On one visit, for something to do, I visited a marble sculpture from the site of the Eleusinian Mysteries. I’ve long been fascinated by the Eleusinian Mysteries; more than three and a half thousand years ago, for more than a thousand years, from about 1600 BCE to 392 CE, people traveled to Eleusis in Greece for a nine-day initiation that culminated in the revelation of a great secret. What fascinates me is that even though countless people were initiated over centuries, no one ever betrayed the secret. Even today, all we know is there were “things recited, things shown, and things performed.” This is extraordinary, because it’s very hard to keep a big secret.
As I gazed at the marble relief of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone standing with a boy, I reflected on this aspect of human nature. Whether it’s a speakeasy, a gossip session, an Agatha Christie novel, a friend’s medicine cabinet, research into the origins of the universe, or the Eleusinian Mysteries, we all want to learn the secret.
I reflected, “Keeping information secret unfailingly makes it more interesting.” That would make a good aphorism, I thought. I love aphorisms, which are short statements that contain large truths. “In fact,” I realized with sudden excitement as I stood there, “I could write my own collection of aphorisms.”
For most people, writing a book wouldn’t sound like play. But I often play hooky from my regular writing by working on unofficial projects, such as “My Color Pilgrimage,” “Scientific Oracle,” or “Symbols Beyond Words”
—for fun. Sometimes my hooky books turn into real books, such as my once-hooky book
Outer Order, Inner Calm.
I immediately returned home and created a new document.
Over time, as I worked on my aphorisms, I realized that an important thing I was trying to accomplish was to capture the secrets of adulthood that I’d learned—mostly the hard way. I wanted to be able to give them to my daughters, to save them from making some of the mistakes I’d made.
I also wanted to save myself from making the same mistakes over and over.
And now I’ve done it! I’m publishing a book called Secrets of Adulthood. It’s a collection of my secrets of adulthood. Secrets such as “What we do every day matters more than what we do once in a while,” or “The bird, the bee, and the bat all fly, but they use different wings,” or “We care for many people we don’t particularly care for,” and perhaps my favorite, “Accept yourself, and also expect more from yourself.”
What a joy it was to write this book, to distill my observations and experiences into general truths! After all, work is the play of adulthood.
