integrity + integration

It is impossible to speak of Martha Beck – author of the bestseller Expecting Adam , celebrated life-coach, Ph.D., Harvard alumna, reformed Mormon, one of eight children to a magniloquent professor – without speaking of clarity. Beck buffs perception as easily as others sneeze. And yet however deep this love, it is specific: she is no Gandhi, nor is she a reconstituted Mother Theresa. Her love is the lucidity known to a rose.

Expecting Adam is a work of unparalleled lightness – light in the sense of illumination; light in the sense of ease: a book infused with all the wonder of a being liberated from real suffering. Like her father, Beck was raised “to be a genius the way a Nazi is raised to be a bigot”. She was taught English at four, French at eight, and awoken on clear summer nights in order to memorize the constellations. The night before her fifth birthday, she lay in bed panicking over her limited accomplishments. Naturally, her intellect was soon put to work rationalizing a suicidal despair.

An atheist by her early twenties, Beck ploughed through philosophy - the pre-Socratics, postmodernism, the texts of all major religions – searching for a reason to live. She did not find one. A sense of futility had her comparison shopping for the most painless method of suicide. She does not dwell on this (undoubtedly to protect her family of origin), but the edges of darkness are seen. Her husband, John, a fellow Ivy League academic with a similarly astringent background and whose coworkers feigned “deathly slumber as soon as he began to describe his research”, was just as much a victim of Descartes: nothing outside the mind's realm mattered.

Their beliefs were just about to hit the wall.

During a car crash and pregnant with her second child, Adam, the 25-year-old Beck found herself “pinned against my own seat by a centrifugal force stronger that anything I had ever felt.” Improbably terrible circumstances that soon made the wisdom of surrender clear. Hurried to ER in a fevered delirium, she dreamed of an unknown young man: “[T]he page he gave me was the one I had been looking for … The words … shone. Literally. A brilliant golden light … flashed and sparkled from every … line.” On awakening, she not only knew this man to be the foetus she carried, but that there was “something wrong”.

Trusting such pure rushes of intuition was hard. “Who wants to turn into a Mrs Ross,” she writes of a clairvoyant, “blurting out gibberish about spirits and veils? How much of that sort of conversation are you allowed before people stop inviting you to parties, and you end up pushing a mop in an elementary school?” She was also alarmed at the prospect of being perceived as intellectually inferior, and increasingly inexplicable experiences had her fearing insanity. Then the Alpha-fetoprotein test she had felt impelled to take showed evidence of retardation in the foetus. This revelation threatened everything in which she and her husband believed. How valuable was a being texts referred to as a “Mongoloid idiot”? What did the attitude towards such beings reveal? Should she abort? Forced to reevaluate her priorities, she found them wanting.

The way in which Beck confronts prejudice is nothing short of heroic.

Arguing that the institutionalization of those with Down's “is like forcing an otter to live in a Pringle's can”, Beck expands our understanding of real human rights. How does intelligence correlate to meaning? She writes of bow-legged children whose thigh-bones are broken and reset to conform to the norm, of the thousands of Down's Syndrome children who died of neglect and loneliness in special homes, of the woman who assured her that such children are “better than the best dog”, and of the medical specialist who begged her to abort: “[His] entire philosophy of life centred on obliterating the stupid little boy inside him. It was that person he feared … and this is why he was begging so earnestly for a chance to obliterate the stupid little boy inside me.”

Beck rises from the expectations of her forefathers to wisdom like Venus from the clam-shell: “Adam is not some oracular phenomenon, like Jesus in the Temple astonishing the scholars with his insights, or that kid in Seattle who was recognized by Tibetan monks as the latest reincarnation as a high lama, or even Shirley Temple, who can really dance.” The real phenomenon is that which Adam inspires in his mother: a fragrant blossoming of perception. She watches him find wonder in the most ordinary things – a set of batteries, a yellow bus: “The landscape of our son's mind began to reveal itself to us. Instead of a rationally constructed structure of empirical observations, logical conclusions, and arbitrary symbols, Adam's mental world … is a gathering of people, all linked by … affection into a complex universe of relationships and characteristics.”

Adam teaches his mother that the real magic is not in the glass slipper, but “in the pumpkin, in the mice, in the moonlight; not beyond ordinary life, but within it.” She shapes this understanding into a mission remarkable for its joy. Beck realized that the meaning of life is not what happens to people, but what happens between people, and her new book, Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming The Life You Were Meant To Live, pivots on this awareness. Her stellar consciousness now exclusively applies itself to fulfillment. What was happening in your life when you last were ill? Why listen to those who do not have your best interests at heart? Which activities cause you to forget time? With whom do you deeply relax?

Her goal is Eastern - self and context are united through empathy, through joy. She no longer shares the seventeenth century Puritan perspective that the self is an abomination to be crushed. In short: happiness is the man's truest ambition, and all else is compensatory. The kernel of most mystical practices, this path was memorably described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as “flow” and by anthropologist Joseph Campbell as “following your bliss.” However slowly, this search for truth and beauty is seeping into ordinary Western consciousness.

Beck's confidence is magnetic. She clarifies the basis of operations for that which she calls the “essential self” (read: id) and the “social self” (read: superego). The social self is avoidance-based, conforming, and hardworking; the essential self is attraction-based, inventive, and playful. Nonetheless, her incisors are evident: “Thanks for sharing, Yoda, but … I have to pay my rent.” And so she illustrates how in today's economic climate, the essential self is a far more reliable moneymaker than the social self - importantly, the changing marketplace has created different needs. Consistency, routine, size and conformity are now less relevant than flexibility, innovation, lean structure, and tolerance for incongruity.

The essential self is incorruptible. Energy levels are its navigational tools. “[I]n circumstances that poison your core,” Beck explains, “all the subtle mechanisms that make for smooth social behaviour get gummed up.” She illustrates this causal link between interest and energy: “You go into a near coma chatting with your in-laws after dinner, only to stay up half the night avidly reading a new murder mystery.” The stymied or aimless are merely “carrying an unresolved emotional wound. A lack of enthusiasm for life is always a sign that the deep self is hurt.”

It is the vogue to depict human suffering as a complex biochemical problem cured by the ingestion of chemicals, but Beck's vision is sharper: the needs of human beings are simple, and emotions are eloquent. Fear protects us from danger, grief heals, anger corrects injustice, joy expands. She counsels us to place desire above fear, an arrow that flies directly at the heart of Christian teaching: “Hedonists believed in living for happiness … [D]ue to our basically good inner nature, we can be happy only if we live moral lives, complete with integrity, compassion, and sometimes self-sacrifice … Joyful activity adds real value to the world.” Her suggested mantras are no more than permission to share the human experience:

•  I don't know what the hell is going on, and that's okay.

•  There are no rules, and that's okay.

•  This is much worse than I expected, and that's okay.

•  Everything is changing, and that's okay.

Finding Your Own North Star is a work of wisdom - funny, irreverent, practical, and true. As the dreaming Beck was handed a page of sparkling symbols, so are we. Her luminous words enlighten in the truest sense: they lighten the burden of ignorance. Albert Camus learned that there was in him an “invincible summer”; Beck not only understands this but shares her understanding, an approach antithetical to that part of her personality she christened “Fang”. Adam changed everything. “The problem was that it was impossible not to fall in love with him. It is a frightening thing to love someone you know the world rejects.” The solution? To gradually change the world into one in which Adam is valued, and Beck is succeeding. Greater love hath no man than this.

*Originally published in HQ