I AM A child of the 1960s, that wild and vital time, so misunderstood, exalted, or condemned, based on the glimpses of its extremes. It was a turbulent, wondrous time that shaped so many of us. I could list so many events, and each has a story worth telling. We were carried on a current of social upheaval that suspended and broke the roles awaiting my generation. We happened to grow up on a cultural fault line. And during the quake that was the sixties, the earth opened, and seeing the center under all that chaos has stayed with me my entire life. In that chasm, I was able to sense the deeper, more eternal nature of things. And that deeper knowing has directed the course of my life.
I did not have a prominent role in the starburst of tensions that shed light in a dark world. I was just one of many tossed about in the helix of suffering and possibility that was our time.
You could say that my generation came of age like a bed of snails on the shore of an angry sea. Many of us were tossed about and washed away, with nothing to hold on to, while many of us hunkered down to avoid the storm, never to show our heads in public again. But some of us were slow to run or hide and, poking our heads up to see what all the fuss was about, we were caught by surprise in the churning tide that scoured us of everything we were taught. I was one of these. It was in the sixties that I truly saw for the first time. It was coming of age in the sixties that widened my circle of compassion.
This long moment of community knit our generation together before scattering us into our various lives. Years later, after marriages and countless new beginnings, we still can recognize each other by the depth in our eyes. We may be riding the subway or in a waiting room at a hospital or spilling sugar in a corner bistro. Suddenly, there is a sense of life below all our maps, and a feeling of so much to say and so few words to reach with.
Let me share one small, revealing moment from that time. More than forty years ago, I was part of a group of college students who took over an administration building in protest against so many things that we felt were oppressive. In truth, I was swept into that moment. I didn’t realize what was happening. I was in deep conversation with three or four others. We were circling some elusive truth about how harsh life can be in wearing us down to our beauty, when the crowd swayed and swelled. Suddenly, like a school of fish chasing a warm spot in the current, we were in the administration building, and one of our brethren—the one too tied to his point of view to join our conversation—locked the door from the inside, stood on a desk, and declared that we had taken over the building. He was shouting about demands. Some of us cheered, while some of us groaned at having no choice. My friends and I shook our heads at how this all seemed an ironic and messy example of how life can force us to face each other.
Ultimately, I remain a student of those elemental times when the distance between us seemed less, if more strident. It’s where I learned to ask so many questions. Where I learned to believe that it’s the questions, entered honestly, that soften us into dropping the veil of being strangers. At times, I feel certain that the great breaking wave of that decade has crashed and rolled for forty years into the thin clarity of old men and women left in wonder with their questions. It’s a happy fate for any generation: to be stripped of all cause and explanation, left with only truth and kindness, with our palms up, holding our questions like begging bowls.
I remain a student of those elemental times when the distance between us seemed less, if more strident. It’s where I learned to ask so many questions.