When I was on an operating table about to deliver twins, the obstetrician inspected my cervix. He was surrounded by a team of people in surgical scrubs who were eager to proceed and to perform a cesarean if necessary. The doctor was scrubbed in for surgery, too.
He could have pushed the babies out or cut me open and pulled them out. Instead, he decided to do nothing. He told everyone to come back in twenty minutes. He knew from experience that, just by waiting a bit longer, the twins would probably descend on their own and come out the old-fashioned way. Twenty minutes later, they did.
When wise people make a judgment about what to do, or not to do, they often make the right call. All of these good qualities only count as wisdom if, quite often, you turn out to be correct. Wise people have “a willingness and exceptional ability to formulate sound, executable judgements” in the face of life’s uncertainties, Baltes wrote. Or as the neuroscientist Elkhonon Goldberg explains, they have “not only a deep insight into the nature of things, but also—and even more so—a keen understanding of what action needs to be taken to change them.”
* * *
—
Once researchers had a working definition of wisdom, they could test people to see whether they are wise or not. And they could measure whether wisdom really increases with age. Are fortysomethings wiser than, say, people in their twenties?
If you use a very broad measure of wisdom, the answer is: not necessarily. “Most wisdom researchers would concur that wisdom does not automatically increase with age and that it is relatively rare even among older adults,” Ardelt wrote. She found about as much wisdom in college students as in people over fifty-two. (Though older people with college degrees had significantly higher wisdom scores than the students did.)
Vivian Clayton found that the older people got, the less they associated wisdom with age, and the more they associated it with understanding and empathy. “There is wisdom at each age, even childhood,” she told me, echoing the Latin writer Publilius Syrus, who said, “Bright faculties are the source of wisdom, not length of years.”
And yet, while overall wisdom doesn’t automatically come with age, “it appears that wisdom can increase with age,” Ardelt observed. She said that becoming wise requires “motivation, determination, self-examination, self-reflection, and an openness to all kinds of experiences to do the necessary inner work.”
And when researchers test for individual aspects of wisdom, they find that many of these do improve by midlife. People in their forties and fifties are more positive than younger ones, better at controlling their own emotions, less focused on themselves and better at reading other peoples’ moods. Perhaps as a result, they’re also better at reasoning about social conflicts.
Those in midlife also have more of what researchers call “crystallized intelligence,” such as the ability to draw conclusions, make judgments based on their experiences and apply their knowledge to new situations.
This sounds a lot like those index cards popping up in my head, reminding me how similar situations turned out. They’re just one element of wisdom, but I’ll take it. We fortysomethings could have used these index cards earlier, but we definitely need them now. They’ve come just as we’re juggling growing children, aging parents and busy careers. We’ve never had more responsibility and less free time.
We’re also increasingly called upon to make decisions and give advice. When a friend told me that her husband had confessed to sleeping with several other women, she was pretty sure this meant that their marriage was kaput.
I didn’t see it that way. An index card popped up in my head with examples of marriages that have come back from all kinds of brinks. I told her that I’d seen traumatic events become part of a lifelong love story, not necessarily its finale, and I urged her not to make an impulsive, irreversible decision.
This may have been terrible advice. I’m still far from wise and I live mostly in the small picture. But being slightly less clueless is an improvement, and I’ll take it. My index cards have made me happier. They’re the start, at least, of what I craved while growing up: to have more knowledge, less regret and a better grasp of what’s happening.
* * *
—
After Vivian Clayton left Columbia, she moved to California and retrained as a geriatric neuropsychologist. She opened a private practice in which she assesses whether elderly people are fit to make legal decisions for themselves. It’s the study of decision making from a new, real-life angle.
Clayton watched, from afar, as the field of wisdom research that she started became its own branch of psychology. She can tick off the names of wisdom research centers at several major universities. But nearly forty years later, Clayton is certain that, when she left New York, she made the right choice.
“I have never looked back,” she tells me. “I did what was important to do, and it was time to step off. I just knew it.”
You know you’re in your forties when . . .
You know that not all old people are wise.
You still turn to older people for advice, hoping that they know more than you.
You see people’s good and bad qualities, and know that someone who’s very smart in one domain can be useless in another. You’ve seen that there are “smart idiots” and “amiable rogues.”
You can be aware of someone’s flaws and nevertheless still like them.
You realize that you’ve been moving at the speed of your generation all along, even if—for a long time—you didn’t know what that speed was.
16
how to give advice
A FEW WEEKS after I turn forty-five, I get an email from the dean of an American art and design school in Paris. She wants me to give the commencement speech at the school’s graduation ceremony.
The ceremony is about a month away, so I sense that I may be a last-minute choice. Also, the school has just thirty-five graduates, and the speaking fee won’t even pay for the dress I’ll need to buy to deliver the speech in. (Many of the graduates are studying fashion design.)
Nevertheless, I accept. Giving advice to the next generation—or at least a tiny part of it—seems like a crucial step in my slow journey toward adulthood.
But what exactly will I tell these students? They don’t want to hear about French parenting. And I can’t rely on my own experience with commencement speeches. When I graduated from college, a US senator delivered his stump speech on Poland, then wished us luck.
I watch lots of commencement speeches online to get ideas. After I’ve seen about a dozen of these, I realize that there are three key rules: The best speeches are under fifteen minutes. It’s a plus if the speaker can do celebrity impressions. And the fact that someone once starred in a hit sitcom does not mean that she has any worthwhile advice.
I also discover that commencement speeches are mostly an American phenomenon. The British hold graduation ceremonies, but they don’t bring in outside motivational speakers. (My husband’s graduation from an English university was conducted almost entirely in Latin.)
French universities usually don’t even have a ceremony; they just mail your diploma. A professor at one of the top schools in Paris tells me that she once showed her class Steve Jobs’s 2005 commencement speech at Stanford. Jobs describes how he dropped out of college and studied calligraphy, which seemed pointless at the time but later became the basis for the fonts on Apple computers. He concludes that when you follow your passion, all your strange choices gradually make sense, and the great narrative of your life emerges.
Her French students were unmoved by the speech, calling it “completely disconnected from reality” and “so Californian.”
That puts me in a tricky spot. The whole point of a commencement speech is to say something encouraging. Most of the ones I watch boil down to: Yes you can. Here’s how. But I’ll be in Paris, speaking to a graduating cl
ass that’s only a quarter American (the school’s roughly two hundred students hail from forty-eight countries). If I say anything too uplifting, I’ll seem deluded. The message of a French commencement speech would probably be: No you can’t. It’s not possible. Don’t even try.
A few days before my speech, I attend the school’s end-of-year fashion show. As I’m waiting for it to start, I strike up a conversation with the student sitting next to me, and he asks me why I’m there.
“I’m a writer, and I’m giving the commencement speech on Saturday,” I say. He looks surprised. He has never heard of me or read anything I’ve written. “I was flattered and surprised to be asked,” I add.
He listens thoughtfully, then says, “Well, I guess at a certain point in your career people just start asking you to do things. And you think, ‘Well, I’ve never done that before, but I’ll give it a try.’”
Now I’m surprised. At age twenty-two, he knows this already. Millennials seem far more emotionally evolved in their twenties and thirties than my generation was, perhaps because they’ve grown up meeting like-minded people in internet chat rooms, and watching TV shows with names like Awkward. In my day, you didn’t get to discuss being awkward. You just were.
Two days later, I put on my new purple dress and ride the métro to the hotel where the commencement ceremony is being held. There are about 125 people in the hotel’s gilded ballroom, including parents who’ve flown in from around the world. I realize instantly that I should have pocketed the speaking fee and worn something from my closet. Practically everyone is wearing black.
The graduates aren’t writers. But, like me, they will probably spend a lot of time alone in rooms struggling to make things. So in under fifteen minutes in that room, though without celebrity impressions, I share my advice on how to cope. Much of it applies to any creative work:
You’re qualified. Or rather, you’re not the only imposter out there. That student sitting next to me at the fashion show was exactly right. You never feel completely ready to do your next job. No one else does, either. Just carry on.
Everything that happens is potential inspiration for your work. Or as Nora Ephron put it, “Everything is copy.” When someone tells you a story, you notice a recurring theme in conversations or you turn a corner and see something that moves you—use it. In fact, when you’re deep into a project, information about it will pour into your life.
Seek out inspiration, too. Read and watch the work of artists you admire. “Most of what I do comes from seeing someone else’s work and thinking: I can do that. I want to do that,” the writer and director Miranda July says.
Stay in the room, offline. It needn’t be an actual room. You can be alone in a busy café. I’ve gotten ideas while walking or riding the Paris métro. (I recommend line eight.) Figure out your clearest, most productive time of day to work, and guard this time carefully. Much of life consists of the dead time between events. Don’t fill these interstitial moments with pornography and cat videos. You need to be blank and a little bit bored for your brain to feed you ideas. In solitude, “one’s inner voices become audible,” the poet Wendell Berry wrote.
When you have an idea, write it down immediately. Do not trust yourself to remember it. Always carry a pen and a notebook, plus something good to read.
You needn’t reinvent the wheel each time you create. It’s not cheating to fall back on established forms. My husband likes to quote an editor who said, “You can write it any way you like, but I’m going to put it back together chronologically.”
Grow where you’re planted. Yes, this sounds like it should be printed on a mug. But it’s essential. Embrace whatever weird talents or expertise you’ve ended up with. Treat your assignment, whatever it is, as the most important job in the world.
It’s the research, stupid. An architect tells me that he’s never nervous about creating a building from scratch. “I just keep gathering information, and the building takes shape,” he says. Often, the reason you can’t move forward, despite weeks of trying, is that you don’t yet know enough about your topic. Go back and find out more.
Embrace anomalies. When I was starting out as a journalist, an older reporter told me that when researching a story, you will inevitably discover some fact or detail that muddies the clean narrative you had imagined your story would follow. This fact is irritating and inconvenient, and you will be inclined to ignore it. Instead, pay attention to it and see where it leads. Doing this will make your work richer, truer, less predictable and more airtight against objections.
“Don’t be too silly or too profound.” The singer Jarvis Cocker says this is a key to writing rock ’n’ roll songs. (If you’re too profound, “you’ll be embarrassed when you’re older,” he reasons.) He also warns not to be a “rhyme whore.” His example of this: “I don’t want to see a ghost / It’s the thing I fear the most.”
Be generous. Many of the people you meet at the beginning of your career will still be around decades later. If you were a jerk early on, they’ll remember.
Pay attention to what you’re doing on the side. When I was a financial journalist in Brazil, I took samba dancing lessons. Eventually, I wrote a brief article about this for the arts section of my newspaper. My bosses hardly noticed it, and I’m pretty sure no one read it. It would be years before I got to write that way for a living.But it was the first piece I’d ever written that lit me up inside.
Ignore the naysayers. People with other kinds of jobs will say, “I don’t know how you do it,” or “I could never sit alone in a room all day.” They will think you are an irritating obsessive who jots in notebooks during dinner. Just keep going. You’re the lucky one. And though you can’t tell, you’re probably getting better.
You control the work, but you don’t control whether other people will like it. A writer I know once described his Zen-like approach: total commitment to the process, total equanimity about the outcome.
Done is better than perfect. Get over your fear of finishing. Being able to complete tasks doesn’t just matter in kindergarten; it’s a key skill for grown-ups.
It’s okay to be an obsessive. They’re the ones who do good work. The late Garry Shandling once recalled that when he was making a TV show, he ran into another comedian who was making one, too. Shandling asked how it was going. “He said, ‘This is so much easier than I thought. I’m having so much fun.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ Then of course, he was out.” Doing routine work gets easier with time, but doing your best work doesn’t.
This Herculean extravaganza is worth it. For most people, getting married or having a baby are peak moments in their lives. But when some mysterious place in you churns up a sculpture, or a dress, or a scent, or a graphic design, and other people respond to it, that’s a peak moment, too. “It’s not about working toward a specific, correct goal; it’s just about working,” said the artist Maira Kalman. “To care passionately about your work will keep you—dare I say it—happy.”
Even if you follow all these rules, your first attempt will be terrible. A large part of the creative process is tolerating the gap between your glorious vision of what you want to create and the sad thing you’ve just made. Remember that everything good you see started out as someone else’s bad first draft. Version number twenty of your work may still not be brilliant. But version number one almost definitely won’t be.
I leave the graduates with two final thoughts. The first is the best creative advice I ever got from Simon: when you get out of a bus or a taxi, look back at your seat to see if you’ve left something behind. If you lose your portfolio, you won’t get the job.
The second is a French expression that is optimistic but not grandiose: vous allez trouver votre place—you will find your place. I love the idea that, somewhere in the world, there’s an empty space shaped just like you. Once you find it, you’ll slide right in. (I don’t mention that this search might ta
ke several decades.)
Then, feeling very adult, I get back on the métro and go home.
You know you’re in your forties when . . .
You’ve gotten a lot better at one or two things.
People in their twenties ask you for advice, and actually seem to follow it.
You give worthwhile advice, and many of your friends do, too.
You know that most people are just as clueless as you are.
Your parents have stopped trying to change you.
17
how to save the furniture
RIDING HIGH FROM MY COMMENCEMENT SPEECH, I’m invited to give a talk in Brazil. I’m excited to go back there. I’ll be speaking at an event called the International Seminar of Mothers in Belo Horizonte, a midsized Brazilian city. It’s best known as the place where Brazil suffered a national humiliation: in the 2014 World Cup semifinal, Germany beat Brazil’s national soccer team 7–1.
I’m supposed to talk about French parenting, so I’m not that worried. I only start to think about my speech a few weeks beforehand, when one of the organizers informs me that they’re expecting a thousand mothers to attend my talk. That will be the largest live audience I’ve ever addressed.
There Are No Grown-ups Page 13
