It's hard to feel good about
yourself when you don't know who you want to be. But that's the
position many of us are in. For men, the traditional career path
is not nearly as certain as it once was. For women, the new power
to have both a career and a family can just mean more pressure to
do it all. For all of us, living in a culture that defines us by
what we buy rather than what we do with ourselves leaves us feeling
shallow.
When we have no one to look
up to, we are impoverished. We live in an age of cynicism and exposÈ,
and we are all lesser for it. But there are people who take risks
because of their beliefs, who stand up to oppressors, who can serve
as models of caritas. I saw on the news an 83-year-old plastic surgeon,
grandmother of 16, who had dropped her busy practice for a month
to go to Africa to help treat victims of one of the embassy bombings.
Look around your own community. Ask people who they admire —
perhaps a teacher, a civic leader, a clergyman, an intellectual
figure. Find people for yourself to admire, and strive to be like
them. If there are people like this at work in your community, perhaps
you can help them in their work.
If there doesn't seem to be
anyone around, read biography. You don't have to go back too far
in time to find real heroes — Eisenhower, Truman, Franklin
and Eleanor Roosevelt. Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Lee and Grant.
My heroes of depression, Lincoln, Churchill, and Freud. These are
all people who had faults, who could be petty and human and yet
more than human too. When there are people we can admire, we are
elevated and enriched through our admiration. We construct our selves
on models we derive unconsciously from our experiences with our
parents and with popular culture. When our models are people we
truly respect, we respect our selves.