Taking the road less traveled

Sad to learn that Dr. Scott Peck has gone over, at the age of 69, a time of life when he could have most enjoyed those things about life that he had worked to prove true.

Some years ago, in my 40s, I decided that the best possible life would be to have the imagination of a six-year-old and the experience of a 65-year-old. It has worked out almost exactly that way. I am only 62, but that has been enough maturity to experience experience, and to know first-hand how central it is to happiness.

A key chapter in that experience has been exposure to Scott Peck’s thinking. “Life is difficult,” he began, in “The Road Less Traveled.” Then he argued in behalf of turning toward, not away from, difficulty. He called it “the means of experiencing the pain of problems constructively.” He called this “discipline,” and provided four tools a person could use to obtain discipline in one’s life.

One tool was delayed gratification. “Delaying gratification,” he wrote, “is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure in life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing the pain first and getting it over with. It is the only decent way to live.”

I read those words for the first time in 1988. I forgot most of the passage, but a few of the words stuck, and have been with me since: “It is the only decent way to live.” They have guided me in ways Peck may not have intended. To live decently, I reasoned, one must do decent things. What does it mean, to do decent things? In many cases, I discovered, it meant to do things the opposite of, or at least quite different from, how I had done them before.

And the words have been reward in themselves. A year ago, I met the woman I am soon to marry. In the course of a now-forgotten (and I hope not too high-minded) conversation, I said the words: “It is the only decent way to live.”

“Scott Peck,” she said immediately, and went to her bookshelf to show me her copy of “Road Less Traveled.” Pleased to have struck a chord, I trotted out another phrase I remembered: “Love is nurturing another’s spiritual growth.” She found it on Page 81 of her text and read to me the entire quote: “I define love thus: the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”

Whatever else this woman discovered about me as we came to know each other, at her bookcase she learned that I held an active, practicing definition of love with which she agreed, and I am positive it has made a difference. We have years of nurturing and growth ahead, and truths about love to be discovered that as yet we can only imagine.

In its obituary, The New York Times used this quote from Peck: “I make no distinction between the mind and the spirit, and therefore no distinction between the process of achieving spiritual growth and achieving mental growth. They are one and the same.”

To me, that was affirmation. It meant spirituality wasn’t the dogma of rigid belief, but dynamic, and alive, and growing. My spiritual life continually brings me, when I am spiritually and mentally ready, to a new door, which I open, and step through into a space of virgin light and unbreathed air so pure that it is awhile before my heart is calm enough to let me see and breathe again. These rooms are not created for me, but already exist, destinations in place at this moment, but I don’t know what the next one is, or the next, and I won’t, until the day I arrive. By this argument, the last room must already exist, and probably God is waiting there, but I can’t know that, or Him, until I arrive.

In every new room, sooner or later, life is difficult, just as Scott Peck said. In my experience, happiness has also been in every room, as long as I turned toward the difficulty, and not away. It always seems the decent thing to do. It truly is the only way to live.