Being 60: Happiness Is Not an Accident
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1 Being 60: Happiness is Not an Accident (A Scholar’s Search for Fearlessness) Alternative titles: Beneath the Surface: Journeying through Fear to Joy Being 60: On Death & Dating Being 60: Journeying through Fear to Joy Patricia Mellencamp 2 Table of Contents Section I: Death: A Passage through Time Prelude: Becoming 60 Chapter 1: Facing Death & Aging: From Anxiety to Equanimity Chapter 2: A Spiritual Quest in India: A Student of Death Chapter 3: Of Mothers, Daughters, Fairytales, and Death Chapter 4: How I Learned to Read the Wall Street Journal: Money, The Market, and my Mother, A Love Story Section II: Dating: The Problem might not be the Prince Chapter 5: Melodrama in Morocco: ‘Deep Sixtied’ Chapter 6: Sea Ranch, California & the Buddha. Chapter 7: An Asian Odyssey: Buddhist Boot Camp Chapter 8: High Drama in the Himalayas: On the Road in Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan Chapter 9: Southeast Asia: The Silence of History Chapter 10: A Man, A Plan, A Canal: Panama Chapter 11: An Old Girl Can Learn New Tricks: China, the Market, and Me. Epilogue: Now: Being 60 . or 70 or . Footnotes Author 3 ***** Although personal experience is used as illustration, this book is neither autobiography nor memoir. Far too many encounters and people are missing to constitute a life. The highly selective focus is on moments of learning about fear and moving through its anxiety. So it’s about 5% of a life. Is it self-help? Yes. Particularly because the goal is to find and nurture the inner self. Is it how-to? Yes. Because it relies on the updated yet ancient teachings of great beings who reveal ways to deal with fear and other emotions. But it is intimate and private rather than objective and professional, a tale told by an amateur. The structure is a search for fearlessness through events, books, countries, and finally the lense of a new, late in life love affair. And it is told from the point of view of a 60 year old woman, a feminist media scholar and author of seven books, and a single mother, unmarried for 25 years, who reveals her struggles with a late-in-life relationship, along with the self insights and happiness that emerged from confronting fear and embracing love. It is a tale of mother love and of romance, including love at first sight and travel to exotic places like an ashram in India, Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, the remote, primitive regions of Myanmar (Burma), Vietnam, Laos, and China. It is a book which anyone who has had fear about losing a child, caring for ill and dying parents, death, aging and growing old, money, and finally, men and relationships, will understand. Along the way, Distinguished Professor Mellencamp shares her many great teachers – keeping their invaluable words intact so that they may be reapplied to other lives. Happiness is Not an Accident is a creative encyclopedia of great spiritual writers, including many women, whose words are guides through life’s fears. And it is a book which consistently reveals the adventure and joy of being 60, a secret that has been kept from younger women for generations. As the Epilogue says: “Being something, anything, is to fully inhabit, or embody . whatever, without hedges, or qualms or self-doubt. It is a state without equivocation. Being 60 is to embrace all the aches, wrinkles, intelligence and experience that have accrued in six decades. Being 60 is facing the last part of life with an attitude – of assertion and acceptance, of curiosity and humility, of adventure and retreat, all dosed with humor. Being 60 is prime time.” 4 PRELUDE: Becoming 60 I always felt ten years behind in my adult life – achieving at 50 what men do at 40. Only in my 50s, did I learn to value myself and my thoughts accurately. Although I had many essays published, only in my 50s did I write my own books, becoming an author, and more importantly, feeling some authority. I think this time lag is true for many women, particularly those who are also mothers. It took time for women of my generation, girls in the 1940s and 1950s, women and mothers in the 1960s and 1970s, to find and then pro/claim1 their talents. Self worth, like economic equality, was an elusive value. Many of us were the best students in the class, from grade school through graduate school. Although we learned how to study and to work, we weren’t taught to have professional careers; instead, we had jobs. And there is a big difference. This paradox trained us to be wives and to support our husbands’ ambitions as if they were our own. But they are not. A career, like education, cannot be given away, it cannot really be shared equally -- although this is what the Clintons are trying to do by invoking Hillary’s experience as first lady/wife. (See Addendum for more on contradiction.) Despite this double bind – be smart, not ambitious -- I became an independent woman with an academic career as a feminist media scholar, known for speaking up, irreverently so, and lecturing around the world. My divorce in 1976 was my economic incentive. My inspiration came from my two children who were adorable and superb students. They are wonderful, accomplished human beings, now in their thirties, with professional careers and families. I eventually lived in a beautiful condominium in a gracious estate built by a German beer baron in 1907 on Lake Michigan, walked a few blocks to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where, as a Distinguished Professor, I taught film history. I took my two Cairn Terriers to my lectures; they loved college students, especially the snacks in their backpacks, as did I. Work involved re-viewing a Hitchcock thriller or a Buster Keaton comedy or a German Expressionist or Japanese film or attending an international conference with good friends. Sometimes I had to pinch myself. And I could deduct “going to the movies” from my taxes. I loved my work. I ended up with a magnificent life. It was a self-made professional life – for I did not have a PhD. I became a Professor (Associate, then Full) and was appointed a Distinguished Professor on the basis of my writing and international reputation2, a rare achievement, particularly for a woman (and one who taught movies, just crass popular culture for many, and was [and is] a feminist), in a university system in which only 2% of Full Professors were women. Unlike this rarified percentage, I was also self-taught. I had only one film course in graduate school – receiving a Masters degree in Communication. In a highly professional world of hierarchical credentials, I was, early on, a rank amateur and had to run very fast to keep up. It took years for me to believe that I had even adequate knowledge. Academia can be exhausting – for there truly is no end to knowledge. 5 During my 50s, my quest was to conquer fear – many of which had been dormant, or unconscious, unnamed for years but there as anxiety or high drama or just emotional chaos. Walking toward fear by leaning into the pain became a challenge, almost like an obstacle course I was learning to master. Each time, I would successfully emerge on the other side, stronger, happier. I didn’t realize then how much of my intellectual writing also concerned fear – that beneath the patina of scholarship, I was writing about my life, trying to understand my emotions. I began with writing a book about the ways television creates anxiety, High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Age & Comedy, a very fat book, and ended, books and experiences later, with a project to write about death. Becoming 60 involved dealing with archaic, and displaced, and real fear, particularly the fear of death. When I was ready, and open to learn, I found teachers everywhere. During my 50s, my Siddha Yoga meditation practice helped me deal with my son’s diagnosis of cardiomyopathy at the same time as I faced the long illnesses and deaths of my parents. I would also learn about investing in the stock market; my mother was my teacher. Later, in my 60s, came knowledge of emotions and relational dynamics via Buddhism and the concepts of the Swiss psychoanalyst, Carl Jung. I call these my amateur knowledges. Amateur knowledge comes from experience, from the ordinary and the everyday, and, like the Latin root of amateur, amo, it has love at its core. Acquisition of this kind of knowledge was precipitated by trauma, along with fear. Initially the knowledge is a means of survival – a lifeline -- and then of healing; eventually it becomes a way of life that leads to contentment, the highest form of happiness. My awareness of death came in stages – beginning in my late 40s. The first form death took was highly amorphous, as fear and anxiety -- Fearing Death. Then death became a very real and unexpected drama. I was there as my father died of botched, emergency stomach surgery. The second form of death was Facing Death. As in life, my father was my teacher. I didn’t want to look away from what was happening, I wanted to see death. During this brief period and then throughout the seven year deathwatch for my mother, who had bone cancer, I began to read about death, particularly Eastern Philosophy. As I became a student of death, death became a part of my life, at least intellectually so. This knowledge was reassuring, comforting, not frightening; acknowledgement began to quell my fear. I wanted to lighten my mother’s fear of excruciating pain and impending death by talking and reading about others’ experiences.