Ambition: Coming to Grips with Myself (II)

When assaulted by these two intellectual forces, forces which most would claim are inconsistent with each other, I didn't quite know what to do. I discovered later that there was a totalitarianism of the right as well as the left, as both sides became more strident in their beliefs, but at the time I didn't want to alienate people in either position. I wanted to be liked by everyone (because, I still felt that I had some kind of "message" for everyone), and I didn't possess at the time a strong enough sense of self to cut through the powerful rhetoric like a scythe, expose the weaknesses of both, and then grandly and calmly return to a repose in the self. And so I left my 20s in intellectual turmoil.

Becoming "Serious" About Life

But there comes in a time in the life of almost all of us that we tend to morph out of our ideological discussion days and enter into what most would call a semblance of "normal" living. This means that you have a regular job, that you probably are married and even have kids, that you start to become concerned about health insurance and pensions and safety and the communities in which you live more than the struggle for certain abstract principles which occupied so much of your mental space earlier in life. So, for about 20 years (roughly from ages 30-50), when I was paying my "debt to nature," I had this array of ideas in my mind, even though I didn't do much with them. But the basic point was that even though I was assembling a stellar resume and had all the signs of a "normal" and admirable family life (two kids with straight teeth, civic involvement, spouse and I with good jobs, etc.), I was crumbling internally. I was crumbling because of my basic inability to "square" my deep beliefs about myself with the still-insistent voices of Feminism and Evangelicalism that said that humility, non self-assertion, was the way to go. It created years of extreme mental torment for me, and I am sure I was not the best father or husband in those years. On the one hand I would engage myself in all manner of civic, church and professional activities and, on the other, I would go home an try to internalize the philosophy of being "humble-minded." On the one hand, I pictured myself being launched like the astronauts into the stratosphere of recognition while, on the other, I firmly believed that I was no more gifted than anyone else "out there." I was just "differently abled" perhaps, but nothing special.

The Tension Explodes

There was no one event that brought this crisis to a head in my life, but I was casting around so miserably for so many years to find something, anything that interested me that I believe I became nearly impossible to endure. Colleagues shunned me; the church became distant from me; my marriage dissolved; I took no pleasure in learning. When my family and I moved back to Oregon in 1996 from KS (1990-96), I entered law school. True to form, I excelled in law school, but felt so internally miserable that my anger, self-hatred and intolerance of others' success were making me into a very unattractive person.

Well, in my second autobiogrpahy, I have a sort of "day-by-day" narrative of how things fell apart, and I won't repeat it here. Suffice it to say that after my marriage broke up late in 2001, and I left my law practice in January 2003, I decided that I had spent too much time listening to people in life and not enough time really trying to hear what my heart said to me. I removed the word "should" from my vocabulary, as much as I could, and I refrained from giving any kind of advice to anyone. I simply wanted to see if the Bill I once loved, the young boy who was so talented, smart (and frustrated), the young man who was so excited in learning the text of the Bible, could return sans the frustration, and what he would look like if he could return.

That, friends, has been my quest since 2003--when I left the private practice of law. Even though I was a law professor until the end of 2006, I was able to spend countless hours on self-exploration and writing because I knew that "career" law teaching wasn't my desire. I did enough to teach my classes well, and then I turned inward, probing everything I could to see if I was still healthy mentally and physically, and how I could go forward.

When I began to cultivate the self, to honor it the way I wished it would have been honored all these years, to let it speak to me, I truly began to enjoy life--maybe for the first time. My words have not stopped since then, and my ambition has become clearer and clearer. Rather than to be the specialist in life, a task at which I have repeatedly failed, I would be different. I wouldn't be the "generalist"--you were probably expecting me to use the word. Rather, I would become a sort of "field-transcending-guru," a person who could understand and state clearly the assumptions on which fields are based, trace the history of major movements in each field and, because I am deeply familiar now with the movements of the human heart and the way that we are our best friends as well as worst enemies, be a sort of "mirror" to the culture. But, even beyond that, I would lay out a new theory of learning (which stands behind these mini-essays) and be a person who describes classic texts with brevity, brilliance and passion. In short, I would become a modern polymath, with important words to say in nearly every situation in life. That, friends, became my new picture of myself--when I laid aside all the ideologies and began to listen to myself. It is a terribly ambitious picture for a person who is now 55. But, it is about time, don't you agree?

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