December 17, 2019
Dear Grandson,
Thanks for calling me the other day. It feels really good to hear such an enthusiastic thank you for a small gift. We all say, oh, it doesn’t matter. But that is not really true. It does matter to people. We feed off of such emotional messages.
Also, thanks for giving me a small window into your life and sharing with me some of the unease you are feeling about one of your two outside music activities. We talked a bit about the problem, and we discussed your choices. You also mentioned to me the role that music might play in your getting into and attending college three and a half years from now. You shared with me your anxiety about the situation and I came to realize that this was a difficult thing for you.
During the call I mentioned a few thoughts about how you might address the situation. When I am in a phone call, I tend to do things like that. I spent my professional career as a problem solver for hire.
But I have had some time to think about the conversation and I have concluded that providing advice about the particular situation is probably not my best role. My role, if any, should be to add the tools to your toolbox which will help you solve many problems of the same type for years to come.
Since we spoke, I have been doing some reading, actually in a book I have already read several times. And there were some thoughts in that book that I feel might fit this situation and I want to share them with you. These thoughts are a little deep, so we’ll need to reflect on them a bit. This will be challenging. OK with you?
There are two thoughts, and they are short and simple:
“Trust in Life.”
“Trust in yourself’”
Trust in Life
What does this mean? Human life is a great gift. If you are lucky, you get to enjoy that life for 90 years or more. Human life allows you to experience joy, pain, happiness, struggle, success, disappointment, comfort, distress, giving, receiving and every other conflicting human emotion or event. These emotions are all part of the package. There is no human life without them. Pain makes you appreciate happiness. Disappointment makes you appreciate success. Sadness makes you understand happiness. You cannot have one without the other.
So, trusting life may be as simple as trusting that all things will work out. Life always provides a path toward the future, until your 90 years are worked out. Life is good. Trust it.
Trust in self
But life is only part of the living equation. The other part is self. Belief in self is knowing that you will find a way to work things out. It is a belief that you are a learning animal, and that as you acquire more time in life, you acquire experiences, which convert to knowledge, which creates new paths through life that you could not even imagine during an earlier period.
Some might say, I don’t know how to solve this, but I’ll figure it out. I’ll figure it out because I trust myself to do so.
How do you build trust in yourself? Perhaps it is as simple as getting the most out of your circle of influence. When you are provided a choice that you control, you make that choice as best you can. But you also step away from it, and later on, evaluate whether the choice got you what you wanted. If it did not, you take the time to understand what kept you from making the right choice? Was it just luck, or the lack of it? Was it ego? Was it fear? Was it lack of commitment? Was it insufficient information? Was it conflicting values? Was the choice made too quickly? From this self-examination you get smarter and become better equipped to make more satisfactory future choices. This is life’s promise. Life gives you the tools to trust in yourself so long as you trust life.
Not everyone trusts in life. This is especially true for people who do self- destructive things. It is true for people who have nothing but bad things to say about life, or people, or events, or politics, or even the weather. It is so for people who live in isolation, concentrating almost entirely on their own ego and needs. Such people live in a kind of fear.
Not everyone trusts themselves. Trusting in yourself is having this sense that I am OK. I am smart enough. I know how to work hard. I know how to play. I will get better at anything I want to improve. I am as good as anyone, especially in the things about which I have a choice. It is more than confidence. It is that I am important.
So, as it relates to your thoughts regarding the two music programs, it is great that you trust yourself to think about it. It is good that you reflect on how your actions and commitments might influence where you are in four years with regard to college. It is important that you value your time and don’t want to waste it on something that stalls your improvement.
But it is also life trusting to believe, such as when you think about college, that many things will happen between now and then, some which you control and some you do not, which will help you chart a path toward the best outcomes you can receive. Trusting in life is not leaving things to luck. Trusting in life is the belief that life presents many options and alternatives. Rarely are there real roadblocks. Most can be overcome. Trusting in yourself is the belief that you will skillfully navigate life’s alternatives because you just know that you will find the right way.
My writer friend put it this way: “I have always emphasized that trust in life and trust in the self are the cornerstones of a healthy personality.”
My writer friend offered another thought “But it is also the case with adults that self-assertion sometimes calls for overcoming the self. An inner spiritual void -which is possible even in a dedicated group or clique -can be filled only through values in life and meaning in life. But I find meaning in life -and here I come back to the question with which we started -not in my isolated self but only in the midst of human relationships. That means that my self finds my meaning in life only if it is open to a you, an us: to a beloved person, to the family, colleagues, circle of friends, fellow human beings who live with me and on whom I am always dependent. I find meaning in life only when I transcend myself, rise to embrace a person, a community or a cause in whose service I put myself. But it would be wrong here to think only of the great and noble and forget trivial everyday tasks.” (Hans Kung, “What I believe”)
OK. That’s a mouthful. Even harder, the words are translated from German, and therefore more difficult to read. What he seems to be telling us is this: there is a third element to a well lived life, and that is you. You is not me. You is other. Other than yourself. He is talking about the importance of human relationships. He is writing that his self gets its real meaning from its openness to relationships with a you, with other people, with other groups, with fellow human beings.
Perhaps I am saying that the thoughts I have expressed in this letter take their meaning only when I share them with you.
So, Addie, my purpose here is not to make an immediate conflict go away; but rather, to provide some thoughts about how you might think about such things that you can bring to the next conflict situation, and the one after that. It is because of my deep respect for you that I write these words, knowing that what you do not understand today, you will surface for another look, and then another look, and maybe one after that, until you do understand.
