What Is the Shape of My Life?

When my daughter was in her early 20s, I bought a card for her that was unlike any birthday card I’d ever seen. On the outside, it asked the question, “What is the shape of my life?” The words were written against a cloudlike swirl of blues and grays, crisscrossed with slanted silvery lines. Inside the card, the answer came in the form of another question: “What is the sound of the rain?”

When she opened the card, my daughter’s eyes filled with tears. Though I hadn’t quite expected the intensity of her reaction, I had known that the card would be just right for her—as once it would have been for me. I could still vividly remember the feeling that pervaded the same stage of my own life: It was like trying to look through a windshield in the rain.

Prior to that stage, the way forward had seemed relatively clear, an orderly sequence of levels and steps, from kindergarten through college. But then “the seventy-year summer vacation” (as one of my friends called it) began—and, of course, it wasn’t a vacation. It was a prolonged blur through which I kept trying to discern the road ahead, the shape of the landscape around me. And in the midst of this blur, there were the ever-increasing responsibilities of forging an adult life, a sense of pressure growing more acute with each passing day. Though there was definitely an element of excitement and adventure in the mix, at times the combination of pressure and blur felt close to unbearable.

Gradually, very gradually, I made my way forward. As the writer E. L. Doctorow put it: “It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Through that mysterious mix of intention and serendipity, good fortune and hardship, the shape of my life revealed itself, one bend at a time. And now, at 73, I find myself living in a state that is the very opposite of anxiously trying to discern the road ahead through a windshield wet with rain.

The way it feels to me now is that I am sitting in a small plane, flying over the landscape of my life. I am flying high enough that I have a view with a panoramic perspective, most of which reveals the terrain I’ve already traveled through: a patchwork of hill and dale, streams, fields, and forests. . . . It’s a bit like a painting by David Hockney, though the pattern and palette are not quite so giddy and bright. There are certain barren stretches, dead ends, and sharp edges—but still, these are part of a whole that can be seen only from above.

The challenge, earlier in life, was to live through the blur with what the poet Keats referred to as “negative capability,” and which he described as the ability to hold oneself in a state of not-knowing, without “an irritable reaching out for certainty.” This seems to be one of the hardest states for us human animals, with our big brains, to tolerate: to feel somehow as though we need to be preparing ourselves, mobilizing ourselves for something we don’t know and can’t clearly imagine. It is why people will sometimes say that they actually felt relieved, after a prolonged period of uncertainty, when they finally received a diagnosis, however dire. Or when, after a prolonged period of tension and rumor, a war finally erupted in the land where they lived. Even dreaded outcomes can seem preferable to the discomfort of not knowing what lies ahead.

But “hindsight is 20/20”—and later in life, when there is more behind us than before us, the task is not so much to live with the unknown as with the known. Though we can never fully see into the future, and though the past will always retain its own pockets of hiddenness, it is nonetheless true that, by the time we are in our 70s (and often well before), a great many of the plotlines that gave shape to our lives have unfolded. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor: Now we know what we were going to be when we grew up. Whom we would marry or not marry. Whether or not we would have children, and if we did, who those children would turn out to be. Where we would live. What blessings and hardships would befall us. . . .

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It’s always disturbed me, in biographical writing, when a writer leaps forward in time and tells you something that their subject couldn’t possibly yet have known. “Walking through the lobby of the hotel, her eye fell on the man who was to become both the greatest love and the greatest disappointment of her life.” It seems so contrary to the way we actually live our lives, which involves moving forward through clouds of unknowing. . . . And yet, once we have moved through these clouds, is there any reason not to pause for a moment and appreciate the fact that now there is a panoramic view?

For years before I actually became a mother, I used to fantasize that I had a long telescope that could peer into the future and give me a glimpse of the child who would be mine.  Usually, I pictured this child on a playground, climbing up the ladder of a slide. I pictured the child as a little girl—and though I hoped for only a glimpse, I was always disappointed that her face was a blur.

And then the day came when a nurse placed my newborn girl in my arms. In that moment, the infinitude of children who might have been mine vanished forever, and now there was only this one, whose cheek I felt against my cheek. Is it outrageous to think that there might be something similar in the experience of looking at the shape of one’s life? Not necessarily in the intensity of feeling but in the recognition of what is. In the undeniable truth that what was formless has taken form. This is my child. This is the shape of my life.

In his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, the Japanese Zen master Shunryu Suzuki celebrates the virtue of “beginner’s mind.” Ever since first encountering the book many decades ago, I’ve embraced its central theme that “in the beginner’s mind are many possibilities, while in the expert’s mind are few.” But now, to my surprise, I can also see a certain beauty in the narrowing of possibility that happens over time. All those roads not taken: One by one, each decision, each step forward, was a kind of winnowing, a shucking of alternatives, an affirmation that implied negation, a this that was not that, nor that.

Can we find something to celebrate in the die-off of possibilities that has given rise to the precise shape of the life we’ve lived?

Some years ago I happened to watch a rather quirky documentary. Though I don’t recall the title, it was about how nature uses waste in the process of creation. Of all the vivid examples it provided, I remember only one: the way our hands and feet start off webbed in the womb.  Then, through a process of eliminating the millions of cells that form the webs, our fingers and toes are formed. . . . It’s not hard to feel wonder at the die-off of cells that gives rise to the precise articulation of ten fingers and toes. But what about when we look back at the years behind us? Can we find something to celebrate in the die-off of possibilities that has given rise to the precise shape of the life we’ve lived?

Conventional wisdom tells us that what’s most important, when we look back at the past, is the question of attitude or perspective. We’re told that you can’t change what happened in the past, but you can change how you frame it. And we’re offered a range of different lenses:  acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude. . . . For many people, this is at the heart of what it means to heal from wounding experiences, and it is no small thing. It might even be called a kind of human superpower: the way that we can marshal a new insight or influx of information to release ourselves from the pain of the past and be reconciled with the life we’ve lived.

But is it possible that there is an even more radical way of healing, one that is able to linger in a state of wonder that this—and not the myriad possible others—was the shape of the life that we’ve lived?

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In Zen there is a famous koan about a young woman named Sei. Its roots lie in a Chinese ghost story that involves a man named Chokan, his beautiful daughter, and his handsome young cousin named Ochu. Chokan used to joke that the two young people would make a fine married couple—but for Sei and Ochu it was no joke, and they fell deeply in love.  Chokan, however, had long ago decided that his daughter would be given in marriage to another man. When Ochu found out about this, he felt enraged and betrayed, and took off in a boat.  Deep into his journey, he was amazed to find one evening that Sei was on the same boat!  Overjoyed, the two lovers traveled a long distance to a place where they made a new home together and had two children.

Content though she was, over the years Sei pined for her native place and worried about the father she felt she had deserted. So Ochu decided to travel back with her, and when they arrived at Chokan’s house, he begged forgiveness for having taken Sei away. But Chokan looked astonished. “Who is this woman?” he asked. And then he told them, “Sei became ill and has been in bed for several years.” Hearing this conversation, the Sei lying in bed arose and went toward the Sei who had left and returned by boat, and the two became one.

Clearly, this simultaneity of opposites in Sei’s life is not logically possible! But it points to a deeper truth. One way of discovering this truth is to explore within oneself the ways that one might be leading a divided life, split off from one’s authentic being or true nature. But another, perhaps equally fruitful, approach is to recognize that, for each of us at birth, a myriad of life stories were possible. With the passage of time, some of these stories were actualized and some fell by the wayside. Yet there is a sense in which each of them is equally true—because none of them represents the essence of who we are: a being before and beyond any stories. This is the being evoked in the question: Who were you before your parents were born?

In his book No Self, No Problem, the contemporary Tibetan teacher Anam Thubten writes:

One time Buddha said, “I am beyond coming and going.” This was the most profound teaching that he ever gave. What he meant was that everything is an illusion. That is the truth whether our mind can digest that as truth or not. Even Buddha himself is an illusion. In the same way, when we look into our consciousness, we see that our mind is always telling us all kinds of stories. Everything we believe to be reality is nothing more than stories. “I was born in 1950 or 1960. I went to such and such college. I married. I divorced. I had children. I did this and that. I met with a great teacher two years ago and I found the path to liberation.” It’s all a story, all an illusion, imagination, fiction. The truth is that nothing is happening. Therefore we have to make sure that this, the egoic mind, is not just chasing after illusions again.

Once, years ago, I was in a restaurant with a man I’d only very recently met and was looking forward to getting to know better. As the various dishes arrived at the table and were taken away, we each shared the nutshell version of our autobiographies. As we were finishing dessert, he said to me: “So it seems like your life has worked out.” By then I knew enough about him to know that he didn’t feel his own life had worked out. I felt sad for him for his sadness—but more than anything, I felt saddened by the very idea of a life “working out” or “not working out.”

I know I can’t even begin to speak for those who are struggling to simply survive in the wake of catastrophe, whether natural or historic, a tsunami sweeping through their village or a rain of bombs from above. . . . But through the ups and downs, the joys and heartbreaks of my own, mercifully less eventful, life, there is something I have always been seeking that is beyond any conditions, that is not defined by the particular shape my life has made, by the roads either taken or not taken. In a way, it might be called a kind of negative capability toward the past, an unknowing of the known—in the sense of refraining from any judgment as to whether what happened was good, bad, something to be regretted or celebrated, whether all together it made the shape of a life that “worked out” or “didn’t work out.”

What rings most true for me is something conveyed in one of my favorite poems of all time: “Let Me Begin Again” by Philip Levine, which opens with the words, “Let me begin again as a speck /of dust caught in the night winds / sweeping out to sea.” From this line, the poem makes an extraordinarily distilled journey through space and time, during which formlessness passes into form and back again. And then the poet (who was born and raised in Detroit) ends with these words:

Tonight I shall enter my life
after being at sea for ages, quietly,
in a hospital named for an automobile.
The one child of millions of children
who has flown alone by the stars
above the black wastes of moonless waters
that stretched forever, who has turned
golden in the full sun of a new day.
A tiny wise child who this time will love
his life because it is like no other.

So much resonates in the two words “this time”! What about us? Is it possible, at this very moment, to do what we may not have ever been able to do before, which is to look down at the shape our life has made and—suspending all judgment, throwing away every possible frame—simply marvel that this is the shape that my life has made, this and no other?