Gail Sheehy Passages Quotes

It is no longer enough to be competent and promising; a man wants now to be recognized and respected.

No two people can possibly coordinate all their developmental crises.

If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we are not really living. Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.

Though loved ones move in and out of our lives, the capacity to love remains.

Many of us are not consciously aware of such fears. With enough surface bravado to fool the people we meet, we fool ourselves as well. But the memory of formlessness is never far beneath. So we hasten to try on life’s uniforms

THE GREAT HEROISM OF A SOBER LIFE is getting up in the morning and facing the day, greeting others, going out into the world with something to give. When we are in the grave of our own thoughts, feeling like we will never be able to crawl back out, our fingernails packed with dirt, how is it that sometime later we can be laughing, and laughing hard?

ONE OF THE terrifying aspects of the twenties is the conviction that the choices we make are irrevocable. If we choose a graduate school or join a firm, get married or don’t marry, move to the suburbs or forego travel abroad, decide against children or against a career, we fear in our marrow that we might have to live with that choice forever.

WHATEVER YOU CAN DO, OR DREAM YOU CAN, BEGIN IT. BOLDNESS HAS GENIUS, POWER AND MAGIC IN IT. —GOETHE

And even as one part of us seeks the freedom to be an individual, another part is always searching for someone or something to surrender our freedom to.

We look to our mates, to our children, to money or success, hoping they will extend the protection of the caregivers from our childhood.

No matter how different the forms we choose, our concentration during the Trying Twenties is on mastering what we feel we are supposed to do.

Ignorant of our own and our mate’s inner life, we are ruled largely by external forces at this stage.

Many people find it easier to live together when that commitment is voluntarily renewed. The

The caring of experienced partners goes less into roles and more into enhancing the special qualities and endearing idiosyncrasies that brought them together in the first place.

As men and women enter midlife, the tables begin to turn. Many men I interviewed found themselves wanting to learn how to be responsive.

We are the only ones with our own set of thoughts and bundle of feelings. Another person can taste them, through shared experience or conversation, but no other person can ever really digest them.

50, there is a new warmth and mellowing. Friends become more important than ever, but so does privacy. Since it is so often proclaimed by people past midlife, the motto of this stage might be “No more bullshit.

The other real forces urging young people into marriages generally sift down to one of the following: the need for safety, the need to fill some vacancy in themselves, the need to get away from home, the need for prestige or practicality. Safety

Doubts immobilize. Believing that we are independent and competent enough to master the external tasks constantly fortifies us in our attempts to become so. It is only later we discover that logic cannot penetrate the loneliness of the human soul. One

And to what degree does the young woman invent the man she marries? She often sees in him possibilities that no one else recognizes and pictures herself within his dream as the one person who truly understands. Such illusions are the stuff of which the twenties are made.3

Further discomfort from these new realities afflicts men who expected to reach a certain level by dint of their white maleness but who now have to make room for women and minorities as well as their own generational bulge. The old boy network doesn’t help them much anymore.

You can’t take everything with you when you leave on the midlife journey. You are moving away. Away from institutional claims and other people’s agenda. Away from external valuations and accreditations, in search of an inner validation. You are moving out of roles and into the self.

Resolving the issues of one passage does not insulate us forever. There will be other tricky channels ahead, and we learn by moving through them. If we pretend the crises of development don’t exist, not only will they rise up later and hit with a greater wallop but in the meantime we don’t grow.

THE TRYING TWENTIES CONFRONTS US WITH THE QUESTION of how to take hold in the adult world. Incandescent with our molten energies, having outgrown the family and the formlessness of our transiting years, we are impatient to pour ourselves into the exactly right form—our own way of living in the world.

If there’s something about me you don’t like, just tell me,” says the newlywed anxious to please. “I’ll change it.” If he or she is not forthcoming with such an offer, the other one is determined to change it for the partner. “He may drink a little too much now,” the bride confides to her friend, “but I’ll reform him.” Examination

The forties are the time to rediscover community on a more realistic plane. Before this decade is out, if you are determined to become authentically yourself, you will find a way to assemble all the parts of your nature into one whole. You will have to stop pretending to be the person you have been and begin to recognize and ultimately accept who, or what, you are becoming.

If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we are not really living. Growth demands a temporary surrender of security. It may mean a giving up of familiar but limiting patterns, safe but unrewarding work, values no longer believed in, relationships that have lost their meaning. As Dostoevsky put it, "Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most." The real fear should be of the opposite course.

It is frightening to step off onto the treacherous footbridge leading to the second half of life. We can’t take everything with us on this journey through uncertainty. Along the way, we discover that we are alone. We no longer have to ask permission because we are the providers of our own safety. We must learn to give ourselves permission. We stumble upon feminine or masculine aspects of our natures that up to this time have usually been masked. There is grieving to be done because an old self is dying. By taking in our suppressed and even our unwanted parts, we prepare at the gut level for the reintegration of an identity that is ours and ours alone—not some artificial form put together to please the culture or our mates. It is a dark passage at the beginning. But by disassembling ourselves, we can glimpse the light and gather our parts into a renewal.

early marriage usually foreclosed the possibility of a career dream.

Here was a dyed-in-the-brine Cape Cod, Massachusetts, man who dropped into New York State on a carpetbag and used his slain brother’s gilded connections to help win a Senate seat.

man who dropped into New York State on a carpetbag

I was

I reread an observation by Willa Cather with a mixture of amusement and startled recognition: “THERE ARE ONLY two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

And somewhere between the late thirties and early forties when we enter midlife, we also have the opportunity for true adulthood, whereupon we proceed either to wither inside our husks or to regather and re-pot ourselves for the flowering into our full authenticity.

If I’ve been convinced by one idea in the course of collecting all the life stories that inform the book, it is this: Times of crisis, of disruption or constructive change, are not only predictable but desirable. They mean growth.

The loss of youth, the faltering of physical powers we have always taken for granted, the fading purpose of stereotyped roles by which we have thus far identified ourselves, the spiritual dilemma of having no absolute answers – any or all of these shocks can give this passage the character of crisis. Such thoughts usher in a decade between 35 and 45 that can be called the Deadline Decade. It is a time of both danger and opportunity. All of us have the chance to rework the narrow identity by which we defined ourselves in the first half of life. And those of us who make the most of the opportunity will have a full-out authenticity crisis.

Nor is it automatic that once a person becomes acclaimed or powerful, the voice of the inner tyrant will be stilled. The work of individuation is internal. We all have to do it unless we prefer to remain very old children. Even when we do finally claim the authority formerly wielded by that inner custodian, we are not only freed but also bereft. We have lost the inner companion who for so many years also made us feel watched over and safe.

Would that there were an award for people who came to understand the concept of enough. Good enough. Successful enough. Thin enough. Rich enough. Socially responsible enough. When you have self-respect, you have enough; and when you have enough, you have self-respect.

To come through this authenticity crisis, we must reexamine our purposes and reevaluate how to spend our resources from now on. “Why am I doing all this?” “What do I really believe in?” No matter what we have been doing, there will be parts of ourselves that have been suppressed and now need to find expression. “Bad” feelings will demand acknowledgment along with the good.

Along the way, we discover that we are alone. We no longer have to ask permission because we are the providers of our own safety….There is grieving to be done because an old self is dying. By taking in our suppressed and even our unwanted parts, we prepare at the gut level for the reintegration of an identity that is ours and ours alone – not some artificial form put together to please the culture or our mates.

What is disassembling is that narrow self we have thus far put together in a form tailored to please the culture and other people.

The illusions of the 20s, however, may be essential to infuse our first commitments with excitement and intensity, and to sustain us in those commitments long enough to gain some experience in living.

I want to have everything. And I don’t see why I can’t.

Because the 40s, as writer Barbara Fried so succinctly captures them, are a time when it seems no matter what course one has pursued, “everything is turning gray, drying up or leaving home.

Ever since romanticism replaced the arranged marriage, the assumption has been that people marry for love. This is largely a myth. Any marriage can evolve into the mutual love of watching each other live. But first marriages are often a matter of conforming to the shoulds of the 20s.

One of the terrifying aspects of the 20s is the inner conviction that the choices we make are irrevocable. It is largely a false fear. Change is quite possible, and some alteration of our original choices is probably inevitable.

Life after adolescence is not one long plateau. Changes are not only possible and predictable, but to deny them is to be an accomplice to one’s own unnecessary vegetation.

To be really good at something, you can’t be married. I believe that, along with Katharine Hepburn.

By all accounts of statistics and studies, men need marriage more than women do…Divorced men remarry sooner than divorced women do. Widowed men remarry much sooner than bereaved women do.

Single women in this country experience less discomfort and greater happiness and appear in most ways stronger in meeting the challenges of their positions than single men. Unmarried men suffer far more from neurotic and antisocial tendencies and are more often depressed and passive.

Autonomy equals aloneness.

The change in time sense forces each of us to a major task of midlife. All our notions of the future need to be rebalanced around the idea of time left to live.

The myth that marriage offers an equally supportive structure for the development of men and women is dealt a blow, however, when husbands and wives are compared…The mental health hazards suffered by married women are far greater than those of married men.

It would be surprising if we didn’t experience some pain as we leave the familiarity of one adult stage for the uncertainty of the next. But the willingness to move through each passage is equivalent to the willingness to live abundantly. If we don’t change, we don’t grow. And if we don’t grow, we are not really living. Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.

DARING My Passages By Gail Sheehy Illustrated. 484 pp. William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers. $29.99.

The career acceleration that for so many men precedes any inner survey also serves to delay it. By the time the true and sobering issues that are driving them forward begin to insist on acknowledgment, the impact may be more cruel. A crucible rather than a survey. Jung

The tasks of this period are as enormous as they are exhilarating: To shape a dream, that vision of one’s own possibilities in the world that will generate energy, aliveness, and hope. To prepare for a lifework. To find a mentor if possible. And to form the capacity for intimacy without losing in the process whatever constancy of self we have thus far assembled. The first test structure must be erected around the life we choose to try. One

THE SHOULDS ARE defined by the family destiny, the press of the culture, and/or the prejudices of our peers.

Perfect” is that person we imbue with the capacity to enliven and support our vision or the person we believe in and want to help.

The illusions of the twenties, however, may be essential to infuse our first commitments with excitement and intensity, and to sustain us in those commitments long enough to gain us some experience in living. The

We are utterly convinced that all our notions spring full blown, as if by magic, from our own unique selves. At

Trying to stabilize—that is what the twenties are all about. The

Growing in tandem is virtually impossible in a patriarchal society, as ours has been. Only one-half of the couple has the use of that remarkable support system known as a wife. Added to this basic determinant of tempo is the rate of social change. Even in a relatively stagnant society, the odds are minimal that any couple can enjoy matched development.

What really happened with Serena and Jeb is that each was able to be strong in an area in which the other needed support. In

What is the first thing young people ask about in job interviews today: What are the health benefits? When I asked a savvy focus group of New Yorkers in their mid-twenties, “How safe do you feel—about sex, money, relationships, marriage, street violence, job security?” The response was urgent and unanimous. “None of the above. Unsafe on all levels. At all times.” And

There is nothing wrong with projecting this false self to the outside world during these early striving years, so long as it isn’t too distant or disconnected from who we really are. Later, in the forties and fifties, it becomes imperative to find our way back to the truest things we know and to compose a more authentic self. Now

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Today the smart man will use his early forties as preparation time. What does he need to learn to maximize his ability to respond quickly to a fluid marketplace?

Just as the most successful industrial plants are adopting the concept of “agile manufacturing,” so the most successful contract workers make themselves agile through developing multiple abilities.

I don’t want to spend too much time describing this culture of individualism, authenticity, autonomy, and isolation because it has been described so masterfully by others: Philip Rieff in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism, Gail Sheehy in Passages, Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue, Tom Wolfe in “The ‘Me’ Decade,” Erica Jong in Fear of Flying, Charles Taylor in The Ethics of Authenticity, Robert Bellah in Habits of the Heart, and Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone.