The Important Things in Life

2006-04-07 23:53:01

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　　Sometimes people come into your life and you know right away that they were meant to be there, to serve some sort of purpose, teach you a lesson, or to help you figure out who you are or who you want to become.
　　
　　You never know who these people may be - a roommate, a neighbor, a professor, a friend, a lover, or even a complete stranger - but when you lock eyes with them, you know at that very moment they will affect your life in some profound way.
　　
　　Sometimes things happen to you that may seem horrible, painful, and unfair at first, but in reflection you find that without overcoming those obstacles you would have never realized your potential, strength, willpower, or heart.
　　
　　Illness, injury, love, lost moments of true greatness, and sheer stupidity all occur to test the limits of your soul. Without these small tests, whatever they may be, life would be like a smoothly paved straight flat road to nowhere. It would be safe and comfortable, but dull and utterly pointless.
　　
　　The people you meet who affect your life, and the success and downfalls you experience, help to create who you are and who you become. Even the bad experiences can be learned from. In fact, they are sometimes the most important ones.
　　If someone loves you, give love back to them in whatever way you can, not only because they love you, but because in a way, they are teaching you to love and how to open your heart and eyes to things.
　　
　　If someone hurts you, betrays you, or breaks your heart, forgive them, for they have helped you learn about trust and the importance of being cautious to whom you open your heart.
　　
　　Make every day count. Appreciate every moment and take from those moments everything that you possibly can for you may never be able to experience it again. Talk to people that you have never talked to before, and listen to what they have to say.
　　
　　Let yourself fall in love, break free, and set your sights high. Hold your head up because you have every right to. Tell yourself you are a great individual and believe in yourself, for if you don“t believe in yourself, it will be hard for others to believe in you.
　　
　　You can make anything you wish of your life. Create your own life and then go out and live it with absolutely no regrets.
　　
　　And if you love someone tell them, for you never know what tomorrow may have in store.
　　
　　Words from A Loving Fath
　　
　　IN THE DOORWAY of my home, I looked closely at the face of my 23-year-old son, Daniel, his backpack by his side. We were saying good-bye. In a few hours he would be flying to France. He would be staying there for at least a year to learn another language and experience life in a different country.
　　
　　It was a transitional time in Daniel’s life, a passage, a step from college into the adult world. I wanted to leave him with words that would have some meaning, some significance beyond the moment.
　　
　　But nothing came from my lips. No sound broke the stillness of my beachside home on Long Island. Outside, I could hear the shrill cries of sea gulls as they circled the ever-changing surf. Inside, I stood frozen and quiet, looking into the searching eyes of my son.
　　
　　What made it more difficult was that I knew this was not the first time I had let such a moment pass. When Daniel was five, I took him to the school-bus stop on his first day of kindergarten. I felt the tension in his hand holding mine as the bus turned the corner. I saw color flush his cheeks as the bus pulled up. His questioning eyes looked up at mine.
　　
　　What is it going to be like, Dad? Can I do it? Will I be okay? And then he walked up the steps of the bus and disappeared inside. And the bus drove away. And I had said nothing.
　　
　　A decade or so later, a similar scene played itself out. With his mother, I drove him to the College of William and Mary in Virginia. His first night, he went out with his new schoolmates. When he met us the next morning, he was sick. He was coming down with mononucleosis, but we could not know that then. We thought he had a hangover.
　　
　　In his room, Dan lay stretched out on his bed as I started to leave for the trip home. I tried to think of something to say to give him some courage and confidence as he started this new phase of life.
　　
　　Again, words failed me. I mumbled something like, “Hope you feel better, Dan.“ And I left.
　　Now, as I stood before him, I thought of those lost opportunities. How many times have we all let such moments pass?
　　
　　A parent dies, and, instead of giving a eulogy ourselves, we let a clergyman speak. A child asks if Santa Claus is real, or where babies come from, and, embarrassed, we slough it off. When a daughter graduates or a son is married, we watch them go through the motions of the ceremony. But we don’t seek out our children and find a quiet moment to tell them what they have meant to us. Or what they might expect to face in the years ahead.
　　How fast the years had passed. Daniel was born in New Orleans, slow to walk and talk, and small of stature. He was the tiniest in his class, but he developed a warm, outgoing nature and was popular with his peers. He was coordinated and agile, and he became adept in sports.
　　Baseball gave him his earliest challenge. He was an outstanding pitcher in Little League, expecting to make it big in high school. It didn’t happen that way. He failed to move up from the junior varsity team. But he stuck it out. Eventually, as a senior, he moved up to the varsity. He won half the team’s games. At graduation, the coach named Daniel the team’s most valuable player.
　　
　　His finest hour, though, came at a school science fair. He entered an exhibit showing how the circulatory system works. He sketched it on cardboard. It was primitive and crude, especially compared to the fancy, computerized, blinking-light models entered by other students. My wife, Sara, felt embarrassed for him.
　　
　　It turned out that the other kids had not done their own work--their parents had made their exhibits. As the judges went on their rounds, they found that these other kids couldn’t answer their questions. Daniel answered every one. When the judges awarded the Albert Einstein Plaque for the best exhibit, they gave it to him.
　　
　　By the time Daniel left for college he stood six feet tall and weighed 170 pounds. He was muscular and in superb condition. But he never pitched another inning. He found that he could not combine athletics with academics. He gave up baseball for English literature. I was sorry that he would not develop his athletic talent, but proud that he had made such a mature decision. He graduated with a “B“ average.
　　
　　One day, I told Daniel that the great failing in my life had been that I didn’t take a year or two off to travel when I finished college.
　　
　　This is the best way, to my way of thinking, to broaden oneself and develop a larger perspective on life. Once I had married and begun working, I found that the dream of living in another culture had vanished.
　　
　　Daniel thought about this. His Yuppie friends said that he would be insane to put his career on hold. But he decided it wasn’t so crazy. After graduation, he worked as a waiter, a bike messenger, and a house painter. With the money he earned, he had enough to go to Paris.
　　
　　The night before he was to leave, I tossed in bed. I was trying to figure out something to say. Nothing came to mind. Maybe, I thought, it wasn’t necessary to say anything.
　　What does it matter in the course of a lifetime if a father never tells a son what he really thinks of him? But as I stood before Daniel, I knew that it does matter. My father and I loved each other. Yet, I always regretted never hearing him put his feelings into words and never having the memory of that moment.
　　
　　Now, I could feel my palms sweat and my throat tighten. Why is it so hard to tell a son something from the heart? My mouth turned dry. I knew I would be able to get out only a few words clearly.
　　
　　“Daniel,“ I said, “if I could have picked, I would have picked you.“
　　
　　That’s all I could say. I wasn’t sure he understood what I meant. Then he came toward me and threw his arms around me. For a moment, the world and all its people vanished, and there was just Daniel and me.
　　
　　He was saying something, but my eyes misted over, and I couldn’t understand what he was saying. All I was aware of was the stubble on his chin as his face pressed against mine. And then, the moment ended, and Daniel left for France.
　　
　　I think about him when I walk along the beach on weekends. Thousands of miles away, somewhere out past the ocean waves breaking on the deserted shore, he might be scurrying across Boulevard Saint Germain, strolling through a musty hallway of the Louvre, bending an elbow in a Left Bank café.
　　What I said to Daniel was clumsy and trite. It was nothing. And yet, it was everything.
　　
　　The Power of Silence
　　What did you not say yesterday? Were there things you wish you had said but held back? Did you corral certain words, certain sentences, and hold them for another opportunity? Were some thoughts pushed below the surface, allowed to be changed with time, perhaps to be forgotten forever? How many “I love you’s” went unsaid that would have healed an aching heart? As with sleep, you cannot store them and build a reserve to tap into at a later date. Their power, their balming effect, quickly dissipates with disuse. They work only in the moment that they were intended. Left idle, their potential is gone, the object of their delivery untouched by kindness, by tenderness.
　　
　　“I love you.” It is so simple to say. Three words. There are many other opportunities to say them, but none more important and possessing more potential than now. Words can have the opposite effect if left unsaid, almost as if they were spoken as opposites. Silence can equal the opposite. “I love you” unsaid can become “I don’t love you” out loud. Your most tender and endearing thoughts, if not allowed to fly free from the prison of your mind, may silently tell someone that you don’t care. How many times has your silence told your partner or child that you didn’t love them? How often has an unsaid word created the opposite effect? Think of all the lives that would have been changed had armies of sentences been allowed to roam free. Those who go through life cloaked in spoken endearments, wrapped and comforted in the voiced love of others, are truly blessed. The power of the spoken word is mighty. The power of silence can be mightier still.
　　
　　Countless millions of words have been written and spoken since the beginning of human history. A total of all the words in all the libraries of the world, past and present, and every word of every conversation, idle chatter, lecture, broadcast, and speech in history would be dwarfed by the vast legions of words left unsaid, those rendered impotent by silence. Not that it is a good thing to instantly speak every thought that comes to mind: chaos would ensue. We have to be selective of our words and deliver them into the pattern of conversation where appropriate; however, it is our mental editing that isolates certain words and thoughts as unspeakable, and sentences them to die (pun intended).
　　
　　Words can change the world. They can incite, torture, kill, comfort, heal, encourage, humiliate, anger, inspire, sadden, give joy, make one laugh, and they can forever change one’s life. There are many kinds of words: “In other words,” four-letter-words, words that are read, words to make you blue; there is the spoken word, the written word, the forgotten word; we put words in someone’s mouth, and we don’t have the words to express.... Words, words, everywhere, and not a thought to speak. And the unsaid words—oh, how they could have changed the course of history! Would they have altered the destructive lives of John Wilkes Booth, Adolph Hitler, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jeffrey Daumer, or the Son of Sam? Would the unspoken “I love you’s” have given them a new lease on life had those three words been bestowed upon them?
　　
　　The power of words and their silent cousins: “What did you say?” “Nothing.” Think of the consequences had that “nothing” actually been, “I was wrong. I’m sorry. I apologize and want to make it up to you.” Instead, a relationship was probably hurt forever, or even eventually terminated. “Ouch, that hurts,” if left unsaid, can become one of many familiar wedges in a marriage, or any relationship. Not expressed, it can fester inside, becoming worse and much larger over time than it originally was. It also will accumulate other unsaid “ouches,” and grow to become a very powerful “I hate your guts.” It can eat at one’s insides if not voiced. Actually, its release will help the relationship; its incarceration will destroy.
　　
　　Don’t withhold. Let the hostages go. Release the words while they still hold their meaning. Release them before they change in silence. The loneliest place in the world, more desolate and forbidding than the blackest cell of any prison, is a silent marriage/partnership. All the city lights from Manhattan to Bangkok could probably be powered by the turbulent energy of the silent, but unrelenting, dialogues churning in the minds of an unhappy couple. And it would be possible, as well, to freeze solid the oceans of the world by the dynamics between the two.
　　
　　Allow your thoughts to be heard. You are the most powerful person on earth. You alone possess the ability to change your world, make friends, and influence people. You have the key. Use your words for good. They can help you. Don’t withhold them, for in their muted state they can turn on you. Life is a fine balance of releasing the right words in the right order at the right time, and deciding which words are truly better left unsaid