Your autonomous perspective is a work in progress, just as you are. It is built upon the availability of new intelligence—understandings born of experience (including the hard-knock variety); the discoveries of science; the higher range of standards and ideals that give greater meaning to life; and a serious and thoughtful consideration of the apathies, illusions and pockets of ignorance you uncover as you go along.
You acknowledge just how much of your life is a quick-on-your-feet, nimble-of-mind improvisation, negotiation and experiment. What else could it be—as you react to the natural, practical and social realities, and ordeals, that elevate or burden your circumstances? What else could it be—given that no one is free of the brute and primitive fears, desires and teeth-clenched anger that prompt each and every one of us to occasional or frequent selfish, unkind and irrational actions?
As you improvise, negotiate and experiment, yesterday’s certainties and must-haves may seem inauthentic or hollow, the relationships you had counted upon to be constant may present compromising, even loathsome, demands, and the competitive marketplace, well, it is intimidating and ruthless. You win some, you lose some and you endure—and hope to recover promptly from—the losses. Amid the press of everyday, dexterously managing the relationship between the personal freedom you want and a willing and disciplined acceptance of your responsibility for your transformative fate, you find new opportunities for contribution, joy and fulfillment.
You also get the normative facts straight. What is normative does not possess an absolute power or truth. It emerges from human beings’ expectations of one another’s capacities for autonomy. Some of these normative expectations live in codes and laws. Others, though not formally organized, live in the culture as “the right thing” to think, to say and to do. Of course, there are many mind-numbing and polarizing arguments over what these right things are. However, most people—not hopelessly alienated or presumptively entitled—know what these right things are. Indeed, normative or regulative ideals such as self-control, integrity, responsibility, resilience and initiative make sense to you, and to most of us.
Moreover, given all the factors at play in this complex and rivalrous world we live in, you accept that your life will never be free from the consequences of your judgment. Unforeseen consequences, ill-advised decisions and choices, errors of reason and calculation, and just plain contingency are inevitable. You will spend a lifetime involved with retrospective judgment, with recovering from disappointment and with returning yourself to the drawing board.
Do you see what I see?
Arnold Siegel is the founder of Autonomy and Life and leader of its Retreat Workshops and Advanced Classes.