Conversations For Transformation: Essays Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard

Conversations For Transformation

Essays By Laurence Platt

Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard

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Empty Nest, The Joy Of

TrueNorth, Santa Rosa, California, USA

October 30, 2023

"It's much easier to ride the horse in the direction he's going."


...

"Empty nest syndrome is a very real feeling of grief and loss, including feelings of loneliness and a shifting of your sense of purpose. It most frequently happens when your children go off to college or start to live independently. The feeling of loss you experience can be similar to the grief you feel when there is a death in the family."

... Psychology Today

"Father snores as his wife gets into her dressing gown, picks up the letter that's lying there, standing alone at the top of the stairs she breaks down and cries to her husband 'Daddy, our baby's gone. Why would she treat us so thoughtlessly? How could she do this to me?'."

... The Beatles, She's Leaving Home

"When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody notices, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps."

... John Winston Ono Lennon paraphrasing Anna Eleanor Roosevelt

This essay, Empty Nest, The Joy Of, is the sixth in a hexalogy on Children:

It is also the first in a trilogy written at TrueNorth:

It is also the sequel to Boyne City, October 2023 III: Blonde Boy.

I am indebted to my children Alexandra Lindsey Platt Doyle and Christian Laurence Platt and Joshua Nelson Platt who inspired this conversation.

It appears that there are many symptoms of the fabled, much-ballyhooed so-called empty nest syndrome. A cursory googling of the topic unearths parents in the throes of empty nest syndrome with symptoms like confusion, incompletion, loneliness, numbness, sadness, stuckness, even grief and more, when their children grow up and leave their family home. What also stands out on the internet in this material which makes empty nest syndrome unlike almost any other malaise that life foists upon us from time to time, is that empty nest syndrome is a normal, natural, even organic outcome of the end of the child rearing process. It's even to be expected - you know, you can't mitigate empty nest syndrome in the same way as you take Sudafed for a stuffy nose. You could say (to deploy one of my all-time favorite Alan Watts distinctions) that empty nest syndrome simply goeswith completing the child rearing process.

What struck me once my children's time with me in the home I had provided for them had come to its inexorable close, was not so much that I could relate to most if not all of the classic symptoms that those who've experienced empty nest syndrome have experienced, but that there was yet another symptom I could vouch for which is missing from the collection on the internet. It's a symptom that I experienced along with the others, and yet qualitatively it was distinct inasmuch as it teased out a new possibility ie context for all the other symptoms. I grappled with it until I'd finally figured out what it actually was.

In essence, this was an inquiry which began as if I'd turned to the dictionary for an exposé of empty nest syndrome, and found this (inter alia) in its index:

Empty nest,

• the confusion of
• the incompletion of
• the loneliness of
• the numbness of
• the sadness of
• the stuckness of
• the grief of

You can tell (and you can trust me) that that's the colloquial collection of the symptoms of empty nest syndrome. Yet upon close scrutiny of my experience, I realized I had to account for a critical symptom which was missing from that collection ie there was an omission from the collection - and it wasn't a trivial omission either: it was a glaring omission. So now I've added it to the collection. Now the fuller collection of the symptoms of empty nest syndrome reads:

Empty nest,

• the confusion of
• the incompletion of
• the loneliness of
• the numbness of
• the sadness of
• the stuckness of
• the grief of
• the JOY of

It's profound. By "the joy of" empty nest syndrome, I don't mean it heralds the onset of my being joyful that my children have flit the nest, leaving me free, unconstrained, no longer responsible for raising them, thus able to party on irresponsibly. This is not about moi / me. This is not about me saying "Home alone? Yesss!" (sorry Macaulay). By "the joy of" empty nest syndrome, I mean empty nest syndrome also goeswith (if I want it to) the celebration marking my joy at the start of their accomplishment, marking my joy with the success of having raised them to now live their independent lives, marking my joy at the start of them living their created lives. This is about eux / them, not moi. That then is the distinction teased out in this essay, Empty Nest, The Joy Of.

My three children are in their 30s. They flit the nest to live wholesome, created, gainful lives, leaving me smack dab square in the middle of an empty nest. At its onset, I didn't like it one bit (the understatement of the decade). But look: this isn't about avoiding empty nest syndrome, nor is it about soothing its anguish. It's about transforming it. To have the joy of empty nest syndrome be a possibility, you must invent it. To invent it, you must take your attention off yourself and the end of an old phase of your life, and instead put it on your children and the start of a new phase of theirs. That's what Life itself does anyway, with or without your permission. You may as well get with the program, go along with it. Then it's a great ride, a wonderful ride, an awesome ride.

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