Quality Transformation: Revisiting Wholeness

▤ Summary

Thanks to three pieces in the New York Times; a recent live stream class featuring Christina Baldwin; a dinner conversation with friends; and a Facebook post from poet Mark Nepo, I am once again reflecting on what it means to live what Parker Palmer has called an “undivided life,” by way of “seeking wholeness in ourselves, our work, and our world.” In the first New York Times piece, an April 22, 2022, guest essay by one of my favorite authors, Rebecca Solnit, asks, “Why Did We Stop Believing That People Can Change?” In her essay, Solnit tells the story of our legal system’s failure to consider the dramatic transformation that has taken place in her friend Jarvis Masters’ life. During his 41 years in San Quentin prison, mostly spent on death row, Masters saw his way to becoming a “renowned Tibetan Buddhist practitioner and peacemaker.” Yet the legal system has refused to revisit his case, out of what Solnit calls our culture’s rampant “belief in the fixity rather than the fluidity of human nature.” Likewise, New York Times columnist, David Brooks, wrote in his opinion piece of April 21, 2022, “Some People Turn Suffering Into Wisdom,” how, for some, grief can be a catalyst for transformational change or what he calls “post-traumatic growth.” This growth process, he suggests, is like “rewriting a novel” or “crafting a different story.” “This,” he concludes, “is one of those tasks, which most of us have to perform a few times over a life, that nobody teaches you about in school.” How can we embrace transformative change toward wholeness in our own lives to live the undivided life Parker Palmer speaks of so eloquently? David Brooks poses one such approach, called “free expressive writing,” used by social psychologist James Pennebaker to help people become more self-aware and frame new, more coherent narratives. That reflection led me to explore what psychologist, Erik H. Erikson, termed the developmental challenge (or psychological struggle) of our elder years, that of integrity vs. despair. A process of reflecting “on the course one’s life has taken – especially comparing one’s early hopes and dreams with the life one actually lived.” The “fruit of that struggle, writes Erikson, “is wisdom” and “an old age in which one has enough conviction in one’s own completeness to ward off the despair that gradual physical disintegration can too easily bring.” These thoughts and reflections on the need to seek wholeness (at any age) were beautifully summarized in a Facebook post by our friend and poet, Mark Nepo.

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