Letters to My Son. Kent Nerburn

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ offer.

      He was born into poverty. His father ran off. His mother died. Before he was even an adult he was swallowed up into the Great Depression. To get food he had to work and to get work he had to be stronger and work harder. Soon Nazism and Fascism appeared on the world stage, and he was called to take up weapons against other men. After the war was over, he came back with nothing and had to carve out a place for his family in an economic and social order he had never seen.

      From his earliest childhood he had been cut adrift in a world where a person needed to emerge the winner to keep from being annihilated. No wonder his sense of manhood was so deeply tied to his sense of male dominance and mastery.

      Now, as his body fails him, that sense of dominance and mastery has been replaced by a sense of dependence. He feels purposeless and meaningless. The loss of his job, the loss of his physical strength and sexual powers, the loss of his ability to control the world around him are the loss of his manhood. He is a shell, living out his days in a benign hopelessness.

      It did not have to be this way. As his son, I see his real manhood. I see the man who went for days without sleep to help people who had lost their homes to fires and floods. I see the man who worked two, sometimes three, jobs to give his children Christmas presents and who always put his own needs last. I see a man who took his male strengths and put them in service of a vision of caring and sharing, and nothing can diminish his manhood in my eyes.

      He was a good man. In a small way, he was a great man. But he cannot see this. He lived in a time when manhood meant maleness, and he measured himself by those terms.

      But now the times have changed.

      You were born into a different world that will present you with different gifts and challenges. A new vision of manhood will be called for that does not tie so closely into the more aggressive and competitive residues of our male character. You will need to search out new ways of expressing strength, showing mastery, and exhibiting courage — ways that do not depend upon confronting the world before you as an adversary.

      To a great extent, you will have to find the ways for yourself. In times past there were rituals of passage that conducted a boy into manhood, where other men passed along the wisdom and responsibilities that needed to be shared. But today we have no rituals. We are not conducted into manhood; we simply find ourselves there.

      When our bodies tell us we have arrived, it is with a desire and a longing and a sense of unfulfilled outreach. But what we think is manhood is nothing more than our maleness coming into full flower. And when maleness operates untempered with moral value, it visits damage upon the earth.

      I want you to consider this distinction as you go forward in life. Being male is not enough; being a man is a right to be earned and an honor to be cherished. I cannot tell you how to earn that right or deserve that honor. But I can tell you that the formation of your manhood must be a conscious act governed by the highest vision of the man you want to be.

      As you reach for that vision, the echoes of the male will always be with you. The competitive, the dominating, the great sexual urgency and desire for outreach will always whisper. But if you are able to transform them, these male attributes will become the true measures of manhood — strength and honor and moral force; courage, sacrifice, and confidence of touch.

      So acknowledge your male characteristics. Celebrate them. Honor them. Turn them into a manhood that serves the world around you. But do not let them overwhelm you and do not let those who confuse maleness and manhood take your manhood from you. Most of all, do not fall prey to the false belief that mastery and domination are synonymous with manliness.

      Be like my father. Be like the generations of nameless men who served as stewards of the age into which they were born and never willingly raised their hands to harm another.

      Measure your greatness by the length of your reach, but also by the gentleness of your touch. For now, the world needs hands that love, not hands that conquer. Let your hands be among them.

       CHAPTER 3

       STRENGTH

      The other day I saw a group of boys pushing against another boy outside a local store. The lone boy was gesturing as if he was going to hit back at his attackers, but you could see he was afraid. The others kept crowding him and taunting him and daring him to strike them. Then they were going to jump on him and beat him. They only needed that first blow to set them loose.

      Finally, an older man walked by and stopped them. The taunters looked at him and skulked away. The lone boy was free, but not safe. His attackers will be waiting for him on another day, in another place.

      I don’t know what caused this confrontation. I’m sure it was nothing important. The wrong word, the wrong action. But from it came a ritual as old as time — boys measuring themselves by their physical strength.

      It’s a sad ritual, and not one to make us proud. Yet, somehow, this notion of physical strength has survived in our biological coding as something significant, and even the best of us feel its shudder deep inside us. It is a residue of our days as hunters and protectors, when our physical prowess was a legitimate measure of our success as men.

      Now it is a caricature of all that we need to be.

      For ages we have lived with this biological imperative by which manhood has been defined as strength — strength to master others, strength to master our emotions, strength to master the world around us.

      Can we lift more, carry more, run faster, work longer than others? Then we are better men.

      Can we subdue another person physically? Then we are stronger men.

      Can we resist tears when we experience joy or sadness? Then we are truly men of strength.

      The world doesn’t need this version of strength anymore. We are not locked in some physics of survival where we must turn force against counterforce in an elemental battle to see who will prevail. We need greatness of spirit more than we need greatness of physical strength.

      Let me tell you two simple stories. Perhaps you will see what I mean.

      Last week I was home alone. I had two tickets to a chamber orchestra concert to be held on Friday night.

      I started calling our friends. Those who might enjoy the concert were busy. Those who might be willing to go didn’t really like classical music.

      The ticket hadn’t cost much — I could have just thrown it away and gone alone. But something kept gnawing at me.

      For most of the morning I avoided the issue. I tried to ignore the ticket that sat innocently in my billfold. By noon it weighed about a thousand pounds.

      Finally, I got in the car and went over to the local nursing home. I went to the nurses’ station on the second floor and found the head nurse. “Is there some resident here who can walk a bit, likes music, and wouldn’t mind going to a concert with a stranger?” I asked.

      The nurses who were standing nearby looked at each other and began discussing various residents. “Edna? Florence? Joe?” After a few minutes they decided that Edna would be the perfect choice. We went to the dining room and asked her. “No, I don’t want to,” she said. She was afraid.

      So СКАЧАТЬ