If you listen carefully to most people in their 60’s and beyond, you will find that of uppermost importance in their minds is to live a life that is genuine and authentic. Gone is their need to strive for social acceptance and also gone is their need to be correct in absolute terms. All of this has been replaced by the desire —now that death is no longer an “experience for others” but a mathematical certainty for them— to live a simpler, more authentic life. A life that is carefully determined on a daily basis; a life that is unmistakably, uniquely theirs.
When those of us in this age bracket consider how our lives have been spent, we realize that much time has been spent fighting the powers that have sought to control our thoughts and actions from the very time we were born. The endless arguing with our parents, the push and pull with societal standards, the special demands individuals place on us —all of these have posed great challenges during our formative years and it took courage and determination to stand up to them and become ourselves.
Perhaps our greatest foe during our development has been the very culture we emerge from. This is the unspoken yet powerful force that shapes us into adulthood. It is the constant in our lives that promises and delivers stability and comfort at a very high price.
Culture can be defined simply as the thoughts and beliefs of a group of people. Culture develops exactly because there is some separation between one group and another. Not unlike a parasitical organism, the goal of culture is to perpetuate itself. In order to survive, our culture asks us to be inflexible and intolerant towards other cultures.
To be sure, I am not calling for all individuals to reject their culture outright. Rather, I am proposing the more difficult work of sifting through their cultural fabric to see what is truly theirs and what is mostly worn as a garment to please others. I see our fight with our culture as the last frontier for our soul’s very freedom. It is the necessary door we must go through in order to claim our full independence.
Let me explain what I mean. The basic trajectory of all individuals who move from childhood into adulthood is to rebel for a time against parents and various institutions in an attempt to determine their identity. This trajectory is easy to determine and can be mapped out for all of us. The enemy for the most part is obvious to see. The more subtle insidious force, however, is the culture that, in a sense, underwrites all that we fight against but we never see clearly enough to challenge directly.
I was raised in an Italian household. In my home, the Catholic faith was stressed but so were patriotism and a kind of ethnocentrism that looked down on other nationalities. In my upbringing there was a clear sense of what was right and wrong and most importantly, there was a clear understanding of what could happen to anyone who might leave our cultural path for a road less travelled. Most of the teachings I received were difficult to evaluate in themselves exactly because they were part of a large “cultural package.” To dissect and possibly discard any one teaching felt like committing a betrayal of the worst kind.
Fast forward to an older and more confident individual and now everything is on the table for discussion. I would say that I have spent the last 10 years mostly discarding ideas I had inherited but never fully appropriated. To say this has been a liberating experience would be a great understatement.
Making our struggle against culture even more difficult is the fact that individuals tend to look alike on the outside. One may enjoy perogies or tortellini on their family table and feel wholly free to be themselves. But for someone else, a cultural activity might be the tip of an iceberg that represents oppression or actual bondage. On the surface, it is near impossible to tell if an individual participates in a cultural activity for the right reasons.
When it’s time to accept our turn to die, I dare think that there can be no greater satisfaction than to know that eventually, after much fighting and struggle, a good portion of our lives was lived on our own terms. We owe this to ourselves if we want to call our human experience an actual blessing and a unique privilege. Anything less is to have lived and died a lie. And who, exactly were we trying to impress?