What Literature Can Teach Us About Life Change

You don’t have to be a horror story all your life. You can be a pastoral poem!

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What’s the difference between a pastoral poem and a horror story?

Even if you are not an English professor, you probably know—or at least sense—that those two kinds of literature are different—very different, we should hope. One idealizes life in a rural setting, perhaps a pasture, and the other is designed to scare you with, say, a ghost or a crazed madman in a dark, unsettling locale, perhaps a crumbling mansion.

In short, these two brands of literature belong to different genres, or artistic categories.

You may remember, from your high school or college days, learning about genre. Maybe it seemed esoteric at the time—something about as relevant to your life as a spondee or an anaphora—but understanding genre can literally help you change your life.

Let me explain.

Two Inspiring Stories of Reinvention

I have known Tom Ehrlich—known of him anyway—since Lisa and I were undergraduates at Indiana University Bloomington in the 1980s. Tom was president of IU back then. (Lisa attended his inauguration when she was a curious junior, but that’s another story.) Tom and I recently became friends as a result of a shared experience on a national project on civic engagement, and I accepted his invitation to visit him in Palo Alto, where he continues to work in the field of higher education. That’s admirable—to me, a fellow educator, this kind of work is always admirable and important—but Tom also charged into a new realm. After writing several books of nonfiction over the course of his long career, he wrote his first novel—and then his second and then his third. Over lunch we gushed over the joys of writing fiction. (To those of us used to anchoring everything in facts, writing fiction comes with an exhilarating sense of freedom.)

While I was on the West Coast, I made an extra trip to visit another friend, Sita Amba-Rao, who taught business at IU Kokomo for many years before I arrived in 2015. In her retirement, Sita has begun writing an interesting memoir, recounting her personal development as an Indian immigrant to the United States (and a successful academic in a world dominated by men) in the second half of the twentieth century. She invited me to speak about Franklin to the fellow members of her community in Bellingham, Washington, and she and I talked quite a bit about her work.

Tom and Sita provide shining examples of reinvention, as well as an inspiring sense of intellectual adventure. Judging from my conversations with them, I would say that their willingness to take on transition after successful careers in other realms has enriched their lives immeasurably.

There’s a lesson here for the rest of us.

The Trauma of Transition

Change is famously difficult. We become accustomed to being and doing certain things. Then—suddenly, it seems—we are being and doing other things. It can feel uncomfortable, even unnatural.

The transition can feel especially jarring if we have been in a certain category for decades. People know you (and you know yourself) as a teacher, engineer, nurse, or parent. Your work has become part of your identity. How do you, how can you shed that identity and take on a new one?

In his essay “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson captured one reason why we struggle so much with changing the way that other people see us. He wrote, “"The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them." Emerson was referring to more than mere careers, but his words are relevant here, I think: remaining in a particular career or role creates a consistency that helps us to “fit” into our network of relationships.

Leaving one of these roles—as a result of retirement, for example—is difficult enough, but things get even tougher when we try to reinvent ourselves, as Tom and Sita did.

Grant Yourself Your New Donnée

Here’s where an understanding of genre can help.

A career is a lot like a genre. Just as we are accustomed to certain conventions of a pastoral poem or a horror story, we also expect certain things—actions, but also behaviors and even language—from, say, an attorney or a drill sergeant.

If you have spent decades as an attorney, it may be difficult to allow yourself to start acting like a painter. You might be tempted to keep expecting yourself to do what an attorney does, even judging yourself by the standards of an attorney. You spent a career advocating, parsing sentences, poking holes in others’ arguments, and now you’re “just” painting pretty pictures.

Attorneys and painters, however, are as different as murder mysteries and love poems. You wouldn’t expect a sonnet to have an assortment of clues and suspicious characters and then complain if it didn’t. Murder mysteries and love poems are two different things. They belong to different genres and thus have different conventions, or standard features.

In “The Art of Fiction,” the novelist and critic Henry James wrote, “We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, what the French call his donnée; our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.” I would say the same of a person. Give yourself permission, so to speak, to be and do something different, just as you would grant a book or a film to be what it is and do what it does as a fantasy novel or a slapstick comedy. Allow yourself to shift genres.

The shifting may confuse or “disappoint” some people who knew you in a previous genre, but remember Walt Whitman’s wonderful lines from “Song of Myself”:

Do I contradict myself? Very well then . . . . I contradict myself; I am large .... I contain multitudes.

You, too, are large. Your multitudes may include fundraiser, baseball umpire, and even more.

Me? I’ve spent nearly three decades as an English professor and university administrator, so I’ve already been an umpire, a conductor, a salesman, and an unwitting character in an absurdist play, so when I retire I will have to work to find something completely different. Maybe I’ll try education.