Editor's Note: In My Life is a new department of the Bulletin that features first-person essays. Readers interested in submitting an essay for publication should first write for editorial guidelines. Address: Editor, Swarthmore College Bulletin, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore PA 19081-1397, or send e-mail to bulletin@swarthmore.edu.
By Niki Giloane Sebastian '65
Nearing the double nickel, with no retirement benefits, a minimal IRA, and currently no full-time job nor immediate plans for one, I look out the floor-to-ceiling windows of my New Mexico living room at my horses grazing in the adjacent pasture, and I reflect.
The most I have earned in any year since graduating from Swarthmore in 1965 was just under $32,000, which I made in 1990 when I was an upper- echelon administrator in an agency of New Mexico's state government. I hold a master's degree, yet I consistently earn less than the median income for high school graduates.
I will never have the funds for Swarthmore Alumni College Abroad. Indeed I don't have the funds for vacation travel, which is why I choose to live my vacation on site, in a home of less than 1,000 square feet situated in an area overflowing with history and nontraditional culture, with huge painterly skies of evanescent color, and where the Great Plains lap up against the Rockies.
The unemployment rate in my county has not been below 10 percent for many years, so most people survive by "a bit of this and that." When I prepared to move to northern New Mexico in 1972, I was told to "expect to do what-ever it takes to survive for at least a year, until you can make connections and get established in your field." I did--and have continued to do so every year since, "my field" becoming the exceptional versatility of thought and ceaseless interest in new learning that Swarthmore encouraged, and that life experience has led me to accept as central to the "me" of me.
I am within two years of paying off my home and four acres of land, and I have all the possessions I can use. I support myself, my husband (who has been severely ill), and a plethora of animals. I volunteer as co-chair of the local AIDS alliance and as a member of the Foster Grandparent/Senior Companion Advisory Board, and I am a "getaway" parent-substitute for foreign students attending the United World College in nearby Montezuma.
At present, my income dribbles in from counseling (I am a licensed mental health practitioner), writing (essays, features, and short fiction), reviewing case records for a home health agency (I headed the agency when I was willing to put in 60-hour work weeks), and baking bread (hand-kneaded loaves for weekly customers). Occasionally, I get contracts to provide training in communications, AIDS issues, or aspects of personal development. How else does one survive when one's advanced degree is in language pathology, a specialty not recognized as existing--let alone necessary--within the New Mexico educational system?
One of the great appeals for me of settling in northern New Mexico a quarter-century ago is that it was--and in many ways still is--more like living in a foreign country than in the United States. I have always felt more at home learning another new-to-me culture than I have when trying to fit into the predominant American one, which was never mine in the first place. Although I am singularly white of skin, I was raised by immigrant Jewish parents who spoke Hebrew and German at home in addition to English--with half of my raising taking place in Vietnam and France. My family placed great emphasis on learning for its own sake: for the stretching and the excitement of mastery. Perhaps to make sense of the cultural variety I experienced so early, I fell in love with exploring the interconnectedness that underlies the world's peoples and ideas.
I was fortunate to have good teachers--culminating in the sheer delight of my first weeks at Swarthmore, where I found myself in the company of intellectual peers, where debates begun in the classroom did not terminate with the end of a period but spilled down the walks and into the dining hall and dorms. My delight lasted through the full four years, through the original, traditional Honors program, and right up through my last oral exam in philosophy, which turned out to be an hour-long philosophical exploration of my personal values. "A coherent system, cohesive, with substantive content," the examiner decided. My feet did not touch ground again until well after graduation.
Many of those four years of classroom, dining room, and dormitory debates involved aspects of what each of us would ultimately incorporate into our concepts of "living the good life." What was never in question was our implicit understanding that ideas not translated into action had little value. I don't know that anyone openly acknowledged how Swarthmore's Quaker underpinnings were showing in that assumption. We often debated how best to dem-onstrate our beliefs--never whether to demonstrate them.
Manifesting one's beliefs doesn't come easily, especially if one chooses a nontraditional path. I remember Dean Susan Cobb meeting during senior year with those of us not immediately headed for graduate school. She warned us that we--especially the women--would find it difficult to integrate ourselves into the mundane workplace after the intellectual freedom and respect we had experienced at Swarthmore. She ad-vised us to be ready to be considered less employable than technical school graduates who had good secretarial skills. She was right.
In New Mexico, after waiting tables, cutting and selling firewood, and learning to build houses from adobe brick and used mining timbers, I did find employment more in line with my training--in state government and eventually teaching psychology for the College of Santa Fe. It was still nontraditional, however, because my students were maximum-security prisoners in the state penitentiary. I was there for the 1980 riot, leaving the facility just a few hours before the violence erupted. Later, counseling survivors, I learned of plans the students had made to protect me should the trouble have started while I was still inside.
In the aftermath of what has been termed the bloodiest prison riot in U.S. history, I again experienced the price exacted for living my version of the good life, with its obligation to know--and act from--one's ethical beliefs. I was invited to speak at a symposium on the causes of the riot. In Quakerly fashion, I spoke truth to power and was promptly blacklisted.
Back to waitressing, to building a private counseling practice, to writing, and eventually to working as a paralegal for the team defending prisoners accused of riot-related crimes. As I entered yet another new area of learning, there was a flash of remembrance: I had scored well on the law boards but never applied to law school. I thought at the time that my approach to living the good life was more philosophical than legal, and nothing in my exposure to our court and corrections systems has altered my conviction that truth and justice find little expression in them. But there are a sprinkling of well-intentioned people working within each system, trying to make improvements against virtually overwhelming odds.
In a recent call for nominations for honorary degrees, the College said it was seeking to honor a person "on the ascent of his or her career or at the peak of achievement" who had shown "distinction, leadership, or originality in a significant field." Living the good life is not limited to such people, not unless negotiating life from a basis of principle, manifesting those principles when it counts, and serving one's fellows along the way constitutes a career in a significant field. Is there such a thing as a master's degree in mastery? Wouldn't it be appropriate for Swarthmore to award an occasional honorary Master of Mastery? Is there any more "significant field" than living life fully, ethically, and well?
Many of the people I have encountered throughout my variegated yet still significantly unified experience deserve honorary degrees. I'm thinking of an elderly lady whom I assisted in hospice care. She was dying of a most painful form of bone cancer, yet her gentleness, patience, and determination to savor every moment of her few remaining weeks helped ease her grandson out of a crisis of identity and past the lure of gangs. I propose a degree for the prison lifer who enrolled in my classes to relieve boredom and opened up to his own creativity, writing a fascinating science fiction adventure based on the premise that how we relate to the world depends on whether we spend our earliest months on our backs (in a crib, European mode) or tied upright in carrying cloths or cradle boards (in the African and Native American mode). What about an award for a local Spanish-speaking couple, now in their late 70s, neither of whom went beyond sixth grade, whose five children (three of them daughters) hold a total of 10 advanced degrees and work as president of a community college, owner of a travel agency, nursing administrator of a hospice, and co-owners of a busy truck stop and restaurant.
So wherein lies the asserted unity in my experience, I hear you asking? Certainly not in area of employment, nor even in the constancy of its change. No, my experience of living a unity--the good life--lies not in the what of life but in the how and why. I seek to allow the Quakerly "that of God" to manifest fully in others, as in myself. I make room for a centered awareness that is far more than intellectual and emotional expression, and without which intellectual and emotional expression have no resonance. I focus on enjoying the rich diversity around me, the varied ways in which truth and integrity manifest themselves, the spiritual experience often referred to as beingness. I reap therefrom that settled feeling of home, which a poet once tellingly described as "the place you don't have to deserve," where one accepts oneself and is, therefore, at ease. No Alumni College Abroad? Minimal contributions to the Alumni Fund--even though I appreciate what Swarthmore offers and would like to support it?
So be it. Like Popeye, I am what I am.
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