Generativity

“It doesn't do any good to blame people or the time-

one is oneself all those people. We are the time.”

― James Baldwin, Another Country

Another element of our dissolution relates to something universal about good aging – the instinct to be what Erikson* called ‘generative’ for our world as a whole.

Wendell Berry’s poem 'No Going Back' describes a transition from the infinite possibilities of youth, to a recognition that life’s richness increasingly comes from how and where we give ourselves away: 

No, no, there is no going back. / Less and less you are / that possibility you were.

More and more you have become / those lives and deaths / that have belonged to you.

When we relate to ourselves as both part of and in service to life, lots of subtle, good shifts occur: we move from being ‘entities-in-ourselves’ to something closer to ‘shepherds-of-life’ as it moves in us.

We embrace a looser project and focus than our individual self. We surrender into participation rather than triumph, and our life becomes akin to a field or a farm – an energetic arena in which growth, death, work, rest, production occurs. 

If, as Winnicott suggested, there is no baby without a mother, there is also no adult, really, without a world, without the planet floating around and through us, as us, we as it, and out beyond us, into tomorrows without us. 

At times, we will experience this as a deep affront; or at others as a source of fulfillment and joy.

If we are lucky, we will find ways to surrender, more and more often; to offer our energies into life, in the hope that our efforts float away from us, impacting and influencing elsewhere in good ways.

We become a field we want to fertilise, not for its own sake, but for the good of what life can grow there…

*This site offers a rich and practical overview of Erikson's model - focusing here on the themes of middle adulthood and elderhood respectively: generativity and stagnation; integration and despair.

Giving Ourselves Away

“There is only one immutable truth: No being is purely individual; nothing comprises only itself. Everything is composed of foreign cells, foreign symbionts, foreign thoughts. This makes each life-form less like an individual warrior and more like a tiny universe, tumbling extravagantly through life like the fireflies orbiting one in night. Being alive means participating in permanent community and continually reinventing oneself as part of an immeasurable network of relationships.”

― Andreas Weber, Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology