Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!
-Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
I've noticed, as I've gotten older, something qualitatively different between myself and the next generation. It isn't about Millennial culture – it's about the ways people find meaning, and happiness through meaning, as they move through the life-cycle. There's an important change that creeps in on the back of experience.
As a rule, rites of passage in the US are usually designed to celebrate moving forward. There is no ceremony that bears the message, "This next part of life is probably going to be disappointing." They usually play up the positive, recognizing the value of forging a clearer picture as the fuzzy world of endless opportunity comes into focus as a million messy details.
Optimism about the potential for the future fades not just with age (sorry, but the door to becoming an Olympic gymnast has now closed) but with a growing awareness of what's actually possible.
That's a shame, in some ways. Optimism is a great source of happiness. Pragmatic understanding isn't – at least not directly, or quickly. In the end, you trade in that quick gratification for something alloyed with the sad recognition of realities that make negotiating a good life possible. But like Mark Twain, we tend to look on this as a loss.
Unlike Twain, we often miss the more subtle good that comes out of it.
The De-Mystifying Power of the Interstate Highway System
A long time ago, I drove across the country.
After college I launched into adulthood. I moved to Texas for a few years and taught elementary school. It didn't go well. I returned to New York and spent a couple of years redesigning the rocket and launched again, this time toward California.
One day in early August, I set out for the Bear Republic. I drove I-90 through the lush, green eastern Midwest, then took the 80 through the Rockies and the Great Plains, then the 5 to southwestern tip of the country.
It only took a week. I was surprised by that.
For as long as I can remember, I'd thought of the US in the terms of The American Pageant and the other text books I read in school – as a vast and varied land of canyons, mountains, and the "grain belt," immense in its scope and history. It took almost three hundred years to close the frontier. And now, thanks to the wonders of modern technology and civic engineering, you can drive the entire length in an easy week.
It's possible to miss the remarkableness of the interstate highway system – mile after mile of the same grey tarmac blurring by. What makes those roads remarkable, though, is the fact that they make the country so much easier to cross, so much more predictable, and, as a result, make it feel so much smaller than it did back before the system was completed. On the last day of the trip, heading south from Los Angeles, I stopped at a place where I-5 overlooks the Pacific. I got out and looked at the sun glinting off the water and thought, "Huh, That's exactly how big America is."
Two Stages, Two Types of Meaning
Like many psychologists, Carl Jung divides life into different stages. In his Jungian organizational way, he likens the stages to archetypes, which encourage us to think of them as distinct life-cycle entities. The first part of life, Jung explains in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, is about growth – speeding forward into life and establishing oneself. Later on, opportunities for discovery occur increasingly rarely, and instead of speeding forward to keep up as life expands, we can slow down, sink down, and find meaning in the places we've already discovered. As with all psychological phenomena, it takes on a particular flavor in American society. For Twain, the river changed from poetry to signals and portents. Today, the world changes from mythical to mundane.
It strikes me that we pass from one stage to the next in little bits. Small experiences accrue, and things that seemed mysterious lose their mystical glow and become concrete, and, sometimes, useful tools. The version of me who arrived at the Pacific was different from the one who had left New York. Some of the change had to do with the fact that I'd spent the first night I could remember in the hospital on the way, with a terrible case of food poisoning, that a bear stole my backpack one night in the High Sierras, and that I'm pretty sure I was visited by a ghost in a hotel room somewhere in Nebraska.
But in spite of all that, probably the most lasting difference came from seeing the ocean. Now that I'd driven all the way across the United States, I had to square General Custer, Brigham Young, and Abraham Lincoln with grasslands and miles and miles of corn stalks drying in the late summer sun; the mythical country was now measured: 3,300 miles from Rochester to San Diego if you go through Minneapolis and Fresno.
Instead of having vast new horizons to explore, I became aware of a dawning dread of the possibility that each small town is almost exactly like the next. The stage of speeding forward – at least one form of it – was over. It had been replaced with the opportunity to understand the world more deeply.
Meaning in Passing
Life in the US comes with plenty of opportunities to expand across a mythical landscape. The Facebook frontier is still untamed and the promise of onward-and-upward can be found whenever a character on a TV show applies to college or starts a business.
And there are also plenty of opportunities to find meaning. The lessons of childhood get revisited and reinterpreted through the lessons of parenthood.
It's recognizing the value of transition that's hard.
For Twain, who learned to read the Mississippi River as a steamboat pilot, transition went unremarked at first.
In our community-poor society, most of us undergo lots of these little passages alone, so many of the experiences that allow us to look for meaning go unnoticed. And parenthood aside, these transitions don't get thought about as opportunities to see things in a deeper, more meaningful way, but as a loss of the expansive, exciting, mythical potential of life instead.
So Jung was probably right. These are changes, not losses – and it's up to us to figure out how to mark them that way. It's hard for me to see how my 26-year-old self could have felt good about the revelation of the Pacific, in its relative proximity to New York. That only came much later, as wisdom slowly accrues. It ended the myth of America, but it cleared the way for a more honest vision of what there actually was.
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