Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now

by Gordon Livingston

What did that forbidden fruit contain that made its taste worth the anger of God? “The Garden is lost, but I have found him and am content.”

Among these life-altering maladaptive behaviors are our habitual ways of relating to others. The traits that we display toward other people are major determinants of how successful we are in forming and

sustaining relationships. Most of these elements of our personal “style” are not the products of conscious choice and are either inborn or were formed by our early experience with our families. Because they exist below the level of our conscious minds, they are resistant to change, even when they are evidently not working for us.

The same is true for all the other personal characteristics and habitual patterns that don’t work for us but that we keep repeating: impulsivity, hedonism, narcissism, irritability, and the need to control those around us. To imagine that such traits can be changed overnight or as soon as we become aware of them is to discount the well-established strength of habit and the slowness with which we translate new knowledge into behavior. When we think about the things that alter our lives in a moment, nearly all of them are bad: phone calls in the night, accidents, loss of jobs or loved ones, conversations with doctors bearing awful news. In fact, apart from a last-second touchdown, unexpected inheritance, winning the lottery, or a visitation from God, it is hard to imagine sudden good news. Virtually all the happiness-producing processes in our lives take time, usually a long time: learning new things, changing old behaviors, building satisfying relationships, raising children. This is why patience and determination are among life’s primary virtues.

There is a desperate, superficial quality in trying to eliminate the gradual evidence of our mortality. (Someone has observed that, with the advent of healthy lifestyles, soon hospitals will be filled with old people dying of nothing.)

What I came to realize and to be offended by is that killing is such a simple-minded undertaking compared with preserving life. Our common future will be determined by the struggle between the killers and the peacemakers. One can always find justifications, frequently religious, for killing. As with anything else in life, however, it is the act that defines us, not the cause we use as a rationale.

So here’s to the role of time, patience, and reflection in our lives. If we believe it is better to build than destroy, better to live and let live, better to be than to be seen, then we might have a chance, slowly, to find a satisfying way through life, this flicker of consciousness between two great silences.

Even now there is a core of adventurous young people who are willing to step off the educational train long enough to see something of the world, join the military or Peace Corps, or otherwise educate themselves in ways not available in any classroom. Later in life, career changes, marital misadventures, spiritual explorations—all can be forms of “wandering” that seem to depart from the norm but may simply express the courage to take risks in the struggle to find happiness and meaning.

It is surprising how often the closest relationships in our lives come, over time, to resemble power struggles in which we become intimate enemies. Gone is the sense of shared fate, replaced by a daily battle in which the stakes appear to be a survival of self-respect that is somehow threatened by the person who knows us best. Who would want to live this way, in a state of hyper-alertness and competition for stakes that are obscure, even for the participants? And yet, when people are asked to stop making the disparaging comments that are at the root of much marital conflict, they shift responsibility for change from themselves to “the other” in a way reminiscent of international conflicts in which everyone wants peace, but no one wants to be the first to cease retaliation, fearing that it will just make them vulnerable.

Encouraging people to change is an exercise in shared hope. Most of us, no matter how cynical we may be about improvement in our own lives, wish for something better for our children. Often I invoke this desire to get people to try new things. The leverage here is the common belief that children learn the majority of what they know about life from observing their parents. I regularly use this idea to try to persuade people to try to set examples of kindness, tolerance, and conflict resolution on their children’s behalf.

There are few human attributes that excite more contempt than hypocrisy. People whose actions do not accord with their professed beliefs become objects of derision. Most of the scandals that entertain us are based on a disconnect between words and behavior: adulterous preachers, deceitful politicians, drug-abusing moralists, pedophile priests. Our outrage is balanced by our fascination, fueled by the guilty knowledge of our own failure to conform our behavior to the standards we publicly endorse. What would people think if they knew?

Worse than the concealment of embarrassing moral lapses are the interpretations that allow us to continue doing things that erode our sense of ourselves. We routinely invoke theories of accident, coincidence, and forgetfulness to explain behaviors that we do not wish to examine closely. For example, discoveries of infidelity are now routinely made by one spouse discovering incriminating e-mails left by the other on the family computer.

Denial is another way people lie to themselves. Those indulging addictions commonly assert that they do not have a problem and can quit at any time, assertions that fly in the face of a catastrophic decline in their lives: DWIs, broken marriages, lost jobs. I often tell such people

that it’s understandable that they might feel a need to lie to others, but lying to ourselves disables us entirely from making needed changes.

It is when our dream of what we could be collides with the truth of what we are that the clang of cognitive dissonance both deafens and blinds us.

The fantasies generated thereby often take the form of a conviction that there exists somewhere the person who will save us with his or her love. Much of the infidelity that is the hallmark of unhappy marriages rests on this illusion.

First, there is the damage that is being inflicted on children. The comforting reassurance that it is better for them to adapt to parental separation than live in unhappy marriages has come to seem more like a rationalization for adults in pursuit of their own happiness. There is ample evidence that the dissolution of marriages results in tremendous insecurity and unhappiness for children, particularly since most of the time there is some level of bitterness and recrimination between their parents.

The primary goal of parenting, beyond keeping our children safe and loved, is to convey to them a sense that it is possible to be happy in an uncertain world, to give them hope. We do this, of course, by example more than by anything we say to them. If we can demonstrate in our own lives qualities of commitment, determination, and optimism, then we have done our job and can use our books of child-rearing advice for doorstops or fireplace fuel. What we cannot do is expect that children who are constantly criticized, bullied, and lectured will think well of themselves and their futures.

philosophy would be to never leave home again. Even in good times the public perception of the risk of becoming a crime victim is exaggerated. We arm ourselves against mythical intruders and ignore the reality that family members are the most likely victims of the guns we buy. Meanwhile, the real risks to our welfare—smoking, overeating, not fastening seat belts, social injustice, and the people we elect to office—provoke little anxiety.

wealth it generates. Fear, while effective in the short term, is not useful in producing lasting change. The use of it as a motivator for behavior ignores the fact that there are no more powerful desires than the pursuit of happiness and the struggle for self-respect. If means can be found that move people in these directions: better jobs, education, the chance to improve one’s life, and a sense of fairness and opportunity, the seductive and short-lived bliss provided by drugs will lose its appeal. Punitive emphasis on the “supply side” has not worked. Reducing the demand by emphasizing treatment and social alternatives to hopelessness offers the only prospect of winning this struggle between transient pleasure and lasting satisfaction.

To imagine that we are solely, or even primarily, responsible for the successes and failures of our children is a narcissistic myth. It is obvious that parents who abuse their children—physically, psychologically, or sexually—can inflict serious and lasting damage upon them. It does not follow, however, that parents who fulfill their primary obligation to love their children and provide a stable and nurturing environment for them to grow are responsible for the outcome of their kids’ efforts.