s face it, I have measure of vanity too, and I love seeing low numbers on my watch when I’m done!). But this has become the focus for me, especially in the last few years.

What about you? How do you approach these questions? Have you reached the point Hollis describes in your own life? What did you do/are you doing about it?

As always, I love hearing your thoughts and what’s going on in your running/life — let me know!

Your friend,

— Terrell