NOSTOLGIA FOR PAST STRUGGLES

As a young man in the late nineteenth century, Jody’s grandfather led his people westward to California.  But now in the twilight of his life, in the 1930s, he is considered a doddering old fool because he lives in the past.

Grandfather is speaking.  “It wasn’t the Indians that were important, nor adventure, nor even getting out here.  It was a whole bunch of people made into one crawling beast.  And I was the head.  It was westering and westering…

Under the little bushes the shadows were black at noonday.  When we saw the mountains at last, we cried – all of us.  But it wasn’t getting there that mattered.  It was movement and westering…Then we came down to the sea and it was done.”  He stopped and wiped his eyes until the rims were red.

When Jody spoke, grandfather started and looked down at him.  “Maybe I could lead the people, someday.”

The old man smiled.  “There’s no place to go.  There’s the ocean to stop you.  There’s a line of old men along the shore hating the ocean because it stopped them.”

This poignant scene from John Steinbeck’s, The Red Pony, makes the point that the process of moving toward goals is more important than actually achieving them.  It’s all about getting there, not being there.  The journey is the destination. Grandfather was exhilarated by the task of his younger days, and inflated by the achievement, but when it ended, he had nowhere to go.  He needed new obstacles to overcome.  Instead, he was immobilized by the ocean, and his life became an interminable and intolerable anti-climax.

The last CRISIS piece on June 17^th, made the point that war galvanizes people, it creates a powerful social bond, a shared and vital purpose.  Sometimes, after the war, when rhythms of everyday life return to their ordinary pace, people often miss the camaraderie, excitement and intensity of the shared purpose. Grandfather’s longing for past challenges, struggle, glory and suffering, were not generated by war or westering, but by the loss of direction.  For grandfather, the journey was everything; arriving at the destination negated the journey and the challenge of getting there.

Nostalgia for past challenges is not unusual.  In February,1983, when the turbulence of the 1960s had faded, columnist, Anne Taylor Fleming, quoted a friend who wistfully recalled his youth.  “Remember the sixties, the spirit, the hope?  We stopped a war then.  But now everything is different.”  Fleming, lamented the passing of the time when it was “somehow distinctly lovely to be young, when the country itself seemed young again, buoyant, in the throes of an often-unaccountable springtime…the war in Viet Nam, the women’s movement, the sexual revolution – gave those days then such vibrancy, such passion.  One had a fierce sense of living in the moment, of being wildly and giddily alive.”

But now, she writes sadly, “…there is the premature resignation of the middle-aged; there is no joyous contempt, no sense that the world can be a better place…”  

Something doesn’t quite fit.  Because Fleming and her friend associated the sixties and seventies with war and domestic disruptions, I would expect them to recall the time with distaste.  Instead, they long for those days of “vibrancy” and “passion.”  They hated war and sexism yet derived “joyous contempt” from fighting against them.   The years of napalm, assassinations, race riots, Kent State, My Lai, drugs, Watergate, daily war deaths in Viet Nam, and are fondly remembered as an “unaccountable springtime.”  It doesn’t make sense until we realize that their opposition to the Viet Nam war and other low hanging fruit like the A-Bomb, racism, unfair taxes, capitalism, corporate greed, and the “establishment,” clarified identities and provided a righteous sense of purpose.  To fight the good fight, to know who you are and what you oppose, and to take a heroic stance, can indeed provide “a fierce sense of living in the moment…” 

We feel most alive when we are in a state of opposition, when we know with absolute certainty that we are right and the other side is wrong, maybe even evil.   Righteous anger infuses dimension into our character; going against the grain provides substance and perspective to our lives.

Twenty years after the turmoil of the late sixties, Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin suggested that, “Many people reckon time from the ‘60s.  Time stopped for them.  I don’t miss the 60s.”  Back in the sixties, Jamil’s name was H. Rap Brown.  He was the leader of SNCC (Snick), the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, a Black civil rights group that gained national attention with its Black Power rhetoric and radical posturing.  In that brief and flaming moment, Brown/Jamil had more fame, action and purpose than most gain in a lifetime.

Radicals were nostalgic for the sixties because their subsequent lives lacked the drama and notoriety of those explosive days.  When they came down from the high of the sixties, they found themselves trying to recapture those intoxicating moments.  Jamil criticized his former radical comrade, Abbie Hoffman, by referring to Hoffman’s “60s nostalgia rhetoric.”  But they soon learned you can’t go home again.  The fun was over; there was no going back.

Novelist, Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22, made a similar observation. “For a great many people,” he wrote, “the activity of becoming successful is more rewarding than the success itself… In my own case,” Heller continued, “it was very exciting to write a novel that would even be published.  Then it became very important to get some good reviews and make money…With my second book, I got more favorable reviews and did make money.  Now it’s almost something that I can take for granted.  (Therefore) it becomes that much less exciting, that much less thrilling…”

Heller had the same basic problem as Jody’s grandfather: both were stopped or slowed, by success.  Heller was lucky: he found other oceans to cross.  With publication, good reviews and money a given, “the challenge of literary achievement becomes all the greater as a result.”

Actor Paul Newman was also jaded by success.  Because acting was too easy for him, he took up auto racing “to recover the good sense of purpose you have when you are young.”  One gains a sense of purpose by having to work to achieve goals.  Said Newman, “We think that if something’s not painful, it’s not worthwhile.  Maybe that’s the case with me.  All I know is that at some point I’d begun to feel restless.”  Paul Newman was restless for a challenge, something that required effort. Subsequently he dabbled in auto racing, liberal politics, the charitable salad dressing business and philanthropy.

Heller and Newman were able to reach beyond their successes by setting up loftier, or at least different, goals.  But those who cannot keep moving forward, often stagnate and deteriorate.  Vance Packard pointed out that people who have brief moments of glory, high esteem or high prosperity,” like movie actresses and athletes, often have severe emotional problems when they fall from notoriety and have nowhere to go.

What this all means is that success can be satisfying but is not always sustainable.  Success can be a kind of catch-22.  We are compelled to work toward goals, but achieving them eliminates the process of getting there, which is the real sustaining force.  Thus, in that sense, we lose by winning.

“The man who fully exists,” wrote Henri A. Talon, “is the man on the march.”  Psychotherapist, Sheldon Kopp, wrote, “It is the journey itself, that is his salvation.”  Paradoxically, success thwarts the journey.  Success can leave us crying at the ocean because it blocks our way.

Exerting effort presents us with challenges, problems to solve, and obstacles to overcome.  When life gets too easy, idleness becomes the devil’s workshop.  Or just boring.  Or meaningless.  Struggle gives substance, challenge, direction and relevance to what we do.  If there was no pain, no uncertainty, no ego deflation, no challenges, then what in the world would we do every day?   We would join the old men at the beach, cursing the ocean.