The Element (28 page)

Something else has been going on at the Grace Living Center, though: medication levels there are plummeting. Many of the residents on the program have stopped or cut back on their drugs.

Why is this happening? Because the adult participants in the program have come back to life. Instead of whiling away their days waiting for the inevitable, they have a reason to get up in the morning and a renewed excitement about what the day might bring. Because they are reconnecting with their creative energies, they are literally living longer.

There’s something else the children learn. Every now and then, the teachers have to tell them that one of their book buddies won’t be coming any more; that this person has passed. So the children come to appreciate at a tender age that life has its rhythms and cycles, and that even the people they become close to are part of that cycle.

In a way, the Grace Living Center has restored an ancient, traditional relationship between the generations. The very young and the very old have always had an almost mystical connection. They seem to understand each other in a fundamental, often unspoken way. Our practice in the West is often to keep these generations apart. The Book Buddies program shows in a simple yet profound way the enrichment possible when generations come together. It shows too that the elderly can revive long-lost energies if the circumstances are right and the inspiration is there.

What everyone from Susan Jeffers to Julia Child to the book buddies teach us is that remarkable, life-enhancing things can happen when we take the time to step out of our routines, rethink our paths, and revisit the passions we left behind (or never pursued at all) for whatever reason. We can take ourselves in fresh directions at nearly any point in our lives. We have the capacity to discover the Element at practically any age. As the actor Sophia Loren once said, “There
is
a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.”

CHAPTER TEN

For Love or Money

GABRIEL TROP is an accomplished academic scholar. When I met him, he was at Berkeley studying for a Ph.D. in German literature. This work means a great deal to him, but it is not the only thing about which he is passionate. He also has an overwhelming attraction to music. “If I were to lose the use of my hands,” he said to me, “my life would be over.”

Yet Gabriel has never entertained the thought of becoming a professional musician. In fact, for a long time he didn’t want to be involved in music at all. In his first years of high school, Gabriel would look pityingly at the music students, struggling across the campus with their bulky instrument cases, turning up at school for rehearsals hours before anyone else had to be there. That wasn’t a life for him, especially the part about getting to school extra early. He vowed secretly to avoid music.

However, one day, in the music class that was part of his school’s standard curriculum, he was tinkling idly on the piano and realized that he found it easy to pick out tunes. With a sinking feeling, he realized too that that he actually enjoyed doing it. He tried to disguise his obvious pleasure from the music teacher, who had wandered over to listen. He must not have done this particularly well, because the teacher told Gabriel that he had a good ear and suggested that Gabriel go into the music storeroom to see if any of the instruments there appealed to him.

A friend of Gabriel’s played the cello, and for this reason and no other, Gabriel decided to try out one of those in the storeroom. He found that he loved the shape and size of the instrument and the deep, sonorous noise it made when he plucked the strings. One cello in particular, had “a wonderful smell of middle school varnish.” He decided to break his vow and to give the cello a chance. When he began practicing, he took it very casually. But he quickly found that he loved playing this instrument, and that he was spending more and more time doing so.

From there, Gabriel practiced so often and with such intensity that within a couple of months he was playing reasonably well. Within a year, he was the principal cellist in the school orchestra. This meant, of course, that he arrived at school early in the morning, dragging his bulky instrument case across the campus to the pitying looks of the nonmusicians he had left behind.

Gabriel also loves literature, the German language, and academic work. At some point, he had to make a hard decision between music and academics as his primary focus in life. After a long internal struggle, he chose German literature because he felt that doing so would allow him to continue to spend time as a cellist, while if he dedicated himself to a profession in music, the time required to do so would have made it nearly impossible for him to explore German poetry in depth. “I chose literature because it seemed to me compatible with an intensity of music playing, and if I were to be a professional musician, my attachment to literature would have been disproportionately sidetracked. So this arrangement was really the one I could find where I could remain a dedicated cellist and sustain a high degree of involvement with literary language.”

Still, he plays for hours every day and continues to perform (he recently played a cello concerto with the University of California Berkeley Symphony Orchestra). He doesn’t know how he would survive without regular immersion in the practice and enjoyment of music. To call this a hobby, he says, would be ridiculous. Music is elemental in his life, and in music, he has found his Element.

In the truest meaning of the word, Gabriel is an amateur musician. And he wouldn’t have it any other way.

At the most basic levels, professionals in any field are simply those people who earn their living in that field, while amateurs are people who don’t. But the terms
amateur
and
professional
often imply something else—something about quality and expertise. People often think of amateurs as second-rate, as those who perform well below professional levels. Amateurs are the ones who gesticulate too wildly in the local theater production, who score over a hundred on the golf course, or who write cute stories about pets in the town’s free newspaper. When we call something “amateurish,” we use the word as a pejorative. We’re suggesting that the thing upon which we’re commenting is nowhere near professional, that the effort is something of an embarrassment.

Sometimes it’s perfectly reasonable to draw sharp distinctions between professionals and amateurs. There can, after all, be enormous differences of accomplishment between them. If I had to have a vasectomy, I’d greatly prefer to put myself in the hands of someone who did this sort of thing for a living rather than someone who occasionally dabbled in it. But often the differences between professionals and amateurs have less to do with quality than with choice. Many people, like Gabriel, do perform at professional levels in the fields they love. They simply choose not to make their living that way. They aren’t professionals in this field because they don’t make money that way. They are, by definition, amateurs. But nothing about their skill is “amateurish.”

The word amateur derives from the Latin word
amator
, which means lover, devoted friend, or someone who is in avid pursuit of an objective. In the original sense, an amateur is someone who does something for the love of it. Amateurs do what they do because they have a passion for it, not because it pays the bills. True amateurs, in other words, are people who have found the Element in something other than their jobs.

In “The Pro-Am Revolution,” a report for the British think tank Demos, Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller underline the rise of a type of amateur that works at increasingly higher standards and generates breakthroughs sometimes greater than those made by professionals—hence the term
Pro-Am
. In many cases, new technology is providing a wider group with apparatus once unaffordable to the amateur—CCD chips for telescopes, Pro Tools for musicians, sophisticated video editing software for home computers, and so on. Leadbeater and Miller point to the emergence of hip-hop, a musical genre that started with the distribution of handmade tapes.

They note that the Linux computer operating system is a collaborative work created by a large community of programmers in their spare time. The Jubilee 2000 debt campaign, which has resulted in the relief of tens of billions of dollars in debt from Third World countries, started with the petitions of people with no professional lobbying experience. And an amateur astronomer using a ten-inch telescope is credited with the discovery of a supernova.

“A Pro-Am pursues an activity as an amateur, mainly for the love of it, but sets a professional standard,” Leadbeater and Miller say. “Pro-Ams are unlikely to earn more than a small portion of their income from their pastime but they pursue it with the dedication and commitment associated with a professional. For Pro-Ams, leisure is not passive consumerism but active and participatory; it involves the deployment of publicly accredited knowledge and skills, often built up over a long career, which has involved sacrifices and frustrations.”

Leadbeater and Miller call Pro-Ams “a new social hybrid,” noting that they pursue their passions outside of the workplace, but with an energy and dedication rarely given to acts of leisure. Pro-Ams find this level of intensity restorative, often helping to compensate for less-than-inspiring jobs.

Some people do truly remarkable work as amateurs. Arthur C. Clarke was a best-selling science fiction writer, author of, among other novels,
2001: A Space Odyssey
and
Rendezvous with Rama
. He’d already begun his writing career when he became an officer in the British Royal Air Force. While there, he observed scientists in the air force’s radar division and became fascinated with their work. In 1945 he published an article in
Wireless World
magazine entitled “Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-Wide Radio Coverage?” In it, he posited the use of satellites in geostationary orbit to broadcast television signals around the globe.

Most scientists dismissed this proposition as yet another work of science fiction. However, Clarke had a very keen interest in the subject, and he had studied it carefully. His proposal was solid technically and, as we all now know, utterly prescient. The specific geostationary orbit Clarke proposed is now known as the Clarke orbit, and hundreds of satellites use it. And while Clarke made his living in the upper stratospheres of the
New York Times
best-seller list, it’s the work he did as an amateur (specifically a letter to the editors of
Wireless World
that preceded his article) that sits in the National Air and Space Museum.

Susan Hendrickson hasn’t had a particular profession at all. She dropped out of high school, became a skilled scuba diver, taught herself to identify rare marine specimens, became an expert at finding amber insect fossils, and has lived a multifaceted life as an explorer and adventurer. In 1990, Hendrickson joined an archaeological expedition in South Dakota led by the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research. The work started extremely slowly. The group explored six outcrops and made no significant discoveries. Then one day, while the rest of her team was in town, Hendrickson decided to explore the only other mapped outcrop. There, she came upon a few small bones. These bones would lead to the uncovering of the largest and most complete fossil skeleton of a
Tyrannosaurus rex
ever discovered—and one of the few female
T. rex
es ever found.

The skeleton is now on display at the Field Museum in Chicago. Her name: Tyrannosaurus Sue, after the amateur archaeologist who unearthed her.

In his book
The Amateurs
, David Halberstam wrote about four athletes in their pursuit of Olympic gold in 1984. Unlike the track champions or basketball players who could leverage Olympic success into huge professional contracts (the Olympic Committee didn’t allow NBA stars to participate back then) or endorsement deals, the subjects Halberstam followed—scullers—had no chance of cashing in on their victories. They were doing it purely for the love of the sport and the sense of accomplishment that would come from being the best.

The book focuses most closely on Christopher “Tiff ” Wood. Halberstam calls Wood “the personification of the amateur. He had put aside career, marriage, pleasure in his single-minded pursuit of excellence in a sport that few of his fellow countrymen cared about and that was, therefore, absolutely without commercial rewards.” At thirty-one, Wood was old for the sport (at least at the Olympic level), but he was on a mission. He’d been an alternate at the 1976 Olympics and never got to compete. He was the captain of the 1980 team that was supposed to go to Moscow. But, as a protest over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, America chose not to attend those games.

The 1984 Olympics would be Wood’s last chance for a gold medal. Within the small but devoted sculling community, he’d become something of a favorite son. Tiff Wood, as it turns out, did not come away with the gold. That fact, though, is only a sidebar to the story. What comes across in Halberstam’s depiction of Wood and the other scullers is the passion and satisfaction associated with a purely amateur pursuit. Tiff Wood discovered the Element through his nonprofessional efforts. His job was just a job. Rowing was his life.