In 1966, a movie adaptation of Edward Albee’s play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, was released to wide acclaim. At that time, Woolf (1882-1941) was already a cultural icon, a writer and an intellectual. Most of us knew little else about her. Still, with an in-the-know nod to her stature and lured by the movie’s stars (Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton), we went to see the film. In fact, the movie wasn't about Woolf. Its title was a singsong riff on the made-popular-by-Disney, "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?"
Are we afraid of the big bad wolf? I don’t know. But I know we’re not afraid of Virginia Woolf. Many of her interests and commitments were not unlike our own. Like us, she knew that every quality of the mind, one way or another, shows up in how we live our lives.
In 1925, she published The Common Reader. In one of its essays, this one on Montaigne (1553-1592), whose effort toward authenticity she admired, Woolf says “beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself. This life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us.”
How to know and to be ourselves is one of our interests and one of our challenges, too. As it turns out, many of us feel stifled, shallow, discontent and, yes, phony, when we’re not authentic. When we do not recognize ourselves. When we don’t know where we got our marching orders. When we talk and talk and talk though we’ve not given the subject matter sustained consideration. “Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties. We become all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.”
Indeed, despite the trappings we can acquire to give show to our culturally hip, style-and-taste-conscious talents, we want to live a self-determined, authentic way of being that unites the image we project with the contemplative life. To the extent we thoughtfully approach the leadership of our self-determining nature, the more likely we will find the judgment and moral will to arrange our lives functionally, personally and experientially—to suit our unique promise.
Much of “the life within” is not, of course, immediately thoughtful. Much of it, unfocused and primal, is a reflexive rehash of the desperate do-or-die programming we share with reptiles. They don’t contemplate. They can’t. Virtually all of their nerve cells are already put to use. There’s no neuronal room in their brains to think things over, to consider, to question, to evaluate.
But the complexities, multitudes, mysteries and vast resources of human nature provide us with another opportunity. We have brainpower that we can put to better use than a stupefied expression of the irrational, programmed willfulness of the neuron-deprived reptile.
In order to achieve something meaningful, something representative of our hopes and ambitions, cares and concerns, we can master our thoughts and behavior. We can steer our bodies away from habitual compulsiveness, from the knee-jerk anger and resentment stimulated by the harsh world we live in, and toward actions that bring satisfaction, fulfillment and equanimity.
We can be in the world realistically and authentically, a particular person in a particular situation at a particular time in human history, merging the life within us with the demands of the life outside us.
Arnold Siegel is the founder of Autonomy and Life and leader of its Retreat Workshops and Advanced Classes.