Hello Fierce Ones!
My blog today is an excerpt from the recently published Are You Still Listening? 1969 Stories & Essays by eight of us who were witnesses to this transformative year and who survived to tell the tale. Below is an excerpt of my contribution to the book. To preview another excerpt to be included in next week’s Fiftieth Anniversary of 1969 Special Edition of Fierce with Age, Click HERE
–Carol Orsborn
ps Love to hear your memories of 1969 in the comment section below!
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This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the year I began living my own life in earnest—1969. Having moved from the eddies of a pristine suburb of Chicago into the generational maelstrom of the University of California, Berkeley, my days were soon filled with a colorful cast of classmates, agitators and hangers on who populated my life. Fifty years later, I am still in awe of the amount of heavy lifting we attempted, both personally and societally, regarding multiple social and political issues ripe for transformation.
Of course, challenging boundaries in search of expanded freedom is not without its risks, and so it is that 1969 was also the year I made a really bad choice, but that as time would tell, turned out for the best.
My commentaries on student life running in the Daily Cal, despite enraging the chair of the communications department, were winning national attention. Mademoiselle Magazine thought it would be great to have someone on the edgier side join their highly-publicized class of a dozen or so interns from colleges across the country who would spend the summer of ‘69 on staff in New York. At the time, the magazine was all Peter Pan collars and lip gloss and I was, well, there’s no other way to say it. My idea of dressing to impress was to don a lime green Sergeant Pepper uniform from a local thrift store. And my idea of entertaining was to invite the editor, who had flown to Berkeley from New York specifically to interview me, to a pot party. She was not impressed.
When I got the rejection letter, I was haunted by the belief that I was to be doomed by my insistence on doing things my own way. But on the other hand, even back then, I had the suspicion that getting on track to a big job in New York City was, while the epitome of something, not a true reflection of my own aspirations. Instead, the summer of 69, I bought a cheap backpack and headed to Europe where, among other adventures, I literally found myself sitting at the feet of Krishnamurti in the foothills of a mountain in Switzerland.
It is easy to look back now and realize how alternately ungrateful and naïve I was about both the gifts and challenges of living a life of privilege in America on a college campus circa 1969. But mostly, I admire the breadth and depth of our cohort’s vision: what we hoped and fervently believed we could do better than those who came before.
I expected that the seeds we planted back then would have grown into something grand and transformative by now—the better society we thought we had struggled for. Instead, I have come to appreciate that my greatest contributions have come about on a far, more modest scale, one apology, one act of kindness, one act of forgiveness at a time. At 70, with seven decades under my belt, I find myself feeling exceptionally tender towards it all, less a case of nostalgia than of gratitude, for the 20-year-old who, above all, made the commitment to live life to the full, come what may.
As I write about 1969 in the year 2019, I am clear that these last fifty years have made sense after all: that going for what matters most, succeed or fail, is in and of itself the fulfillment of some higher purpose. In fact, what matters most about 1969 is the same thing that matters most about the entirety of life: that the seeds of a life worth living can be planted, nourished and harvested whatever age one happens to be at any given time.
TO COMMENT: Please share your thoughts with me about this blog in the comment section below as it is posted at CarolOrsborn.com.
To read excerpts from all eight authors in the Fiftieth Anniversary of 1969 Special Edition of Fierce with Age, Click HERE
To subscribe to Carol Orsborn’s blog, click HERE
To subscribe to our sister site Fierce with Age: The Free Digest of Boomer Wisdom, Inspiration and Spirituality, click HERE
For more information about Are You Still Listening and/or to order the book, click HERE
You can email us directly at Carol@fiercewithage.com.
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Carol Orsborn, Ph.D., is Founder of Fierce with Age, the free monthly Digest of Boomer Wisdom, Inspiration and Spirituality. Carol, who earned her doctorate in the history and critical theory of religion specializing in adult and spiritual development from Vanderbilt University, is the best-selling author of 30 books, including The Spirituality of Age: A Seeker’s Guide to Growing Older (co-author Dr. Robert L. Weber), winner of gold in the category of Consciously Aging, Nautilus Book Awards 2015. Carol’s blog Older, Wiser, Fiercer is available at CarolOrsborn.com.
