by Gail Sheehy
What made pathfinders different? I wanted to know. All of us have stood at a point where two roads diverged and doubted our wisdom to choose. Some refuse to choose and remain in a rut; others take the safest path; but pathfinders take the risk of choosing the less-traveled path. It can lead to a new beginning, an opportunity to make themselves more. What could they teach us about the qualities we need to cultivate to build toward well-being?
The elusive concept of well-being is more than happiness, which is only fleeting. Happiness generally conveys relief from pent-up frustration or deprivation of pleasure. Well-being is an accumulated attitude that registers deep in our unconscious. It grows into a sustained background tone of equanimity behind the more intense contrasts of daily events, behind even periods of unhappiness. To find such pathfinders among us, I worked with a team of social psychologists at New York University to develop an extensive Life History Questionnaire. It probed the self-perceptions, values, goals, coping styles, and experiences at each stage of life of adults between the ages of eighteen and eighty. Within the questionnaire was a complex instrument for measuring well-being; it identified the women and men who were finding the keenest contentment in the many dimensions of a full life.
During 1978 and 1979, I gathered questionnaires from a wide diversity of Americans who were recommended by their peers: corporate chiefs, members of Congress, men and women lawyers, women brokers and bankers, homemakers, professional athletes, military officers, union representatives, automotive workers, women returning to school for professional degrees, and working people attending community colleges. By the end of 1979, I was ready to cast the widest nets of all, by publishing the Life History Questionnaire in two mass-circulation magazines, Redbook and Esquire.
Altogether, we collected sixty thousand questionnaires. A computer team at NYU tabulated the data. Dialing up people who scored at the highest and lowest levels of well-being for maximum contrast, I made hundreds of telephone interviews. Some sounded like contestants for To Tell the Truth while others were more sincere and willing to collaborate on probing their life stories with me. I narrowed the selection to people who passed my “no b.s. test.”
The next two years were an exciting odyssey that took me across thirty-eight states, four Canadian provinces, three European countries, and many occupational, racial, ethnic, and social-class boundaries. Most phone or paper surveys skip this step. In my view, subjective understanding of a human being can come only from face-to-face experience.
To reduce my conclusions to the very essence, I learned that people who gain high well-being share at least three hallmarks. They say . . .
1. I have a willingness to take risks.
2. I have experienced one or more important transitions in my adult years, and I have handled those transitions in an unusual, personal, or creative way.
3. My life has meaning and direction.
While I was researching this book, I saw that it had resonance in my own life. I had taken risks in my career; some had not paid off, but others had catapulted me into new levels of curiosity, craft, and success. I hadn’t been brave enough to take the risk of marrying again, and I ached to have another child; in those areas I was sorely incomplete. Would I ever find the confidence and creativity to make those passages?
Becoming a pathfinder, I came to understand, requires small acts of courage. It means bucking the status quo, striking out on a less-traveled path, and using one’s ingenuity or creativity to meet the challenges of a difficult life passage. If it leads to a failure, a pathfinder will learn from it, resist panic and self-recrimination, and find the resilience to pick him- or herself up and try a different path. Coming out of such a passage with a sense of completion may take several years. But the boost in self-esteem and well-being is worth all the effort. The pathfinder gains a new sense of mastery.
WHILE I WAS BURIED in analyzing questionnaires for Pathfinders, Clay gave me the chance to meet with a world-class pathleader. At the time, Clay and Milton Glaser owned Esquire, together with Viscount Vere Harmsworth. Clay sent me to Egypt in November 1978 to write about President Anwar Sadat. This was a year after Sadat had found the courage to journey from Egypt to Israel to meet Prime Minister Menachem Begin and address the Knesset. It was widely regarded as one of the most innovative acts of peace in the twentieth century.
Before I went to Egypt, I learned that this was a man whose devotion to his predecessor, Gamal Abdel Nasser, earned him the nickname “Nasser’s poodle.” When Nasser’s envy caused him to denigrate Sadat for his heroic exploits as a young revolutionary, Sadat withdrew. As he wrote, he took up the position of a detached observer. A government functionary, he did nothing self-destructive. He did not give up hope. Remaining in this state of suspended animation for eighteen years, he adapted to a reality he could not change. How, I wondered, was he able to come back in his fifties, after nearly two decades of passivity, and emerge with every fiber of stifled intuition intact, ready to risk taking a less-traveled path that no Middle Eastern leader had ever dared?
The Egyptian leader was invited by President Carter to meet with him and Begin at Camp David in September 1978. Over twelve days, with Carter using real muscle to challenge each of the adversaries in one-on-one meetings, a historic peace agreement was reached. It was a month after Sadat had returned from Camp David that Clay sent me to Cairo on the faint possibility that I might get an interview with the now-celebrated Egyptian leader.
Confined for a week in a hotel room in Cairo across the hall from a Saudi family that cooked chickens in their room, I stared at the phone praying for a summons to the presidential palace. To pass the time, I composed a history of the man’s life and studied his Muslim philosophy. Warned that I would have only twenty to thirty minutes with him, I color-coded the question cards according to their urgency. It turned out to be time well spent.
“GOOD MORNING!”
Sadat did not enter ceremoniously. He appeared out of nowhere like a puff of smoke. Dark, gaunt, looking like a prisoner of war—or was it a prisoner of peace?—his energy and theatricality quickly engaged me. An introductory conversational gambit explained why he was so thin. He had been fasting since August and the holy month of Ramadan. But he had kept up the fast through the Camp David summit and come home to Egypt to start a social revolution by first consuming himself.
The three months of fasting, he told me, helped revive the mental discipline he had learned when jailed as a terrorist in his twenties. He explained that he regarded his time in prison as the happiest period in his life. His narrow self ceased to exist. In fasting and meditation, he came to believe that depending on outward success alienates a man from himself. And self-alienation was the worst fate to befall a man, leading to the loss of inner light and the end of any possibility of vision. He came to experience friendship with God—“the only friend who never lets you down or abandons you.”
I began my formal interview with a different kind of question: “Mr. President, you have proved Egypt to the world, proved yourself to the world, and you no longer have to be quite so careful. It is important for people to know you in your depth. No one is without some frailties, some imperfections. Will you join with me in the objective of following your passages—by that I mean the transitions between stages of adult life when we have the chance to grow or to go backward?”
“Very interesting, your approach,” he purred, puffing on his pipe. “For me it is like this: since my childhood, even when I was very poor but proud, I was asking to be a different guy from the others.” That interview gave me an insight that offered another dimension to the Pathfinders book. Two hours later, we were still talking when his muscle-bound secretary waved his arms frantically to shut me up. Sadat brushed him off. He was about to reply to my final question: “What is your personal attitude toward death?”
“I don’t fear it at all,” he replied. “No one will rob me of one hour of my life. God has put it. So I am at ease. Great ease.” I was amazed by his serenity. He let m
e know that it was part of his Muslim faith, believing in predestination. Having prayed and fasted and prepared for months before making the decision that it was his destiny to go to Israel with the offer of peace, he was not responsible for the outcome of his action. To me, as a product of Western Judeo-Christian thought, it was a novel concept: he carried no burden of guilt if things did not turn out well. This was a wholly unfamiliar way of faith. For Sadat, it settled him into a serenity that was palpable.
“Do you expect to be killed for breaking with the tragic history of Muslims and Jews by offering peace?” I asked.
Sadat sucked on his pipe, not a pinch of anxiety anywhere in his face. “If it is so, I am not surprised; I have done my work in this world.” He let me know that he expected his hour was not far away.
Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel enraged Islamists. On October 6, 1981, during an annual victory parade held in Cairo, Anwar Sadat was gunned down by members of a jihadi cell in his own military. The New York Times carried a memorable cartoon on its op-ed page. Little people wandered, baffled, through what appeared to be a featureless desert landscape. They were saying: “We want to follow in his footsteps—but where are they?” Ironically, they were stumbling in the middle of a footprint so gigantic, they could not see it.
Clay was delighted to publish the first in-depth portrait of the Egyptian leader’s personality, titled “The Riddle of Sadat.” After his assassination, the article was widely reprinted as prophetic.
OVER THE YEARS, MY EXPERIENCE with editors has been magical: Tina Brown at Vanity Fair and the Daily Beast and, later, Graydon Carter, a Renaissance man who greatly enhanced Vanity Fair beginning in 1992. As an author, I was thrilled to be published by Random House under the leadership of Harry Evans. There I worked on five books with one of the last of the classic gentlemen editors, Robert Loomis. His authors were mostly men, from William Styron, Calvin Trillin, and Neil Sheehan to historians Edmund Morris and Shelby Foote. Maya Angelou and Shana Alexander were two of his star women authors. I was much younger than they and hungry to learn more about writing at book length.
Loomis was famous for his cryptic comments penciled on the manuscript. “We know this.” Even more astringent were the barely audible critiques emitted from beneath his white pencil mustache as we worked over long lunches at Mediterraneo, an Italian café on Second Avenue around the corner from the Random House building. The food was banal, the service worse. But while Loomis sipped his Jack Daniel’s on the rocks, I scribbled notes from one of the masters of structure and style.
At HarperCollins I have had the pleasure of working with two fine women editors: Mary Ellen O’Neill was a compassionate companion while both of us were acting as caregivers for loved ones. She helped me to combine my personal story with practical help in my last book, Passages in Caregiving.
The process of writing a memoir is different from anything else I have done. The patience and painstaking effort required to burrow into one’s past and salvage the richest memories begs for an editor of the rarest tolerance. I have been blessed in having the skill and enthusiasm of Jennifer Brehl while working on this book.
I have other passions, of course—skiing, tennis, and, later, theater and opera—but what is more satisfying than almost anything else is the marriage of minds with a trusted editor as we chisel words into a well-sculpted book.
CHAPTER 26
The Mission That Found Me
HONG KONG’S VICTORIA HARBOR was suddenly ablaze in the plane’s window, a dazzling light show of neon reflections coloring the water crimson, orchid, orange, garish green, any color but that of real water. It announced the purpose of Hong Kong: the creation of money.
“Come meet me in Hong Kong!”
Who but Clay would call out of the blue after months of separation with a command to fly halfway around the globe to meet him? “Trip of a lifetime!” was his headline. It was 1981 and his third call from Indonesia inviting me to spend two weeks seeing Asia with him. Clay knew how to tempt me to dive off the edge of the world into an adventure. I was thrilled, but wary.
He was waiting for me at the airport with an armful of exotic flowers and a hungry kiss. We were driven across the busiest bay in the world to Kowloon by his hosts from the Far East Economic Review to the Peninsula Hotel, veddy, veddy British. Hong Kong was still under British control, but the days were numbered before China would reclaim it. Cranes swung between the stacks of deluxe hotels and corporate flagships as if in a race against a Communist future. The incessant noise of the city was of slums being leveled and girders being pounded into landfill.
Gazing out from our luxurious room overlooking Victoria Harbor, where ocean liners began in the 1920s depositing European gentry at the doorway to Asia, Clay mused prophetically, “I’m glad we’re living when we are—probably the last ten years when we can indulge ourselves in some sentimental colonialism before the Chinese take over the world.”
I was excited to show him Temple Street. My seatmate had tipped me off about Hong Kong’s vast outdoor kitchen hidden behind the public square. We gasped at the sea of bodies squatting on sidewalks and in the gutters and all up the side streets, countless families all cooking Mongolian hot pot over coal fires. Everyone dipped into the same pot and scuttled the morsels into their mouths quick as birds. Fortune-tellers moved between the makeshift tables offering to read bumps on one’s head or released birds from cages to pick fortune cards. Sidewalk entrepreneurs fashioned false teeth and hawked snake venom for potency. To us, the only Caucasians in sight, the Chinese paid no mind. These were people fully enculturated in their own freewheeling style of street-corner capitalism.
Singapore and Malaysia were enthralling. But it was Christmas in Thailand that would change our lives.
Midnight of Christmas Eve passed in the confines of an airless plane while we awaited a delayed takeoff from Singapore. Clay was next to me slack in sleep. My daughter was half a world away. Eighteen years had passed since her conception. I remember thinking about that when I felt that month’s clot drop; the blood apple of something like the three hundred and sixtieth ovum, falling, waste. A wind of emptiness seemed to blow through me. I began crying softly for what it was too late to have.
“Melly Kismis!” At three thirty in the morning we were welcomed into the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok by a Buddhist bellhop. Red satin bows were tied around the giant teak temple bells hung from the soaring lobby ceiling. We walked outside and down to a veranda over the klong, the wide canal, feeling embraced by the humid air and dizzied by the sweet rotted scent of jasmine. We discovered the Author’s Wing, a genteel green-shuttered structure; its suites were named to call up the fateful attraction of the East to Western writers . . . Maugham, Conrad, Michener. A floor boy brought wild orchids, mangoes, and a split of champagne.
“This is the Colette room, in case you didn’t know.”
Hours later, we awoke slashed by sunlight through the uncurtained glass. Christmas Day, Bangkok, on our backs running musky with sweat. Now what?
Then we were on the verandah, mesmerized by watching the great hippos of rice barges nuzzle through the klong, up to their noses with cargo, when Clay pointed out a story in the Bangkok Post.
“Honey, this will interest you.” He passed me the paper.
Thousands of children, most of them under twelve, orphaned by the genocide in Cambodia, have been existing in holding centers inside Thailand for over two years. Many suffer from persistent malnourishment and other medical problems. They have scant hope of being adopted or resettled in third countries.
“Maybe there’s a child for you here,” Clay said.
Adoption was an idea as foreign to me as the hippo barges, but that was Clay and his leaps of imagination. I had been deeply moved by TV images of survivors of Pol Pot’s genocide. After four years of forced labor and extermination by starvation for the crime of being educated, the survivors had to flee the 1979 invasion by the Vietnamese army. They kept coming that year, a surge of a half-million Ca
mbodians, tuberous bodies with faces devoid of animation, minds frozen by years of trauma. By 1980, Cambodia was a land that had disappeared from Western consciousness.
Prior to this trip, First Lady Rosalyn Carter had invited me to join one hundred prominent Americans on her Cambodia Crisis Committee. We sat on gilt chairs in the East Room of the White House and discussed how to mobilize support to get Western rice and seed to survivors in the interior, past the Vietnamese political blockade.
On the verandah, now, I read the newspaper item again and shook my head. “We raised millions to bring starving Cambodians to the border after the Vietnamese invaded, and then what? We’re leaving them to rot in holding centers?”
“Don’t beat yourself up, honey,” Clay said. “Cambodia is ancient history to American TV viewers now.”
“Clay?”
“Hmmm?”
“We have to visit those camps.”
“On our last day in Asia?”
“What better to do?”
He looped an arm around my hips. “I planned not to let you out of the room.”
The lure of a last day devoted to your standard decadent Western pleasures held appeal for me, too, but as we crossed the Oriental’s lobby toward the cool elevators, I broke away.
“Where are you going?” he said.
“To hire a driver.”
“I’ll go with you.”
WE STAYED AN EXTRA DAY to get the necessary permissions to visit a holding center at the border, Khao-I-Dang camp. The Thais were jumpy about allowing journalists into these camps, for fear that news stories would swell the already indigestible mass of human refuse from ten years of war in Southeast Asia.