Living Life as A Work of Art

By Albert Waterston

Whenever I visit the World Bank, from which I retired in 1972 after 25 years, and encounter a former colleague who is still working there, he almost always exclaims, as though he can hardly believe it: "You're looking pretty well!" Because this happens frequently, I have concluded tha for ex-colleagues who still work, the three stages of life must be youth, middle age, and "You're looking pretty well!"

Another thing that almost always happens is that my ex-colleague asks what I am doing. If I attempt to answer, he loses interest quickly because he, like others I know, seems to believe that it really isn't possible to live an interesting or useful life after retirement.

This view seems to be more pervasive in the United States than in other countries I know, possibly because here, especially in Washington, people tend to identify themselves and others by their position or profession. Whenever people talk to me about a child, grandchild, or someone else, they almost always tell me how important his or her position or profession is. While they may pay homage to someone who used to have an important job or once was well regarded in his or her profession, they make it clear that, regrettably, they are talking about a "has-been." Even when retirees tell me about their past jobs or professional exploits, they often give the impression that they are talking about a golden era which preceded their fall from grace into "geezerhood." Walter Wriston, the legendary ex-CEO of Citicorp, sounded this note when, upon retiring from his highly placed job, he lamented: "I'll be going from 'Who's Who' to 'Who's that?'"

Retirement is often seen as the end of the road. No job comes to mean no identity. This was true during the Great Depression and it is true today. With the restructuring and downsizing in American enterprises, many who came to believe in the ever-progressive prosperity of the American Dream, and were riding high in their businesses or professions, have found themselves stripped of everything that identified them as solid citizens when they lost their jobs.

But need this condition apply to retirees? The question is important because people are living longer and healthier lives than ever before. I retired from the World Bank more than 24 years ago, a time span nearly equal to my 25 years at the World Bank. Since my health is good, I can reasonably expect now to live in retirement longer than I worked in the World Bank. I am not alone in my retirement longevity. The outlook is that the number of retirees who live to a ripe old age will continue to increase.

Some people do not accept retirement and continue to work in jobs similar to those they had before they retired; others start new careers. Still others occupy themselves with volunteer or organizational work, travel, golf, or tennis, become writers, painters, craftspeople, potterers, and so on. The accepted generality seems to be that as long as retired people do something it is better than doing nothing.

I took a familiar path. I was lucky enough to get two new jobs when I retired: the first required traveling to help carry out agricultural development programs in Egypt and Nepal; the second was as a professor of economics at American University. These jobs kept me busier than I had been at the World Bank.

At first, I found my increased workload and responsibilities exciting and rewarding. But the glamour faded; the teaching became repetitive and boring, and living out of a suitcase in planes and airports, in hotels and places that all look alike became less attractive.

Over the years, I had collected a couple of hundred pieces of antique pewter. Because fine old pewter is expensive, I often bought damaged pieces at low prices with the vague notion that I might someday locate a suitably skilled craftsman to reconstruct them. But as my interest in teaching and traveling waned, I started repairing some of the damaged pewter and found the work more attractive than my jobs. Soon, I gave them up and set up a metal-working shop in a small antique-oriented town in a foothill of the Allegheny Mountains, to which I moved, and worked full time. I enjoyed the work because it was creative. I found also that I could work on the pewter while my mind remained free to roam.

Also, I found I could think about what I had read the previous evening while I worked on the pewter. At first, I felt I had the best of two worlds. But this turned out to be a double-edged sword because, increasingly, I left my metal-working to jot down thoughts about things I had read. I was especially taken by an article which quoted Albert Einstein as having said that an educated person was someone who learned to live life as a work of art.

The thought opened up all kinds of vistas. The more I considered Einstein's idea, the more I felt I had to find out what it meant. The article had not said a word more about it. I found myself spending a lot of time searching for clues about how one went about living such a life. It was bad for the pewtering, but I had become too involved in my new project to stop.

When I had taken up the old and respected craft of pewtering, I looked upon it as a challenge to create an artistic product from a badly damaged piece of metal. But as I turned to my new interest, I realized that if I could learn to live my life as a work of art, whatever that turned out to be, I myself-not simply a thing-would become my creative product. In effect, I would be creating myself as my work of art! That promised to be a far greater challenge, and more rewarding if I succeeded.

In my new pursuit, after becoming lost in many blind alleys, I came upon the writings of Otto Rank, an Austrian disciple of Sigmund Freud who separated from Freud to create a psychological approach of his own. Like Einstein, Rank had concluded that living life as a work of art was a worthy aspiration. What I learned from him was an epiphany! It changed my life.

For more than a decade now, I have been defining for myself what living life as a work of art means and I have tried to live accordingly. For Rank, and probably for Einstein, it meant applying one's creativity to oneself in a manner which raises the self to the coherence and integrity of a work of art. A manuscript I have largely completed on the subject relies heavily on Rank's thinking.

My research for the book made it plain that I had to begin by embarking on a journey within to come to terms with myself. I am still at it, and I know I shall have to continue to "visit myself" indefinitely if I want to realize my objective. It has taken me a long time to identify, mitigate, or eliminate and then replace the negative thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs about myself with functionally desirable ones. Even when I think I have succeeded, I have had to deal with relapses.

I was shocked to realize that I was frequently charging myself with unpleasant and depressing interpretations of myself and my behavior. I seemed to be spending much of my time awake defending myself against self-accusations and in prosecutorial-like proceedings which filled my dreams. Overcoming my seemingly infinite capacity for the denial which constituted my first line of defense against these self-accusations was not easy, but eventually I realized I had to face up to the habituated, unwarranted, and irrelevant self-doubts, fears of rejection, low self-regard, and sometimes self-hatred which impeded or prevented me from doing what needed to be done in a way I would have liked to do it.

I have had to fight off my attempts to escape from harsh reality into dead-end fantasies, which my fertile imagination has no trouble inventing, or to evade these fears and doubts by shifting them onto other people with anger and ill-will. James Baldwin perceptively spoke to this very human tendency when he suggested that one reason why people hate is they know when hate is gone they are left with the pain of facing up to themselves.

But if my inner struggle has sometimes been painful, it also has rewards. I imbibe a heady wine of purposefulness when I realize that I am uncovering the truth about myself by giving free passage to my own thinking. My belief in myself grows as I gain greater knowledge and self-control. With increased self-confidence, my opinion of myself has become more important to me than opinions of me others may have. While I learn from what others say about me, I now see myself as the ultimate arbiter about myself. I no longer feel the need to be like someone else who might be more likeable or more socially acceptable than I am.

By accepting myself I learn to accept others. If I want others to respect my right to be myself, I must accept their right to be as they are; and just as I would not have them impose their values on me, I do not seek to impose my values on them-even when I do not approve of their values. And just as I have given up attempts to justify my behavior to others, I do not expect others to behave in a manner that accords with my own ideas of what is right and wrong. Reduced expectations have led me to a detached, non-judgmental approach to others and to fewer disappointments. I have also had to muster the self-confidence to recognize that I-and I alone-am responsible for my behavior.

More than anything else, I now appreciate how powerful are my capabilities when it comes to changing thoughts and behavior which have prevented me from being a free and independent person. I now realize that everything I think or do depends on my attitude. It is the lens through which I perceive the world and people.

My attitude also determines the extent to which I impose limitations on myself. If I tell myself I can't do something, I really mean I won't do it; and if I approach a situation expecting the worst, the effect is as though I were welcoming Murphy's Law to assure my failure. In contrast, when I bring an optimistic point of view to a situation, I make it easier to do. With a positive approach to people and events, within the limits of factors which are beyond my control, I find I can take charge of my life to a far greater extent than I thought possible.

I find this to be as true of my physical as well as my mental well-being. Research by the MacArthur Foundation Consortium on Successful Aging supports this view. It reports that the effects of our genes on our health decline steadily with age, so that by the time we are 80 our genes retain hardly any influence. This makes the health and well-being of people as they age increasingly dependent on their life style. If they are sensible about what they eat, exercise regularly, maintain social connections, have the resiliency to bounce back after suffering a loss and feel confident that they can control their lives, they can actually succeed in doing so.

I don't find this surprising or mystical. It only confirms my own discovery that if I have the power to restrict my behavior by telling myself I cannot do something, I also have the power to convince myself I can do it. I keep on coming across further evidence to this effect. The New York Times of February 28, 1996, for example, reported the experience of Helen Page, an 83-year-old Arizonan who, after suffering a broken neck, breast cancer, and atherosclerosis, overcame them all when she made up her mind she could do so.

But while there are many things I can change with the right point of view, there are some things I cannot change, no matter how much I try. I know I cannot alter some things about myself that are clearly a part of my being; and since there is no chance that I can overcome them, I don't think of them as problems.

I have also had to accept that some emotional suffering is an inescapable fact of life, that some aspects of life are painful and sorrowful. And of course, I must accept the fact that my life will end sometime. In dealing with my mortality, I adhere to Otto Rank's counsel that life is a loan for which the price is death. If we concentrate on the price, we end up not living fully and creatively. If, instead, we concentrate on living life as fully as possible, the price becomes bearable.

By itself I find the Delphic instruction to ''know thyself'' a useful first step but inadequate as a guide for action. Since living life as a work of art is really a way of creating myself anew, and since self-creation involves much more than intellect, merely knowing what I need to do to live creatively is not enough to achieve it. Knowledge about myself-whether obtained by thought, meditation, or from someone else-can only be a first step, essential but insufficient. I can only change my behavior by interacting with others, dealing with actual problems and situations I encounter living actively, putting into practice what I think I know, and testing results by trial and error.

To do this effectively, I must live in the present. Friedrich Nietzsche put it cogently: "Either one lives in the present or one does not live at all." But it makes a world of difference if I live in the present by reliving the past or anticipating the future instead of living in the here-and-now. If I try to foresee what might happen tomorrow or reach back to what happened yesterday, I only succeed in missing today. While I need to feel that I have a future to live constructively in the present, the best way to help bring about a happy future is to make the most of every moment now.

If the present is pleasant, I must squeeze all I can from it; if it is unpleasant, I must try to change it; if it is unchangeable, I must try to make the most of it. When I succeed in narrowing down reality as much as possible to the present, I am unaware of the passage of time. It is as though it does not exist for me and since-as Thomas Mann has reminded us-the passage of time makes us conscious of the transitoriness of our lives, it is as though I were immortal!

Ours is a world which applauds and rewards material success more than the quality of one's values. The more idealistic a person, the more impractical he or she is judged to be. In a era when people are intent on following self-centered careers, spend much of their time accumulating money or consuming goods, idealism is not popular. To dedicate oneself to caring for or helping others as a way of life-in the spiritual love the Greeks call agape-makes one seem different from others and difference is bad.

As an idea, many people find agape attractive even though it is mostly ignored in practice. It isn't surprising that it is ignored. agape is difficult to adopt as a way of life because one must first free oneself from the feelings that prevent one from giving or receiving love.

The would-be practitioner must also reduce self-preoccupation sufficiently to pay attention to the needs of others and learn to accept people's idiosyncrasies instead of being judgmental or critical of them. I may not be able to love everyone, but if I adopt agape as a way of life, I cannot hate anybody, not even someone I believe to be an enemy. For if I allow myself to hate, I run the risk of becoming so obsessed with the other's destruction that I end up destroying my own way of life. agape has to be unconditional to be effective-and many people find this difficult, if not impossible, to accept.

Since agape is attractive as an idea but difficult in practice, people find it easier to talk approvingly of it than to practice it. Those who practice agape are long on deeds and often short on words. Though they may never have heard of the word itself, I have come across ordinary people practicing it. There is no need to point to a Mother Theresa or a Mahatma Gandhi as examples. I have found practitioners, few though they may be, among people I encounter every day. They aren't always discernible since they often dispense agape unobtrusively in self-effacing ways and have no need to advertise themselves; they give only for the pleasure of giving.

agape has become an integral part of living my life as a work of art because it provides a sense of purpose and a program I can fulfill. In a world in which many traditional ways are under siege, where families have often lost their binding power, where cherished institutions are crumbling, where right and wrong merge until their differences are blurred, I find that the road to happiness lies in the way I relate to others.

I am not alone in this, of course. Most of us sense that we need other people to fulfill ourselves and that it is impossible to change or grow and develop emotionally in a world of one. Most of us have learned that those who habitually separate themselves from others risk ending up with feelings of depression, a sense of rejection and loneliness. Loneliness is perhaps life's most devastating condition. Even those who generally prefer solitude to social life understand that, carried to extremes, estrangement may lead beyond unhappiness to mental illness or even to the madness of a Unibomber.

Nonetheless, few undertake living a life which embodies agape as an essential component. This is at least partly due to the fact that such a life-style is demanding. It also has hazards. I know of one practitioner who-while trying to save an inebriate whose arms were flailing to ward off oncoming automobiles and trucks as they threatened to run him down on a busy street-received a magnificent black eye from the object of his concern. My own efforts once resulted in a charge against me of attempted wife-stealing by a friend with Alzheimer's disease after he watched his wife conferring with me, unaware she was seeking advice about how to deal with the dreadful disease with which I had become acquainted when it afflicted a member of my family.

Anything worthwhile is bound to be difficult and involves some risk. But one does not have to be perfect or saintly to deal with the difficulties of others. If either perfection or saintliness were a prerequisite for living life as a work of art, I would have had to disqualify myself at the start. Yet even small or partial successes can be surprisingly rewarding. It is gratifying to discover, when I am able to help someone start his car with my jump cables, employ a screwdriver to re-fit a shower handle for someone disabled, or give a lift to a person in need of transportation, how much pleasure there is for both the recipient and the practitioner of agape. Often nothing more is needed than listening when someone vents his or her feelings of loneliness, hurt, or despair. Such experiences have revealed for me what I consider a secret of happiness: If I give love away, I end up having more of it. I have also learned that happiness is to be found indirectly, not by reaching a goal but in the journey toward the goal.

In embarking on that journey, it pays, too, to bring along a sense of humor. Although living life as a work of art demands dedication and should not be taken lightly, it can do without humorless self-importance. Even in the darkest times Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill managed to come up with telling witticisms which brought pleasure and laughter when it was needed. My own experience has taught me that when tempers fray, pressure rises and impatience balloons, a well-chosen witticism often can defuse a difficult situation and replace dourness with smiles or laughter.

ALBERT WATERSTON ('72) served with the World Bank for 25 years during which he travelled extensively and wrote five books on planning and development. Upon retirement, he served as a consultant to the United States Agency for International Develpment and is currently Professor Emeritus of Economics at American University.

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