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New Ventures Christopher Columbus was hopelessly confused. He thought Cuba was Japan. But at that time no one else in Europe knew that the American continents blocked the way to the Orient, so he planted the Spanish flag and came back triumphant. Eventually his mistakes caught up with him. It became clear eventually that he had not found Japan, or China, or India. He was misguided in other ways. His aggression towards the indigenous population of the Americas, killing many and bringing others back as slaves, resulted in his imprisonment in Spain. And yet, despite his failings, he is remembered today as the first European to sail west to go east; the first European to discover America, despite little ships on a broad ocean and the lack of a global positioning system. His is a cautionary tale, but also an inspiring one. New ventures do not always go as planned, but they are often worth it for what is learned on the way. One of the most dramatic new ventures I can recall is the transformation of the self-styled “muckraking journalist,” the great I.F. Stone, from the publisher of the I.F. Stone Weekly to scholar of ancient Greek. Stone had published his Weekly from 1953 to 1971, tackling along the way McCarthyism, segregation, and the war in Vietnam . Heart disease forced him to slow down and take up something less challenging. So he decided to study Attic Greek, the Greek of ancient Athens , the first democracy. He wanted to understand how a city he so admired—this forerunner of American democracy and the first civilization we know of to protect freedom of speech—how could Athens put Socrates to death? Stone’s illness forced him to change his life at the age of 64; this question drove him to spend seven years learning Greek. Only then could he really begin the research that would answer his question. I understand Stone’s question about Athens and the death of Socrates. Some things we encounter in life fill us with a kind of longing that expands from the heart. It is a yearning that calls to us to a new task. It is likely to be a task that is not familiar, that means taking up something as a beginner despite years of success walking other paths. Being a beginner again means making mistakes, getting it wrong. Our music director Marcia Hempel teaches piano to adults as well as children. Marcia says that it’s “hard for adults to be bad at something.” But to learn something new, “That’s what you have to be willing to be, you have to be willing to be bad.” There is a kind of selfish selflessness in starting a new venture later in life. Answering the heart’s call is something we do for ourselves. It is, in a way, selfish. Yet I am convinced that if we feel this yearning powerfully, and choose to answer it in a way that respects the inherent worth of others, then we may be answering a call that is not just from our own hearts but from the heart of the universe. Some would say from the heart of God. It doesn’t matter what we call the Source of this deep longing. If playing the piano resonates with a yearning of the spirit, then doing it makes a difference, somehow, in the fabric of reality. Recently several people, unconnected with each other, have shared with me their deep inner longing and the question of purpose in their lives. It was heart-wrenching to hear one smart, fit, lively woman wondering out loud whether her purpose in life was fulfilled now that her child was grown. And in another the longing to seek further education was almost cancelled out by the fear that it was stupid to think of starting a master’s degree program at the age of 55 (an age that sounds younger to me with each passing year). Let me tell you about Joy Dale. She’s 87, but could easily pass for 55, especially with her exuberance and the light in her eyes. She would roar with laughter at the idea that 55 was too late to start a degree program. She started her doctoral program at 85, and will finish up next year. Eyes twinkling, Joy said to me, “People want to know what I’m going to ‘do’ with my degree. Why do I need to ‘do’ anything with it? I’m having so much fun learning!” It is this attitude that makes any new venture worth doing. Marcia says of her older piano students: “You play for yourself. You have to be patient. It’s the process you fall in love with. You have to like doing it, and not be after results.” It may be that the desire for “results” is what positions us to take up a new venture at a mature age. But to overcome the mistakes, the beginner’s incompetence, it’s necessary to fall in love with the process—to appreciate the immediate feedback of a scale well played; the joy of unveiling a single new thought in a book never before attempted; the pleasure of being able to decipher and recognize a single word in a new language. I.F. Stone must have “fallen in love with the process” when he began studying Greek. It took him seven years to learn Greek well enough to begin serious research. The heart disease slowed him down and cataracts narrowed his field of vision. But he persevered. Seventeen years after he began, and at the age of 81, his book The Trial of Socrates was published. The door is there. It makes no promises. It is only a door.(1) There is danger in stepping through. You will be confronted by doubters, naysayers, who echo your own doubts. At the beginning, any new thing is hard. You may play badly, confuse Japan and Cuba , wonder if you should give up. Letting go, even temporarily, even in a great cause, of the feelings of competence and control that get us through our daily lives is difficult because it challenges our sense of self. “Liberation is costly.”(2) Playing it safe seems easier. And there is nothing wrong with deciding not to take up something new. But in the end, playing it safe may not be safe at all, not if it means spending the rest of life feeling that yearning—and stuffing it away somewhere deep inside. It may come down to the question, “Who am I?” Choosing to trust the heart means affirming our own self-identity, either by discovering it or by creating it. Stone laughingly referred to himself as a “muckraking journalist.” In the end of his life, he used his talent as an investigative journalist to ferret out the story of Socrates and his death. When Stone began studying Greek, it must have seemed like a dramatic turn off the path of most of his life. Yet as he found the patience to learn what he needed simply to begin seeking the answer to the question that called him, he also found that his investigative skills gave him a new way of looking at the problem. Stone was not happy with the Socrates he found. And not all scholars agree with Stone that the great Socrates was an anti-democratic, anti-free-speech, elitist who supported a corrupt and murderous dictator—his own student—and continued supporting him even after his fall and the restoration of democracy to Athens. Certainly if Stone’s picture is true it is an ugly truth. But it is also one reverberating with lessons for us today, lessons Stone was equipped to recognize. Stone’s new venture, which appeared at first so astonishingly at variance with everything he had previously done, in the end turned out to have great resonance with the rest of his life—a resonance that would have been left undiscovered had he not taken up Greek at the age of 64. And he gave us something, too—even if unwelcome—something, perhaps, that only he could give us. Liberation is costly; but not as costly as remaining in the chains of fear and purposelessness. The years of faith that sustained the liberation movement in South Africa somehow gave way to self-determination, reconciliation, and democracy. How could anyone who sang N’kose Sikele i’Afrika(3) in the beginning of the 20 th century know that by the end of it the world would have changed? But it did. If there are not others keeping us in chains—if the chains are of our own making—then we must be our own liberators. Trust your heart. There may be many logical reasons something is a bad idea: a risk, a cut in pay, a complication, the likelihood of error, a burden while traveling. Life is filled with logical reasons not to attempt things. Yet are we here to live cookie-cutter lives, in the safest possible way? Or is there something more, something we long for, some progression of the self that brings us into union with our innermost being? Life itself makes no promises. It is only a door. Footnotes 1. Adrienne Rich, “Prospective Immigrants Please Note.” 2. Desmond Tutu, Archbishop of South Africa. 3. N’Kose Silele i'Afrika is now the national anthem of South Africa, but from the time it was written at the beginning of the 20 th century it was sung by the indigenous African peoples as an act of defiance against apartheid and the minority white government. Liberation of the South African people came about in 1993, when the laws changed and the native South Africans became self-determining. |
