Experiments in Living - Song Circles in Berkeley
When I was in college, I briefly dated a woman who was (frankly) a bit of a hippie. She was from my hometown of Vacaville, California originally, but she was an earthy-crunchy Berkeleyean by temperament, by nature, and at heart. We spent our time together tromping around Tilden Park looking for banana slugs (which, for some reason, were green instead of yellow like they are in Santa Cruz), having sex, and participating in acoustic-guitar-sustained song circles in Berkeley.
Growing up in California, I was afforded plenty of opportunity for what the philosopher John Stuart Mill once called “Experiments in Living”—which for me means the trial and error process of identity formation and of consciously deciding what kind of life you want to lead. Many parts of the country are homogenous in nature; people growing up in those environments are handed their worldview, their path in life, and the expectations of their family (or their religion or their local culture) on a platter and never get the chance to experience other ways of being—other forms of life that one might choose to lead.
But how fortunate I was to have the melting pot of the San Francisco Bay Area as the playground of my formative years—to witness and see and experience a multitude of different ways of being alongside one another, and to have the opportunity to move between and among those different ways of living fluidly, to try them on for size and see if they were a good fit for my most-authentic self, to choose them freely instead of their being handed to me from above.
In my formative years I could try on the life of a hippie singing folk songs in Berkeley (Where Have All the Flowers Gone?), of a surfer in Santa Cruz, of a mountain man in Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada mountains, of a wine connoisseur in the California Wine Country, of a beat poet wearing a black turtleneck and listening to jazz music and writing poetry inspired by Rod McKuen in a coffee shop (shoutout to my Caffe Dolce family!), of a musician and wannabe songwriter, of a budding young philosopher-in-the-making sitting under a tree during philosophy class at Sonoma State University, and of countless other diverse experiences gifted to me by the plurality of local environments.
I fear we, as a culture, have forgotten the importance of those experiments in living for the formation of well-rounded and authentically crafted individuals and their own self-identities. It’s overly simplistic to blame social media or politics or geography or the educational system, all of which serve—unfortunately—to reinforce a relatively narrow view of what life is “supposed” (in irony quotes) to be like—of what its boundaries and possibilities are, and what they can and might be. As educators and thinkers who hold the sphere of possibilities for humankind’s future experience in our hands, we must fight against this tendency toward narrowness and homogeny, and we must—once again—rediscover the importance of “experiments for living,” especially in those early, formative years, and for the people who come after us.
