Find Guides to Life in the Stories of Others' Lives

Where can we turn for guidance on how we might live our lives in both a moral and satisfying way?

We can learn what has worked in the lives of others. What has helped them to live a good life? The answer lies in their life stories. We can ask people who have already lived pretty full lives to tell us about the choices they’ve made and how those turned out for them.

A columnist for The New York Times has done just that. His name is David Brooks. He has written two columns recently on exactly our topic. He calls them “The Life Reports.”

In late October he wrote a column [ see Brooks: Life Report I ] that began this way:

"If you are over 70, I’d like to ask for a gift. I’d like you to write a brief report on your life so far, an evaluation of what you did well, of what you did not so well and what you learned along the way."

He went on to say that he wanted to hear from his readers for two reasons.

First, he said, we have few formal moments of self-appraisal in our culture. Occasionally, on a big birthday, people will take a step back and try to form a complete picture of their lives, but we have no regular rite of passage prompting them to do so.

More important, he went on, these essays will be useful to the young. Young people are educated in many ways, but they are given relatively little help in understanding how a life develops, how careers and families evolve, what are the common mistakes and the common blessings of modern adulthood. These essays will help them benefit from the life experience described in these reports.

These essays also have a third value, in my opinion, a value that means the most to me: by reading the essays, and considering how other people remember and summarize their lives, we can learn lessons in living that may help us with future choices and also show us how to make sense of the times already gone by.

David Brooks posts on essay every day on his blog. They make for inspiring reading, They also help us to see that we are by no means alone in the struggle to make sense of life. Check out his blog at Brooks Blog

On November 29 Brooks published a column entitled “Life Reports Number Two.” In that column he listed lessons he learned from the numerous essays he received. I will summarize here four of these; for the full column, see Brooks: Life Reports II .

First of all, in reflecting on our lives and wondering how we did, Brooks advises that we divide our life into chapters. The unhappiest of his correspondents saw time as an unbroken flow, with themselves as corks bobbing on top of it. A man named Neil lamented that he had been “an Eeyore not a Tigger; a pessimist, not an optimist; an aimless grasshopper, not a purposeful ant; a dreamer, not a doer; a nomad, not a settler; a voyager, not an adventurer; a spectator, not an actor, player or participant.” Neil  concluded: “Neil never amounted to anything.”

The happier ones divided time into phases. They wrote things like, “There were six crucial decisions in my life.” Then they organized their recollections of their lives around those pivot points. By seeing time as something divisible into chunks, they could more easily stop and self-appraise. They felt they had more control over their fate.

The second lesson is this: recognize that you can’t control other people. David Leshan made an observation that was echoed by many who wrote to Brooks. Mr. Leshan said, “It took me twenty years of my fifty-year marriage to discover how unwise it was to attempt to remake my wife. . . . I learned also that neither could I remake my friends or students.”

At the same time, and to the same point, some of the most inspiring stories were told by stepparents who came into families after there already were children from a previous marriage. They very wisely bided their time. They accepted slights and insults in the beginning. Gradually, they were accepted and even loved by their new children, if they had the sense not to jump in too quickly with advice and discipline.

Number three: measure people, and yourself, by growth rate, not by absolute talents. The best essays were by people who made steady progress each decade.

Regina Titus grew up shy and sheltered on Long Island. She took demeaning clerical jobs, working with people who treated her poorly. Her first husband died after six months of marriage and her second committed suicide.

But she just kept growing. At 56, studying nights and weekends, she obtained a college degree, cum laude, from Marymount Manhattan College. She moved to Wilmington, Delaware, works as a docent, studies opera, hikes, volunteers and does a thousand other things. She acknowledges, “I did not have the joy of holding my baby in my arms. I did not have a long and happy marriage.” But hers is a story of relentless self-expansion.

The last, and to my mind the most significant, lesson, is this: lean toward risk. It’s trite, but apparently true. Many more seniors regret the risks they didn’t take than regret the ones they did.

I need to emphasize that lesson. In my view it’s one of the most important. Many more people regret the risks they didn’t take than regret the risks they did take. Taking risks left far fewer people unhappy than playing it safe and thus missing out on opportunities for change.

Perhaps you are beyond mid-life and think it might be harder to make changes than might have been true when in our 20’s or 30’s. But I feel very strongly it is never too late in life to make changes. I say again: It is never too late in life to make changes.  We all have many more choices about our lives than we usually allow ourselves even to contemplate, much less act upon. If you think your life might be better by making a change – then go ahead and make the change. Sure, you might regret it. But you are more likely to regret not having changed when you look back on your choices later in your life.

Anyone fully satisfied now with the way life is going doesn’t need to make any changes. But for anyone who feels maybe there’s a better way to be, whether in relation to our spouse or partner, our parents, our siblings, our children or grandchildren, our friends, our job – in any of these areas, the most important lesson from the lives in the David Brooks essays is this: we have but one life; to live it well requires that we examine where we have been, look around us at where we are now, look forward to where we want to be, and then make choices that make it more likely we will achieve our goals.