Marc Blesoff: Seeing What is Most Real in the Midst of What is Most Familiar
"Serenity Now Moment at Lake
Tahoe," Photo by Keegan Houser on Unsplash
I’m reading a book written by David Brooks
titled The Second Mountain. In it, Brooks discusses the difference between a
career and a vocation. He writes that in the vocation mentality one is not
living on the ego level of consciousness, not guided by the frontal cortex. “When you are looking for a vocation, you
are looking for a daemon. You are trying … to fall through the egocentric
desires and plunge down into the substrate to where your desires are
mysteriously formed. You are trying to find that tension or problem that
arouses great waves of moral, spiritual and relational energy. That means you
are looking into the unconscious regions of heart and soul that reason cannot
penetrate. You are trying to touch something down there in the Big Shaggy, that
messy thicket that sits somewhere below awareness.
By one calculation the mind can take in 11
million bits of information a second, of which the conscious mind is aware of
40. The rest is in the Big Shaggy. As Timothy Wilson of the University of
Virginia put it, consciousness is like a snowball sitting on an iceberg. In
other words, most of what guides us is not our conscious rationalization; it’s
our unconscious realm.” The above quote from Brooks reminds me of
one of the best sentences I’ve ever read, written by Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen in
her introduction to the book titled The Five Invitations:
“The daily fabric that covers what is most
real is commonly mistaken for what is most real until something tears a hole in
it and reveals the true nature of the world.”
Remen continues, “In his brilliant book
Small Is Beautiful, E.F. Schumacher suggests that we can see only what we have
grown an eye to see. He proposes that the endless debate about the nature of
the world is not about differences but simply about the differing capacity of
our eyes.” Indeed, let’s grow our eyes so we can see
what is most real in the midst of what is most familiar. This is a question of
our awareness and our consciousness. This is an example of conscious aging.
As I was reading the introduction to The
Second Mountain, I noticed a striking resemblance to Lars Tornstam’s theory of
gerotranscendance. In describing people who have been liberated by their
struggles and their sufferings in the valley between their two mountains,
Brooks writes:
“But suddenly they are not interested in
what other people tell them to want. They want to want the things that are
truly worth wanting. They elevate their desires. The world tells them to be a
good consumer, but they want to be the one consumed – by a moral cause. The
world tells them to want independence, but they want interdependence – to be
enmeshed in a web of warm relationships. The world tells them to want
individual freedom, but they want intimacy, responsibility and commitment. The
world wants them to climb the ladder and pursue success, but they want to be a
person for others. The magazines on the magazine rack want them to ask “What
can I do to make myself happy?” but they glimpse something bigger than personal
happiness.”
This is akin to what Tornstam posits is the
natural path of aging for our species. As Dr. Bill Thomas summarizes
gerotranscendance, human aging includes an increased feeling of affinity with
past generations and a decreased interest in superfluous social interaction; a
feeling of cosmic awareness, and a redefinition of time, space, life and death;
becoming less self-occupied and at the same time more selective in the choice
of social and other activities; and experiencing a decrease of interest in
material things, with solitude becoming more attractive.
Conscious aging helps us to age with
intention. Conscious aging helps us to walk our species’ natural path of aging.
Conscious aging helps us to re-frame aging so that life can be more wonderful,
not just less horrible.
