I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
All of life can be read symbolically (by allowing any encounter to engage the ego, oblige its reformulation of meaning, and thereby reframe our being). In fact, it is symbolic life that allows us to move beyond the regrets, disappointments, and limitations of unlived life and thereby achieve meaning and fulfillment.
Robert A. Johnson and Jerry M. Ruhl, Living Your Unlived Life: Coping with Unrealized Dreams and Fulfilling Your Purpose in the Second Half of Life
I love the idea of using symbolic processing of life events to resolve the unresolved in my life.
What does remain unresolved? What remains unlived?
Things I always wanted to do:
- Paint giant abstract works of art ✅
- Write a book that really expresses who I am and what I think, a book I can be proud of
- Build a business that uses my technical expertise to create success
- Learn to do online marketing
- Own a mountain home
- Get married again
Johnson and Ruhl continue:
Consider a few things in your life that you cannot do but feel that you must experience. Perhaps you are short and you always wanted to be tall. Maybe you always dreamed of living in a tropical paradise, but it has never been practical. Or you always wished to be thin, or pretty, or smarter, or more athletic.
Symbolic life is the only solution to such dilemmas.
What does this mean? I’m not sure it’s makes any sense; the examples that the authors give of how to live out your unlived life symbolically rather than actually aren’t compelling to me. But the idea of figuring out a way to do it is compelling.
There’s no reason I can’t (1) write a book I’m truly proud of (2) use my technical expertise to build a successful business and (3) learn to do online marketing. All of these things are intertwined with one another. I don’t need to live out those things symbolically; I can live that unlived life in actuality.
I already lived the owning-a-mountain-home dream when I was in relationship with a man who was part owner of a Keystone townhome. It wasn’t that great.
The idea of getting married for a second time is one I constantly interrogate since it is so strong within me, something maybe I will only live symbolically.
Why do I want it so much? I know a few reasons. I liked being a wife, and having a husband. I liked the social approval that came with it. It freed me up from a period in my late teens and twenties when I was fixated on romance and dating, to the detriment of spending my time on more meaningful activities.
I suppose a second marriage would have further benefits.
It would say to my adult children: this relationship matters, this relationship is serious. This isn’t just yet another guy I met on Match or OkCupid. We are committed to each other for the long term. We mutually support each other, and when one of us needs something, we would usually turn first to our spouse to provide it.
It would represent a kind of recovery after the devastation of divorce. It would be a way of saying to myself, to the world: I am okay now (as though I can’t be okay single? Something to investigate).
And I would get to make vows and have a ceremony and celebration, vows which could be all the more meaningful than the first ones I made because of what passed in between.
What would it look like to symbolically get married again?
Johnson and Ruhl give a guideline for managing your unlived life:
Apply the oversimplified but very useful general principle: How can I do it (express the unlived life) while simultaneously not doing it?
I asked Chat for some ideas:
- Make a vow of renewal to myself – write vows to my future self and create a ritual where I receive a ring or object symbolizing devotion to my own unfolding. Hold a private ceremony and speak the words I’ve longed to hear.
- Hold a ring ceremony without a marriage – this seems a repeat of the first suggestion.
- Write a wedding ritual for the woman I am now – compose a wedding liturgy for a midlife woman marrying possibility with vows that honor who I’ve become and who I’m becoming. Don’t perform it. Allow it to exist as a ceremonial script for the unlived life, satisfied via imagination.
- Create an art piece that stands in for a marriage ceremony – turn the longing into creative form. Not a bad idea.
- Design a wedding day with no groom – wearing a beautiful dress and carrying flowers, go to a place I love (a mountain overlook, an art gallery, a garden) and read vows or blessings.
- Imagine and write the story of a second wedding, without a groom imagined.
- Undertake a “remarriage quest” – take a solo retreat or begin a new practice that symbolizes union (for example, blending two forms of art).
More from Living Your Unlived Life:
When it was feasible, Jung would refer patients back to the religion of their upbringing to help deal with neurotic problems. He understood the malaise in the soul of modern life and that the great religious systems have historically provided the images and community to support symbolic sensibility. However, when a religious institution no longer contains satisfactory answers, then we are forced to go on “the quest,” utilizing symbols that arise from our own unconscious.
The term quest may call to mind a pilgrimage or some type of spiritual journey and, indeed, this relates to what was once known as a religious crisis. The quest involves listening to your interior intelligence, taking it seriously, staying true to it, and approaching it with a religious attitude. In Jungian psychology this quest is called individuation–discovering the uniqueness of you, finding your purpose and meaning. It relates to wholeness, not some indiscriminate wholeness but rather your particular relationship to everything else. You become more whole by working through the specificity of your life, not by trying to evade or rise above the particulars of your life. [emphasis mine]
On the road trip I took with a friend last week, we talked extensively about our pasts. We told each other things that we hadn’t shared before. There was great specificity in the stories we narrated that brought us to midlife. There was pain and happiness entwined.
She asked, “Do you regret your divorce? Do you wish it didn’t happen?”
I said no. I try to live according to amor fati, love of fate, and the idea of eternal recurrence. This idea that the way to become whole is by attending to the specifics and particulars of my life aligns well with those practices.
Could I imagine some life that went more smoothly than mine, that didn’t have the rupture of my (first) marriage? Yes. But that imagined story is smooth and frictionless, not realistic and detailed and specific.
Philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that contemporary culture is dominated by smoothess as an aesthetic preference as well as a psychological, political, and existential condition.
In Saving Beauty, Han writes:
Without the negativy of being refracted, beauty atrophies into the smooth…. Without the negativity of death, life solidifies into something dead. It is smoothed out in the undead. Negativity is the invigorating force of life.
A life without pain and guilt and shame would not be as beautiful and profound as a real human life.
I don’t wish my pain and guilt and shame to never have happened.
Which is in some ways interesting as input into the question of whether to remarry symbolically or in actuality. Why would I not do it in actuality, given I am involved in a relationship that I want to last the rest of our lives? Because of the possibility of pain, friction, discomfort, and negativity.
Remaining unmarried could be smooth. And because of that, perhaps it’s the wrong path.