The First Day of the Rest of My Life

In this book excerpt, author Sara Davidson describes 'the narrows,' the phase in life where everything gets harder—before it gets easier.

Newsweek

January 22, 2007
 

What are you doing now?" people would ask me.

"Different things ..." If I'd told the truth, I would have said, "I'm doing nothing." For the first time since college, I have no work. I've always been overscheduled—writing TV scripts in the bleachers at Little League games—but at 57, I'm at home with no kids and no work. After 24 years and several award nominations, I can't get hired to write for television. In Hollywood jargon, I can't get arrested. At the same time, my partner of seven years takes off with no discussion, and my children, who've occupied my first thoughts on waking and my last before falling asleep, are off at college. As long as they lived with me, I got up at 7 and made pancakes, drove them to school, soccer, music lessons, helped them write papers and carve pumpkins for Halloween. No more. My kids, my lover and my livelihood are being yanked from me at once and there's nothing I can do. When I tell this to a friend, the photographer Peter Simon, he says, "Oh, honey, you've got money problems and no sex. That's not good."

Not good at all. I can't sleep either. I fall asleep but wake at 2 a.m., shaking with fear. What am I supposed to do for the next 30 years? I've raised my kids, written best sellers, had deep love ... Why am I still here?

This was the beginning of a period I later came to call "the narrows," the rough passage to the next part of life. In the narrows, you're in the dark, stripped of what you thought was your identity, and must grapple with questions like: What do you really want to do with the time left? What will make you feel most alive? That your being here has mattered?

I found, after several years of research, that everyone—no matter how much money or achievement you've attained or not attained—must go through the narrows. You may do it in your late 40s, you may not do it till your 70s, but if you don't do it voluntarily, the world or your body will force you to. Maybe your hips or knees wear down, or you can't drink as much and stay out as late without paying. You're compelled to shift gears, and you won't come out unchanged.

Every person goes through the narrows according to character. Those addicted to gloom will see no hope. Those who put a rosy slant on everything will see it as an "opportunity." My way was to assume the fetal position and cry, berating myself for failing at work, failing at love, with my kids—at everything. This is what the Buddhists call the second arrow. The first is the bad thing that happens. The second is what you do to yourself because of the bad thing that happened.

I began looking for contemporaries who were going through some kind of stripping, because I needed to see that people could survive, find a way through. I decided to turn my predicament into research for a book, LEAP! What Will We Do With the Rest of Our Lives. I interviewed icons like Tom Hayden, Dr. Andrew Weil, Ram Dass and Bebe Moore Campbell, along with 150 others from all walks of life.

I contacted Carly Simon, whom I'd known when we were younger, because I'd heard she'd been dealing with multiple blows: she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy at the same time she and her husband were drifting apart, her kids were moving off on their own and her record company was abandoning her. "I felt discarded like a dog," she told me. "I'd had so much rejection I couldn't take it anymore." Forced to give up her apartment in Manhattan when the rent was tripled, she moved by herself to Martha's Vineyard where she started recording songs in her daughter's old bedroom. She'd stay up late, mixing tracks on her own, just trying to please herself. "I was doing what I'd done at 19," she says, "making sounds I liked. That was the only star I could follow."

Six months after our talk, she received a call from Richard Perry, the superstar producer with whom she'd made "You're So Vain" and other hits. He asked her to collaborate on some romantic ballads. They funded the recording themselves and when they were satisfied, sold it to Columbia. The week it was released as "Moonlight Serenade," it hit No. 7 on the Billboard chart.

How sweet it was—and unexpected. Carly told me, in another moment, that she wants to learn "how to walk down the ladder gracefully. I have this image—I'd like to get smaller and smaller in a relevant way."

It's a gorgeous image. I can picture her—tall, willowy and magnetic—walking down the staircase. But how could I do that? My eyes have been habitually trained upward. My shoulders are hitched forward, my orientation is toward rising rather than descending, and to reverse that feels like turning a train around.

People I respect had told me I needed to "surrender," that at this stage of life, instead of powering your way to your goals it's better to listen and let things unfold. But I detested the notion of surrender. It felt like giving up in defeat.

As I spoke with dozens who'd managed to make it out of the narrows, I saw that each had had a conversion, and each was different. For Carly Simon, it was learning to walk down the ladder with grace. For Tom Hayden, who, after 18 years in the California legislature, lost an election to a man half his age, then collapsed with heart failure and had a quintuple bypass, it was "putting your career drives down." He gave up running for office and shifted his focus to reading and writing, speaking out and teaching. "But not a day goes by that I don't have conflict about it," he said. For a friend in Chicago, it was quitting his job of 30 years as a tax attorney and starting a nonprofit musical company.

When I started hitting the rocks, I had a strong feeling I should move. My life in California had come to a dead stop, and I had no tethers—work or kids in school—to hold me there. On an intuition, I drove to Boulder, Colo., where I knew no one. I was convinced I needed to search for a new vocation. I tried teaching at the University of Colorado, working with dying people in hospice, then tutoring orphans in India, but nothing gave me the sense I was running with the current, doing what I'm meant to do.

Clarity began to come when a high-school teacher, Barry Meyers Lewis, asked over dinner, "If you knew the world was going to end in two days, what would you do?"

"Take notes," I said, not hesitating.

Shortly after this, I spent two months writing a piece for a prestigious magazine, completing what I thought was strong work. My editor called and said the magazine was killing the piece. "I can't tell you exactly why," he said. "But I'm afraid it won't be fruitful for you to submit anything else here."

I went for a long walk on a trail I knew would be deserted. I felt humiliated. They were not just killing the piece, they were barring the door on me. Was I washed up? Then something snapped and I thought, I had a terrific time reporting and writing the piece and know I did it well. That's the real reason to continue writing now: for the periods when your mind is humming and the narrative is unspooling. You lose the sense of time as you're carried to the place John Fowles describes as "the sacred wood," where characters you're inventing start to say things you hadn't expected, and sentences will roll out that startle you with their rightness.

Creative work has always been what makes me feel alive, that I'm using my most potent skills to contribute. The imperative was to shift from creating for a purpose to creating for the joy and challenge of the undertaking. I began to accept—and it's a daily struggle—that whether I'm writing for my blog or a national magazine, volunteering at a community radio station or being paid by a network, the creative work itself is what I need, as I need air.

I also came to see "surrender" in a different light. It's not giving up or being a victim but accepting that you're in a transition and can't know what's ahead. As a friend described it, throwing out her arms as if to meet a lover or embrace a child, "You open yourself to what's unknown."

While there's no single route through the narrows, I can tell you that there's sunlight and air at the other side. What became clear for me may be utterly different than for you. I've talked with a man who's building a hospital in Uganda, a woman who's becoming a nun at 50, a couple who are adopting a child at 61. Others have a passion to live near their families and play golf.

In some ways, I'm in the same situation now as when I started through the narrows. I have no idea what work I'll do next or what companions will be with me. But I'm not raging against it. Expectancy is in the air. The country ahead, from the scouting I've done, is not arid but rich and unpredictable, and I've come to be half in love with uncertainty.