The Choice

CHAPTER 15

What Life Expected

It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life
expected from us, Viktor Frankl writes in Man’s Search for Meaning. In
1972, a year aer Béla and I remarried, I was named Teacher of the
Year in El Paso, and while I was honored by the award and felt
privileged to serve my students, I couldn’t let go of the conviction that
I still hadn’t discovered what life expected from me. “You’ve won top
recognition at the beginning of your career, not the end,” the principal
of my school said. “We’ll expect to see great things from you. What’s
next?”
It was the same question I was still asking myself. I had begun
working with my Jungian therapist again, and despite his admonition
that degrees don’t replace inner work, inner growth, I had been toying
with the idea of graduate school. I wanted to understand why people
choose to do one thing and not another, how we meet everyday
challenges and survive devastating experiences, how we live with our
past and our mistakes, how people heal. What if my mother had had
someone to talk to? Could she have had a happier marriage with my
father, or chosen a different life? And what about my students—or my
own son—the ones who said can’t instead of can. How could I help
people to transcend self-limiting beliefs, to become who they were
meant to be in the world? I told my principal I was considering getting
my doctorate in psychology. But I couldn’t speak my dream without a
caveat. “I don’t know,” I said, “by the time I ĕnish school I’ll be ĕy.”