Composing a Life

An Excerpt from Mary Catherine Bateson's Composing a Life:

"In a stable society, composing a life is somewhat like throwing a pot or building a house in a traditional form: the materials are known, the hands move skillfully in tasks familiar from thousands of performances, the fit of the completed whole int eh common life is understood...Today, the materials and skills from which a life is composed are no longer clear. It is not longer possible to follow the paths of previous generations. This is true for both men and women, but it is especially true for women, whose whole lives no longer need to be dominated by the rhythms of procreation and the dependencies that these created, but who still must live with the discontinuities of female biology and still must balance conflicting demands."

"The model of an ordinary successful life that is held up for young people is one of early decision and commitment, often to an educational preparation that launches a single rising trajectory...Graduation is supposed to be followed by the first real job, representing a step on an ascending ladder. We don't expect long answers when we ask children what they want to be when the grow up, any more than we expect a list of names in response to questions about marriage. In fact, assumptions about careers are not unlike those about marriage; the real success stories are supposed to be permanent and monogamous. These assumptions have not been valid for many of history's most creative people, and they are increasingly inappropriate today. The landscape through which we move is in constant flux...Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers. Just as it is less and less possible to replicate the career of a parent, so it will become less and less possible to go on doing the same thing through a lifetime. "

"The twentieth century has been called the century of the refugee because of the vast numbers of people uprooted by war and politics from their homes and accustomed lives."

"In many ways, constancy is an illusion. After all, our ancestors were immigrants, many of them moving on every few years; today we are migrants in time...Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain."

"I found myself looking again at a patchwork of achievements both personal and professional and questioning how they fit together; whether they composed - or began to compose - a life; whether indeed the model of improvisation might prove more creative and appropriate to the twentieth century than the model of single-track ambition."

"Change proposes constancy: What is the ongoing entity of which we can say that it has assumed a new form? A composite life poses the recurring riddle of what the parts have in common."

"Just as change stimulates us to look for more abstract constancies, so the individual effort to compose a life, framed by birth and death and carefully piece together from disparate elements, becomes a statement on the unity of living. These works of art, still incomplete, are parables in process, the living metaphors with which we describe the world."

---Mary Catherine Bateson, excerpts from "Emergent Visions" in Composing a Life


Echoes of place. Globalization (Friedman's The World is Flat) and Gender Transformation (Taber's Wanting all the Right Things).