Chapter 2: The Life We Choose

I remember the moment. November 1962. I was in a dressing room between dance classes. I was twenty-one. It was seven months before my college graduation, and I was thinking about the future.

I’d been studying art history. It would have made more sense for me to pursue a career in that field. At least it was a clear course of action. About dancing, I knew nothing except dancers made little money and had a very short career span. However, when I made my choice, I thought about what I cared for most. Art history might have had weekly paychecks, but I did not see it as my destiny.

Clearly, I’d had some inkling that dance would be my life at least a year earlier when I’d transferred from college in California to Manhattan in order to be at the center of the dance world. While I’d convinced my college administrators to let me pursue an independent study program shuttling between two disciplines—weekdays for dancing off-campus, weekends for cramming art history textbooks—I knew the student’s life in dance I’d been practicing was different from a professional career. Mondays through Fridays, I’d grab my dance bag and find a class in one of Manhattan’s many studios. I assessed the other dancers in class—many of them in-demand professionals. I felt good about my prospects. The women were strong and fast, but not patently stronger or faster than I. They had polish and finesse, but I could acquire those qualities with more work.

It was a decision to set off in my own direction and see where it led. I left the dressing room decided.

That was the beginning of my pledge. In the Old French, pleige means the security or bail that released a hostage. Our pledges can help free us from the indecision that holds us hostage, a prisoner of inaction. When you think of a pledge, you might think of a promise made at the beginning of a new venture, but I suggest an alternate understanding.

To me, a pledge is revealed over time, like a Polaroid picture coming into focus. The moments when you make choices—move across country for a job or stay in your hometown, have another child or don’t, phone a friend in need or give them space—come together in a constellation that maps what matters to you most.

I promised I would not try to convince you that aging is a gift, but that does not mean we can’t find benefits in getting older. One of these is that you can step back from your life to see its whole shape. A pledge comes into clearer focus over the course of your life—it shows itself not rigid but bending with a momentum powerful enough to dictate what the next day will be.

You have probably grappled with a barrage of choices in one way or another over the years. You are offered a job, but the hours are abominable. You get back worrisome test results from your physician. You feel a calling to investigate a field unrelated to the career you’ve pursued for decades. What are you going to do?

There is no surefire way to make a correct choice, but I offer this: the only choice that is certain to be wrong is the one you don’t make. Eliminate inaction as a choice. Your bigger, freer, better life starts with a choice to act.

While it is true that some choices are best made with slow deliberation, grave thought given to the consequences and responsibilities of our actions, other choices, in situations equally intense, are made with great speed by the body, its thinking unbidden by the mind. At moments of extreme emotion we do not tell the body what to do. We fall in love: boom. A ten-ton truck headed directly for us: we swerve. Death of a loved one: instant profound sadness. These choices our bodies make untutored by the mind.

The inevitable effect of time and trauma will dull these quick, gut-level choices. But too much thinking and fear of failure in advance will cause us to question every aspect involved in our decision-making, freezing us in our tracks. Not good.

The best choices are made instinctively. Bit by bit, these choices fill out your character over the course of a lifetime. Your pledge materializes out of observing the choices you make.

Our culture tells us that to feel rewarded, we must accomplish, achieve, check goals off a list. But a pledge is not a goal. A goal is a desire you articulate to yourself that has an endpoint. You want to be famous, or president, or retired at forty. You want to find a mate or speak Italian or fit into a size two. While pursuing a goal is admirable, I want to emphasize that a pledge is not a goal.

Take Diana Nyad, a champion long-distance swimmer. Over the course of thirty-five years, she had attempted the swim between Cuba and Florida four times, and each time had to make the prudent call to quit lest she risk death. In her quest to become the first person to swim this distance without the protection of a shark cage, Diana Nyad had encountered obstacles most of us never face, including poisonous box jellyfish and sharks. What she found as she entered her sixties, however, is all too familiar to most of us—a sense that she was on the sidelines of the life she was meant to lead. This was literally the case for her, as a sports broadcaster. As she writes, “I was a bystander, witnessing other people chasing their dreams. I was telling other people’s stories instead of living out my own story. I was no longer a dreamer myself. I was no longer a doer.”

After the death of her mother, she confronted her fear that she was wasting, as she quotes poet Mary Oliver, her one “wild and precious life,” and she decided to attempt the swim that had defeated her four times as a much younger woman. Through rigorous training, careful planning, and unwavering determination, she became, at age sixty-four, the first person to make the 110-mile swim. Yes, she achieved her goal. Job well done. But as impressive as this pursuit was, it was a goal, not a pledge.

If you can mark it as “done,” it’s a goal. Not so with a pledge. Whatever you decide to pledge, it is essential that you are striving to reach it, always trying to refine, hone, and improve your choices to better fulfill it. Your pledge becomes a distillation of your life’s work in action. You don’t want to get to a point where you feel you are finished. Remember, when we are frozen, we are dead.

My pledge is a daily choice. We all see the distinction between a chosen life and an unintentional life when we apply it to other people. It’s why we admire the self-made individual and resent the heir. The former satisfies our sense of equity; the latter offends it (why him, not me?).

Know what you want to do and do it. It is how I measure my work at each day’s end: How well did I marry what I wanted to do and what I actually did? If I’m satisfied with the answer, I’ve chosen the day. Anything less is not a good feeling. The life we choose pays dividends. The life that we let choose us will bankrupt us.

Four months after college graduation, my pledge was beginning to unfold: I was dancing in a professional company. It was exhilarating, but I was restless and something didn’t feel right. I began to audition for other jobs. I went in for the Radio City Rockettes, did a series of difficult moves well enough to be brought forward and told, “Young lady, you dance very well. But could you smile?”

I had chosen a physical life, but when I walked out of that audition, I realized that simply being a dancer, taking direction from others, couldn’t fulfill me. If I wanted to dance, I would have to make the dances myself—become performer and choreographer, which is neither an obvious nor an enviable career progression. Of the thousands of ballerinas and hoofers and street dancers in the U.S., only a tiny handful become choreographers. I had no clue what the job meant. What I did know was that when I made up my own steps and when I hit movement that felt right, BINGO!

I should have been worried about my next meal, next class, next paycheck. But I took a longer view of my situation.

What I have learned throughout my life is to try to expand my opportunities rather than limit them, even when faced with an obstacle. What it came down to with me and the Rockettes was my unwillingness to join the line. The line is where you lose your identity and your independence.

So I became a choreographer. The first thing Greek playwrights undertook with new plays was to become their own choreographers, training the chorus to move. Before the music, and before the words, was the action. Choreography is literally to write action for a group: choreo—chorus; graphy—to write.

This is how I would have you write your life: in action. It is not enough to intend or consider, you must choose to act, often and ongoingly. If dancing meant having to make the dances, so be it. Many carry the misconception that we should become more comfortable and that things should become easier as time goes by. This is a belief system designed to undermine you. In life, there will be problems. This is guaranteed. We must learn to use our obstacles, transforming them into advantages.

Karen von Blixen found herself in midlife facing loss on a monumental scale. In 1914 she had moved with her husband from Denmark to Kenya to set up a coffee plantation. She grew to love the farm, but her marriage did not fare well. Bror von Blixen was unfaithful, and Karen was diagnosed with syphilis, plagued with physical suffering for years. When the von Blixens divorced, Karen was left to manage the failing coffee business. Despite her best efforts, the farm went belly-up. Her next love, the adventurer Denys Finch Hatton, was killed in a plane crash—with another woman by his side. Karen returned to her family home in Denmark in 1931, brokenhearted and nearly penniless.

Failure, tragedy, financial ruin, emotional devastation. The only thing Karen hadn’t lost was her mettle—and her talent. She had published minor works many years before, but it was only upon returning home from Kenya that she began to write in earnest. However she had actually been writing all along. She was writing letters. She was telling stories. She had memorized The Arabian Nights. She knew the Bible from cover to cover, absorbed its rhythms, and its cadences. In Africa what she had lacked was a necessity for writing, and that necessity came when there was nothing else she could do. When her life fell apart she found what she knew best was writing. And so she turned to it, finally.

Her commitment—made halfway through her life—to writing was a courageous redirection.

Under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen, she published her first book, Seven Gothic Tales, when she was forty-eight years old. Her second book, Out of Africa, further established her reputation. Ernest Hemingway, accepting the Nobel Prize in 1954, said the prize should have gone instead to “that beautiful Danish writer Isak Dinesen.”

Dinesen is quoted as saying, “I wrote a little every day without hope and without despair.” She made her choice in the face of several obstacles. Her pledge, too, emerged over the course of a life against the odds.

Obstacles often require us to reroute our pledge. The obstacles may not be as catastrophic as the death of a lover and total financial ruin, but every path has them. Be not confused: having an obstacle to get around is not the same as failing. Failure calls for serious questioning; obstacles are simply part of your process. To continue, we learn to cope.

PRACTICE PUSHING BACK

Pushing against a fixed object is the physical equivalent of the emotional resolve we must have as we push against obstacles. Physical resistance is called isometrics. Like a pledge, the isometric grounding we gain by pushing into a wall or the floor can be thorough and unrelenting.

Remember, as a kid, pressing the back of your wrist against a wall for a minute or so, then stepping away and watching the stored power lift your arm of its own accord with no additional effort on your part? Static resistance training using the body’s weight generates great power in the muscles. This is the basis of calisthenics.

Try simply pushing your palms together, fingers pointed upward. Press as hard as you can, as long as you can. By pulling your stomach in and curving your head forward, you can accomplish an upper-body stretch. The same stretch can be had by locking the fingers and pulling out with the arms.

Design your own isometric moves by pushing any part of your body against any surface. You can keep this resistance isolated, as pushing your hand into a wall for the muscles of the arm, or you can extend the resistance by pushing the feet into the ground and elongating all the muscles in the body.

Isometric stretches are fundamental and are done in nature by all living creatures, for pushing away from gravity is how we stand. Make a conscious effort to drive into the ground with your legs and feet. Then resist this movement by pulling your stomach back and your buttocks up. This will deliver a body-renewing stretch any time, any place.