Between the Dark and the Daylight: Encountering and Embracing the Contradictions of Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

disbanded or the office has been eliminated or simply that the people who once asked you for answers to their questions are now calling somebody else.
    More commonly than we realize, they’re average middle-aged couples once identified by the local church as “Family of the Year” who then had to bear the headlines in the local paper trumpeting the fact that their child had been convicted for dealing drugs. Whatever the situation, the sun has shifted in another direction, the star over my life has faded, one of my reasons for getting up in the morning has gone.
    The truth is that all social positions, no matter how small or how large on anybody’s sociometric scale, are fragile. They depend in some instances on term lengths alone: After so many years in an office no matter how much aperson likes a position, fits the position, it ends. The psychological impact of being removed from something simply because the time is up, whether the person’s interest or capacity for the work is up or not, is necessarily unsettling.
    In other situations, because membership itself changes, because the needs of the time change, too, as the years go by, the expectations of the members change, as well. Then it’s not too long before the officeholders themselves begin to feel distance grow up between them and the very people who once cheered them there. Sometimes it’s as simple as seeing the work of a lamplighter consumed by the new electric switch, of seeing the artistry of my life, the talent for which I have been acclaimed, replaced by the new technology.
    Even celebrities know the pressure of having public tastes change toward them, however talented they may be.
    In every instance, support flags, energy fades, endurance pales.
    Whatever the particular situation that prompts a major life change for those who have known the exhilaration of public approval, however limited and local, or the abrupt loss of the public spotlight, as well, the moment is a major one, can even be traumatic for some. Of all the things in a person’s life that require a person to literally begin again, this may be the most impacting. This one is not simply a time of progressive change from one level of involvement to another in the same area. This one involves a real reappraisal of the self. And often a sense of loss, of no place to go, of having life stopped in midflight.
    And so, in the light of such fragility, how do peoplewhose lives depend on this kind of public function sleep through the night with time nipping at their heels, bringing them closer by the day to the end they know must come but do not want? What is the answer then to the question, Where do I go now? What do I do now? What is my life about now?
    The fact is that the preparation for a change of status, any status, must begin even before the change occurs. Years before life becomes consumed by the public and its public functions, the healthy person decides never to be held captive to the masks of officialdom. Never to become the role in which they find themselves. Never to surrender a private life to a public one.
    It is a matter of making sure that a single dimension of life does not consume all the other ones—family, friends, personal interests and basic and fundamental human goals. It is, as young people argue, a matter of “getting a life” that is not consumed by a role, by a position, by a function that will just as easily become someone else’s position tomorrow as my own today.
    Few American presidents managed to stay as close to people and real life as Harry Truman did. Every day he simply got up and walked around the block, meeting new friends, greeting old ones, becoming part of the environment. As a result, when his term of office was over, there was no neighborhood to go back to because he had never left it.
    Keeping up with old hobbies or developing new ones protects us from becoming one-dimensional people in one-dimensional positions.
    Creating other equally avid