Название: Letters to My Son
Автор: Kent Nerburn
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Личностный рост
isbn: 9781608682812
isbn:
Two men. Two moments noticed by almost no one. Two very different ways of being strong.
This is important for you to know. Every man has a different strength. A man who chooses to live at home with aged parents, or a man who devotes himself to endless hours of labor to learn the violin or the secrets of quantum physics has a quiet strength that few will ever know. A man who masters his own desire for independence and gives himself over to being a kind and loving father is strong in a way many others could not match, but his strength is never seen.
You need to find your own strength. We have an instinctive tendency to make that false association of strength with force, and to measure it by moments of high drama or grand flourish. We are easily able to see strength when a man climbs a mountain or wards off an intruder. We are drawn to him because he overcame fear, and that is something we readily understand.
But there is much more to strength than overcoming fear. All men are afraid of something. Some fear being hurt in a fight; some fear not having a woman; some fear being embarrassed in front of other people; some fear being alone. Focusing your manhood on your fears and defining your strength by the fears you overcome does not make you strong. It only makes you less weak. True strength lives where fear cannot gain a foothold because it lives at the center of belief.
Martin Luther may have put it most succinctly when he stood up for his vision of God. “Here I stand,” he said. “I cannot do otherwise.” When you can make this statement about something, all else falls away. You find that your fear is overcome by your belief, your anger overcome by your conviction. Like Haines, you stand in a place of immense peace that cannot be moved, and you possess a strength that is beyond manipulating, beyond arguing, beyond questioning.
Try to find this strength in yourself. It lies far below anger and righteousness and any impulse toward physical domination. It lies in a place where your heart is at peace.
Can you turn and walk from a fight when all those around you are jeering at you and telling you you’re afraid? Can you befriend the person nobody likes even though you will be mocked for your kindness? Can you stand up to a group of people who are teasing a person who wants nothing more than to be part of that group? These are the daily tests of a young man’s strength.
Can you stay away from a friend’s girlfriend even though you want her? Can you turn down a drink or a joint if you don’t want one? Can you do these things with kindness and clarity rather than with self-righteousness?
If you can, then you are strong, far stronger than those who can defeat you physically. Remember, strength is not force. It is an attribute of the heart. Its opposite is not weakness and fear, but confusion, lack of clarity, and lack of sound intention. If you are able to discern the path with heart and follow it even when at the moment it seems wrong, then and only then are you strong.
Remember the words of the Tao te Ching: “The only true strength is a strength that people do not fear.”
Strength based in force is a strength people fear.
Strength based in love is a strength people crave.
His name was Rainaldi. I was in seventh grade and I think he taught math. We were walking out of an assembly in the school auditorium when I made some smart comment, causing much snorting and laughter among my classmates. Rainaldi looked at me and said, quite gently and clearly, “Nerburn, you start every sentence with the word ‘I.’”
Then he walked away.
If ever a sentence had the power of a koan, that sentence did. With those nine words he changed my life forever.
From that moment forward my perception began to shift. I could no longer look at the world as something that started with me. The self as the focal point had lost its fixed position in my life. Instead, the things I saw, the people I met, the events that filled my day started to become the subjects of my thoughts, and the world opened like a garden around me.
I began the long and still unfinished journey toward seeing the world through the eyes of others, toward knowing the endless joy of entering another’s thoughts and feelings and experiencing them as my own.
The change cannot be overemphasized. So often we build our lives around our positions — “I think, I need, I want.” Yet the world around us has a life apart from our particular perspective, and we can begin to understand this life more fully if we give over our perspective and see from other points of view.
This may seem abstract, but in fact it is obvious. Our language contains a tyranny of separateness that wears away at our sense of unity like water dripping on a rock. “I see something, I do something” — the “I” stands apart from the world around me, linked to it only by an action. Over time my very language increases my separation and isolation by making me see and understand the world as apart from me. I find myself estranged and alone, and I don’t know why.
Other cultures, especially those where “being” is seen to permeate all objects, have unity built into their language. That which they see, not the self, is the natural subject of their thoughts. In ours it is not. We have to make a continual effort to move ourselves out of the center of our point of view.
Very few people ever make that effort. Poets, perhaps, and painters, and artists, and people for whom empathy is a gift of the spirit. But for most of us, the self reigns supreme in both perception and importance.
We need to be shaken from our stance and knocked out of our complacency. We need an epiphany, a koan. Rainaldi gave me mine.
I would wish nothing more than that I could give you yours. But the heart receives such knowledge when it is ready, and your heart will receive it when it is time.
But when it happens, the world will shift in a way you cannot imagine. You will stop trying to find your home in the universe and begin making the universe your home. Judgment will ebb and appreciation begin. Everything will gain the potential to be interesting and beautiful, and every moment will become an opportunity for growth and discovery.
And though you will never completely lose your sense of self — that is the realm of the buddhas and the saints — you will have embarked on one of the most exciting journeys in life. You will have begun to see the world with the heart of an artist, and that, more than anything else, is the secret of keeping the heart eternally young.
Education is one of the great joys and solaces of life. It gives us a framework for understanding the world around us and a way to reach across time and space to touch the thoughts and feelings of others.
But education is more than schooling. It is a cast of mind, a willingness to see the world with an endless sense of curiosity and wonder.
To be truly educated, you must adopt this cast of mind. You must СКАЧАТЬ