I wrote this essay about four years ago and have revised it from time to time since. I’ve started to post it once or twice but hesitated because, as a friend of mine said, “it’s awfully personal.” But I was looking for another piece of writing on my computef today and took a look at this again and decided both that I really like it and that it might be useful the people for whom it was written—my younger political and academic friends.
With a few exceptions, I’ve left this written as it was when I last revised it two years ago, before I ran for Council and became a full time political organizer. I’ve just updated it in a few places to talk about the health care campaign I’m currently running in Pennsylvania
I have been thinking about getting older lately. Partly this is because I turned fifty not that long ago. But it is more because I have been spending some time talking with young people with whom I have been working. I have always spent time talking with young people as I have been a college teacher for twenty five years. When I taught in a political science department at UNC Charlotte, I got to know a group of students very well, because a number of them would take four or five courses with me over the course of their college career and then do their senior theses with me. They became friends of mine and with one another and used to say that the majored in Political Science and minored in Stier. I hear from some of them quite frequently.
At Temple, however, I taught a required course called Intellectual Heritage and students can rarely take more than one course with me, so I don’t get to know them that well.
More recently, while still at Temple and since I became a full time political organizer, I have been working in Philadelphia with a great group of mostly young people, some who are associated with Philly for Change and others who I have met in other contexts. They are significantly older than my college students. In particular, a few years ago I go to know pretty well two young women in the 25 to 35 year old age range Both . Two are from Philly and the third is a former student who had become a close friend who I reconnected with recently and with whom I correspond very frequently. All three of them are in fields that to different degrees involve writing and politics and both are in the formative stages of their political careers. Talking or corresponding with them has gotten me thinking even more about the burdens and benefits of getting older.
There are some burdens of getting older. For me, that mostly means two things. The first burden is dealing simultaneously with parents who have themselves gotten much older and have health problems and a child who is in her teenage years with all the difficulties that brings.
The second burden is recovering a little more slowly from bumps and bruises and having to pay more attention to the potential for health problems down the road. (In other words, I’m trying to keep my cholesterol under control and blood pressure low.) All told, the burdens of being fifty as opposed to forty or thirty are pretty small.
But especially after comparing notes with these two three young women and the other young people I know the advantages of being fifty strike me as much greater than the burdens.
Freud, Love and Work
Freud is supposed to have said that there are two elements of happiness, love and work. (By the way, no one I now can find this saying in his collected works or has a source in the memoir literature about Freud. If you can track this down, you will be a major celebrity in Freud studies.) This has always seemed right to me. And what strikes me about being 50 as opposed to 30 is how much easier both love and work are now for than they were twenty years ago.
I am going to write more about work because happiness in love strikes me as much more the result of personal idiosyncrasy and luck than happiness at work.
Lucky in Love
About love, basically all I want to say is that if you have been lucky enough to marry the right person and if you have a capacity for intimacy, then you are, in a phrase from the 1930s movies I love, sitting pretty. Knowing that there is someone at home who cares for you as much as you care for yourself, who knows you as well as you know yourself, and with whom you feel totally free to be yourself, is incredibly empowering. Life is always hard, both when things are going badly and you need help and also when things are going well and you have difficult choices to make. Having someone who shares those burdens, who cares enough to listen well and understands enough to give good advice, and who can tell you nicely when you are being a total idiot, is really a blessing. It’s great to have someone upon who you can unload your frustrations with the people you work with, to whom can say what you can’t say to them. And it’s also great to have someone to share your triumphs. Indeed, I’ve always found that, unless you can share it with someone, there is always something empty about success. (Maybe because I enjoy the work I do, much that success—and the end of that work—is always a bit of a let-down unless I can share it with someone.)
Of course, it works both ways. Knowing that there is another person who depends upon you for support and sustenance is empowering as well. It makes you feel good to be relied upon and helps put your own problems in perspective. And, as some brilliant person once said, if you are not feeling good, the best cure is to try to make someone else feel better.
And I haven’t even mentioned that having a marriage that is full of passion and fun, one in which you share a range of interests with your partner is incredible as well. One reason I think Aristotle is the philosopher most in touch with human life—or at least with male life, since most anything he wrote about women is pretty awful—is that he recognized the importance of diversion and pleasure in the most serious of lives. In my twenties I was so driven that I used to get exhausted from overwork. My wife has introduced me to so much in the world I might have missed—dance, painting, and photography in particular—and has shared and spurred my interests in jazz, movies, theatre, basketball, food, and the beach and mountains. All these things have kept me refreshed, made me more energetic, and made my life so much more enjoyable.
Sometimes I worry about my young friends. Love is always hard to find but it seems even more difficult now then when I was their age. So many young people seem scarred by growing up with divorced parents. So many have doubts about the possibility of happiness in love. I see this is in my twenty and thirty year old friends and even more in my college students. Some of them seem to almost fear intimacy as much as they seek it. And I don’t know if all my young friends really understand how important partnership is, whether in love or work. They sometimes take pride—or maybe it is seeking refuge—in the romantic stance of standing alone against the world. And sometimes it seems as if they find the intensity of a real partnership—in love or work—threatening or discomforting. Yet, at the same time—and this is again true of both college students and thirty year olds—they are quicker to seek help from others than I was at their age.
They are also seem to oscillate between a fear of losing themselves in love during which times they push against the intimacy available to them and a fear of being without love during which times they are intimate with the wrong people. But when I get most worried, I try to remember how difficult it was for me in my twenties, how wrenching were some of my relationships, how much I had to change and grow in order to be capable of falling in love with the woman who became my wife. And I recall that I also found partnerships difficult to negotiate in work as well as in love. And then I worry less. We are all born with the desire to love and be loved, and with the capacity to form deep friendships. But the capacity for it and appreciation of its importance is something we have to nurture…and for some of us it takes longer and the path is much harder than for others. And it is especially hard, when you are young and so much of life seems uncertain, to let down your guard and be open to others. Much of the teenage and young adult years are devoted to building the hard shells we need to survive as adults. So it’s sometime hard for us to be soft with one another. I’m thus pretty grateful that at 50 I have come pretty far down that path.
Work and Love
Doing well in love might have a little to do with getting older and developing the capacity for intimacy. But I tend to think it has a lot more to do with the personal tendencies that make us more or less capable of love, as well as the luck of the draw in finding the person who is, to use Plato’s metaphor, our other half.
On the other hand, doing well at work seems to me to have a lot to do with growing older and developing skills and abilities that make work much easier and, at least potentially more fun.
Harry Gottlieb and the Practice of Medicine
I first realized this when my father-in-law, Harry Gottlieb, was on his deathbed ten years ago. I was very sad at the thought of losing a man I liked and admired so much. But I also thought about how sad it was that our city would lose this incredibly skilled doctor. Harry was a very well known internist at MCP with a specialty in endocrinology. He was an incredible doctor whose skills at the diagnosis and long term treatment of difficult diseases such as diabetes were very well known by his colleagues, most of whom asked Harry to their personal physician.
I had often talked with Harry about the practice of medicine. At the time I was doing some philosophical work on the nature of expertise. My own take on what it was to be an expert in something, which was influenced by my reading of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, was that it rested on practical skills developed through a long period of training rather than theoretical knowledge. Theory was important and one did have to keep up with it. But without the practical ability to know how to apply the theory, theoretical knowledge was, at best useless, and at worst, something that could be positively dangerous.
Harry agreed with me. And his practice as a doctor proved it. For example, he was the last physician I knew who actually gave me a real physical exam. When I came to him once with what seemed like a weird cold or flu, his short stubby hands poked and prodded me in all sorts of ways. It actually was a little rough…there was no mistaking that I had had a serious physical exam. And then he announced I had pleurisy. I must have looked a little surprised that he had diagnosed this without any tests for he said, “Well, I could take some tests but they really would be a waste of time and money. I am going to give write you a prescription and tell you what is going to happen over the next three days. If it doesn’t happen, we can run some tests.” Of course, Harry was right and the next three days happened pretty much as he predicted.
So as he was dying, I kept thinking about how sad it was that all his incredible skills—skills that he told had taken years to develop—would die with him. And then I remembered that in addition to being a wonderful doctor, he was a great teacher. And I brightened a bit thinking of all the people he had taught and to whom he passed on not just skills—which, after all, could not be learned in a year or four of residency—but his attitude towards being a physician—which, I hoped, would enable his students to develop their skills as he did.
Writing
Over the course of the last year each of my two young friends have remarked about how productive and energetic I am. One of them, with whom I worked on a city wide campaign, thanked me for all my work at the end of the campaign and was shocked when she learned that I actually had a day job teaching at Temple. “I couldn’t understand how you ran this campaign basically by yourself and it never occurred to me that you actually had a job,” she said. My other friend, who is an accomplished writer, has expressed surprised at how much and how fast I write, not just what appears on my blog but what I write for the political and issue campaigns with which I’m involved as well as the articles I write for newspapers and the work in political philosophy I occasionally still find time to do. How, she wondered, have I been able to do all that? She told me how the (really wonderful) writing she does is difficult and time consuming.
I know exactly what she meant because writing was once much more difficult for me than it is today. I have loved to write since I was a freshman in college. That was when I discovered that writing was not a means of recording thoughts I already had, but of discovering new and sometimes surprising ideas. And it was when I discovered how much pleasure a well structured essay, an original argument, and, even more, a memorable phrase gave me. I was in my late twenties when I first adapted a line from one of my heroes, Miles Davis, and started saying that writing gave me more pleasure than anything else I did with my clothes on.
But though writing was pleasurable once I got going, it was also incredibly hard work. I had to force my self to sit down and get started and it took me a while to generate some momentum. I found it hard to sit for long. I could work for about a half hour and then I would take a walk and think through some things before I sat down again for another half hour battle with my computer. I used to joke that it was a good thing I was writing political philosophy because my research method consisted mostly of taking long walks and talking to myself.
Now things are much easier for me as a writer—and as a political activist, which I’ll come back to at the end of this essay. There are a number of reasons for this, most of them having to do with my age.
Age and Energy
The first is that I have a lot more energy than I used to have. Now I have always been blessed with a lot of energy. (The longest five minutes of my life was when I was eight years old and my grandmother offered me a quarter if I could sit in a chair and be quiet for that length of time. I probably haven’t done that since.) Writing used to wipe me out. I could do no more than four or five of writing a day, broken into two parts, and then could not do any kind of intellectual work the rest of the day. And I needed a good eight hours of sleep a night to be functional the next day. This was probably good for my marriage as I was happy to fill up the day folding laundry, going shopping, and cooking dinner while my wife was doing her medical residency.
Now things are different. I can sit for hours and write. I don’t need to take breaks like I used to. And I don’t like to sleep more than six hours a night and can get by with much less for days at a time—especially when I’m adrenalated by an issue or political campaign.
I’m not sure what the difference is. I once read that you need to sleep when you are learning a lot because at night your brain reorganizes all that it has absorbed during the day. (Babies probably learn more each day than any of us, thus they need to sleep so much.) Sometimes it seems as I’m not learning as much each day as I used to. Since I have become politically active I certainly don’t read as many books as I used to. But I suspect that the real difference has to do with it being easier to learn because I have so much context in which to put what I learn.
Contextual Knowledge
At least in the fields I’m interested in, context is everything. Understanding an argument about public policy or a political action is so much easier when you have some context to put it in, when you have seen or read about similar issues or circumstances or when you have heard parallel arguments about the subject before.
I think most people misunderstand what being smart or intelligent is all about. It is much more about having information organized in a way that you can use it than it is about thinking quickly. I never thought of myself as a particularly quick thinker—and when I started to, there were always people in high school and college and graduate school who seemed so much quicker than me. But after thirty years of reading, writing and teaching about philosophy and politics—and ten years of community and political activism—I have learned a little about these subjects. And, even more than that, after writing a number of long manuscripts I have developed a perspective on politics that helps me organize and apply that information. Having this kind of context helps me work effectively and write quickly.
Practice
And so does all the writing I have done. Writing is like any other activity—you only learn to do it by practicing. In the last thirty years I have probably written over two to three million words of prose including four book manuscripts that total 1.4 million words. And some of that writing, especially some abstract work I have done in philosophy, was incredibly difficult work. There were times when I felt that writing one really good paragraph a day was a major accomplishment. Even now, philosophical work is much more difficult than political writing for me. But it is all so much easier than it used to be because of all the practice I have gotten.
And, I should add, because of all the reading I have done. Again, people often assume that each and every sentence you write is an original creation. The fact is that most of my sentences—and here I mean not just the ideas in the sentences but their structure—I have borrowed from someone else. I can look through a page of my writing and recognize that this sentence structure is something I borrowed from Michael Walzer; that one comes from Alasdair Macintyre and the one over there I took from Chuck Taylor, to name the three political philosophers who most influenced me. There are certain kinds of structures I think I have developed myself…but that might just be wishful thinking. Despite all my borrowing, I know I have a style of writing that is more or less my own. But to the extent it is, my own however, it is because I have followed the Stravinsky who once said that good composers borrow, great ones steal.
Confidence
Out of all that practice has come another reason that I can work so much faster than I once did: I have a lot more confidence in myself and my own observations and insights into political and social life. That is not to say I don’t make lots of mistakes or leave important things out or need a lot of advice. I do. And some things I write need lots of revision before they see the light of day. But after thirty years, I know that I can produce arguments that make sense and that I can make interesting and important observations about political life. When I was just starting out, I researched everything to the end. My early writing is so detailed because I tried to consider every alternative and anticipate every objection. I still have tendency to do that. However that tendency is much more under control because I trust my instincts now in a way I couldn’t possibly have done at twenty five.
Partnerships
It also helps that I now a lot of people who I can ask for advice and information. And I’m not afraid to call them. Bob Brady is famous for saying that what he is good at is knowing who is good at everything else. It is a very important skill and one that everyone should try to acquire.
And this comes back to a point I made when I was talking about love. Partnerships are critical in every area of life. When I was younger I had trouble, as they say, playing well with other children. Partly this was because I wanted to see my own ideas implemented and was afraid that partnering with others would dilute my influence. And partly it was because I didn’t feel confident enough to work with others, especially people who seemed to be confident experts in the fields in which I was interested. I was afraid that they would see how much I didn’t now or that I would let them down. (That was actually a silly fear because most confident experts love to help others follow in their path.) And partly it was because the writing I was doing in political philosophy was very far from the mainstream and it was difficult to find people who believed enough in my large project even to hear it out, let alone to work with me on it. And, anyway, most writers these days work alone.
But I soon discovered that partnerships are possible even in writing political philosophy. I met a few friends who became real colleagues. And I began to encourage some special students who seemed particularly engaged in what I was teaching to work with me on articles. Other students became part of my projects by taking courses with me that focused on the books I was writing. Their enthusiasm for what we were doing, their questions and, as they got up to speed, their insights and the flow of ideas between us made our work fruitful and exciting. And a nice byproduct was that some of them became close friends with whom I am still in touch twenty years later. Only a few continued in the field and others went on to do other things. But they all tell me how much they learned from our work together and how special that time was.
It has been even easier to use the same collaborative approach in my political activism. While I am happy to lead some efforts I really value collaboration. For example, the Minimum Wage Campaign was so successful in part because it was a tremendous partnership of people with different ideas and perspectives. And even when I’m taking the lead, I am reluctant to act without a lot of advice. There is no question that I’m the leader of the health care campaign in Pennsylvania. But while my colleagues expect and encourage me to take the lead, I also encourage them to question and improves the ideas I put forward and to come up with other, better ideas. And, even when I’m working on a plan for the team, I almost never put it forward without talking it over with a few friends who have some expertise in political organizing—drawing both on people working closely with me on the campaign and people who are not. Indeed, one of the best things of this great health care campaign we are on is what a wonderfully collaborative experience it has been.
Focus
And, finally, what makes my work easier today is that I am more directed than I once was. I have pruned away a lot of the extraneous concerns that keep me from focusing on the work that is most important to me. When I was younger, I felt I had to keep up with everything. But now I know that’s impossible and I can live without following football or keeping up with pop music or learning the details of the politics in Columbia or seeing every avant-garde theater production off off Broadway (though I really do miss that). I have a wide range of interests but I have accepted that I can’t be interested in everything. And most of my interests are focused on a set of core philosophical-political concerns that have been with me for a very long time. I am interested in a wide range of ideas and public policies, but all those interests emanate from a pretty tightly knit agenda (I phrase I’m borrowing from Chuck Taylor, by the way).
Polymaths
When I was in my twenties, the people I most admired were the people who struck me as polymaths. They always had revealing insights into the world around them and the politics of the day. They were the people who seemed to have read every book and seen every film. And they could see connections between one book or film and another and could use those connections to talk about the way we live and govern ourselves. They did this not in a pedantic way but in a way that gave them (and their listeners and readers) an original understanding of our individual and collective lives. They were the people who could talk about Socrates and the Philadelphia Story and capitalism and Richard Nixon in what seemed like the same breath. Or they could give a Wittgensteinian interpretation of Aristotle that explained the failures of large American corporations to compete with the Japanese. Their ideas just seemed to move and intertwine and knock into each other and form combinations like a Twyla Tharp dance piece. And they were always far ahead of the daily papers. And, as a result, they seemed to be alive to the world and all that is in it in a way that dazzled me and left me feeling wholly inadequate.
Thirty years later, I am not there yet. But I feel that I have learned so much that I am much more alive to the world around me than I once was. I see connections between ideas and action in a way that would have utterly eluded me long ago. And, that helps a great deal with practically all I do. It seems as if the last thirty years of my life were spent gradually waking up to the beauty and richness of the world around me. Some ideas once seemed inert. Now I see how they flow through our lives. I once found it harder or bothersome to connect with people. Now I find getting to know lots of people exciting and stimulating. And all this makes love and work so much easier, more fun, and more powerful.
And I learned something else. As I got to know some of those brilliant polymaths well, I discovered that they had not actually read every book and seen every movie. They had read and seen a lot, and enough to pick up the central ideas in a lot of books they had not read through to the end. But they had not read or seen it all. Nor were they interested in everything around them. What made them impressive, I have come to understand, was not so much how much they had read but the work they had done in assimilating and working through all they had read and seen. Their insights came not because they knew something about everything but precisely because they had organized all they knew in ways that served their own tightly knit agenda. They seemed so far ahead of the rest of us because they had developed a distinctive and powerful way of looking at the world.
As I said, I’m not there yet. But I do have a way of looking at the world that comes out of my academic work in philosophy and politics—and to some extent the arts—and has been shaped since by my work in politics. (Even at its most abstract, my academic work always was attuned to the difference between theory and practice, which is perhaps one reason it’s been possible for me to transition from academia to practice politics.) I’ve Life and work is easier for me now than in my twenties because I do have a pretty good idea where I stand on many things. I don’t feel, as I sometimes did back then, that I’m unsure about everything all at once.
This sometimes gets me into trouble when I come to judgment too quickly on some new issue because I’ve assimilated it to an old issue rather than paying attention to its distinctive details. And sometimes I get impatient with my young friends who seem to be endlessly pointless rehearsing debates of the past. (The single payer movement, for example, seems determined to make every mistake of the impatient and factionalized left of my twenties and I find it hard to resist telling people that.) But more often I can absorb the details a new issue and make a useful contribution to it because I can put it in the broader perspective of my approach to political life. I don’t need to start from the beginning every time because I’ve got a good sense of how the world works and how I’d like to see it evolve.
Political Activity
I have been talking mostly about my work as a writer because that has been central to my work life over the last thirty years. But in the last ten years, I have gradually devoted more time to community and political activism and less to abstract thought.
That has partly been a deliberate choice I’ve made. Ten years ago I had written most of what I could out of the inspiration that set me going in my twenties—though I was still a few year away from finishing a few book manuscripts I hope to return to once the health care campaign ends and I take off from political organizing to do some writing. I had always assumed I would spend part of the second half of my life applying my theoretical ideas to practical problems and since I don’t think one could can understand practical problems without getting involved with them practically that meant doing some political work. And at the same time, I wanted some new challenges and to use some skills and abilities that I rarely needed in academia.
The opportunity to do this came my way, however, a little sooner than expected when I moved to Mt. Airy ten years ago. Some folks in the neighborhood heard that I had written about local democracy and community building and I quickly got caught up in our great civic organization, West Mt. Airy Neighbors (WMAN), which I soon came to lead. And as I learned about our neighborhood I came to understand how important the work of organizations like WMAN is to what makes Philadelphia a great city. And then I saw how our political system does—and does not—help these organizations do well. So it was a short path from my academic work to community leadership to political involvement. After my unsuccessful campaign for City Council, I decided I had more to learn about practical politics and was too much enamored of the high energy life of politics to return to teaching (and especially grading paper) just then. So I decided to spend a little more time in practical politics and took a job on the SEIU health care campaign, which led to my present position at HCAN.
I have discovered that all the benefits of experience I talked about above apply even more in political activism. Here, too, energy is important, practical experience is how you learn to be effective, contextual knowledge allows you to make sense of what you experience, partnerships are central to what you do, you can build your confidence over time, and being focused is critical. And you can have a tightly knit agenda even if you are involved in many issues and campaigns, so long as you understand the connections between those issues and sees how pursuing each one helps in pursuit of a larger goal.
Now, as the HCAN campaign winds down, I’m thinking about taking time off and decompressing a bit, finishing one of the book manuscripts I put aside a few years ago when my political involvement became overwhelming and starting a new one on what I’ve learned about political organizing. I expect over the next ten years to continue to move back and forth from periods of intense political organizing to more reflective periods in which I can finish some of the theoretical writing I put aside ten years ago. I’ve no doubt that just as my practical work has benefited from my work in political philosophy, as I revise my more theoretical work it will be influenced by all that I have learned from practical politics. And all of it will be much easier and more joy filled than it was when I was younger because of all my experience.
Conclusions
My mother always jokes that getting old isn’t so bad and, anyway, it’s better than the alternative. But my take is a little different. Being fifty-four is not only fine with me, but it sometimes feels as if it is the time in my life for which I’ve always been waiting. It is the time in which I can put to use all that I have experience and learned and all that has been given to me by my friends, colleagues, and my wife.
I didn’t know where all the struggles I had in work and love in my twenties and early thirties were leading me. And I was frustrated by how far I was from where I wanted to be and how slowly I seemed to make progress. That’s why I’ve written this piece. Maybe my life would have been easier if I had had an inkling of where I was going, if I had a sense of how the hard difficult work of my twenties was giving me the skills, experience, and perspective that would make the work of my forties and fifties so much more productive and fun.
So I hope my young friends, for whom I have written this, can benefit a bit from what I hope is a preview—or coming attractions—for the productive and joy-filled lives that are in store for them.