From a Mother to Her Son at the Launching

June 15, 2023

My amazing son,

 

In my mind’s eye, I can barely picture the woman who began this journal almost two decades ago.  I had started work at the Department of State, and your dad and I had married the year before in Oxford, excited to start a family as we both turned 30.  It was as if we wished for you and you arrived.  I found out I was pregnant after we had already planned a trip to Australia in October 2003 to attend a friend’s wedding in the wine country of the Barossa Valley (I did not anticipate having to avoid alcohol or fly 20 hours across the world newly pregnant).  You were a world traveler from your earliest days!

 

As you embark on this next chapter, with the newfound independence that will come with it, I wanted to share a few humble pieces of advice.  What I offer here, I earned one gray hair at a time.  It is the wisdom of trying and failing, of being disappointed but seeking resilience afterwards, and of loving imperfectly and learning from life’s heartbreaks in the many forms in which they come.  I offer this advice knowing that your journey will be different than my own.  And I offer it knowing that if someone had offered it to me at your age, I would not have known how to adapt or change.  But nonetheless, here it is with hope and love.

 

Change

 

At my high school graduation, I gave a speech that I am sure was full of trite expressions of the consequential moment it represented to me and my classmates.  My grandmother had just passed away, and I remember wondering if she could see me delivering that speech “from heaven.”  The only parts of the speech I recall are mentioning her death, quoting Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If,” and offering a bit of wisdom I could not possibly have understood at the time – that“the only thing we can rely on to remain constant in life is change.”

 

It's true.  When I was younger, I thought life was a linear progression.  A straight line up towards “success.”  It would be defined by all the standard markers along the way:  college graduation, grad school, a job I was proud of, a marriage, children, a home.  I thought as I ticked off all of those accomplishments, I would be headed towards “success.”  But now, in the middle of my life, I see that life is full of surprises – both good and bad.  It is not at all linear.  There are ups and downs, joys and sorrows. There are crushing disappointments and unfair things.  Beautiful things too.  

 

There is no moment at which we obtain “success.”  Indeed, the only way to true success is to develop the skill to live in the moment as it is happening.  Try not to worry about the future or regret some aspect of the past.  You do not have control over the future or the past.  You can only control how you experience and conduct yourself in the moment you are living.

 

Enjoy those moments – they are precious.  Every one of them.  Pause and look around you whenever you can.  Take in the sights, smell the smells, listen to birds and the ocean and happy chatter.  Do you remember when we worked on a project about Mary Oliver’s A Summer’s Day?  It ends with:  “Tell me, what is that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”  

 

After you read it, you went for a walk in the woods along the bike trail you take to school.  You told me how – without your phone and your airpods – you saw things you had never seen before on the path.  Try to turn off your phone and pay attention whenever you can.  There is beauty and wonder all around you.  

 

And each moment is fleeting.  The moment you are in right now will never happen again.  Relish it.

 

Someday, you might find yourself sitting with your toddler when you’re tired and have some looming crisis at work.  You might find yourself wishing away the moment, hoping to get to the next one when things will be less stressful.  In that moment, pause.  Look at your adorable, frustrating, beautiful, willful toddler and pick him (or her!) up and snuggle him.  And remember, one day, you’ll be sitting down to write a letter tearfully nostalgic for that moment and wishing you had lingered longer in it.

Your Knowing

 

Of all the advice I have shared with you in my life, this is the advice I wish I had known and believed earlier.  I was an adult with a career and two children before I even saw glimpses of this truth.  And as I have settled uncomfortably into it, I have felt lighter, freer, at peace.

 

Inside of you is something I like to call your “knowing.”  I have often put my hand on my midsection when I talk about it and said something like “our knowing is where are hearts and our mind meet up in our tummy.”  That’s, at least, how it “feels” to me.  Your knowing is the voice inside you that tells you what your passions are.  That knows what is kind or good or true.  If your knowing were a compass, it would point true north.

 

Too often, the clear, strong voice of our knowing is drowned out in the noise and cacophony of life.  People will not hesitate to share with you what they think you should do.  I often marvel at how freely we humans give advice to others about how others should live their lives (when we are usually hopelessly ruining ours).  I also marvel at how much we humans want others around us to think about and see the world as we do.  If possible, avoid people with strong opinions about how you should live your life.  (In fact, if possible, avoid people with strong opinions).

 

Instead, practice listening to yourself.  Sometimes I have to find a quiet, hidden place to listen to myself.  For any problem you have, think through the pros and cons (Nana calls this the Ben Franklin balance sheet), anticipate the consequences of various courses of actions, and be thoughtful about the effects of your actions on others.  And then, sit quietly after having weighed those factors, and the way forward will come to you.  You’ll know.  You won’t need to find it somewhere else.  It will be right there – inside of you.

 

Do the things in life that make you feel passion.  Do what brings you joy or meaning.  I am not suggesting you shouldn’t seek advice from people you trust.  I have always found it useful to ask people who I know have my best interests at heart how they view a problem.  And I am certainly not saying that you should hedonistically do whatever feels right to you in the moment regardless of how it affects other people.  One of the things I love most about you is that you are thoughtful and kind.  I think there is enormous value in going through life being graceful and avoiding unnecessarily hurting others.

 

Instead, I am sharing that I spent much of my life, until very recently, scanning every room I was in to see what other people thought of what I was doing and saying.  I was hungry for other people’s approval (for myriad reasons) and I often twisted myself in knots trying to please everyone.  I often ended up displeasing more people by trying to please everyone.  I sometimes even twisted my own truths to please others.  You simply cannot please everyone.  And there will be people in your life who will want things because it is good for them, not because it is good for you.  

 

So, as much as you can, strike out on your own path instead of following a herd.  If you do something and it brings you joy, do it more often.  If something doesn’t feel good or hurts, that’s a sign – leave it.  For your career, pick something that will inspire you, that will make you want to get out of bed with a sense of purpose.  Don’t do it for money or prestige.  Do it because you find meaning in it.

 

You are an old soul.  Wise beyond your years.  Your knowing will always guide you to your true north.  Listen to it.

Love

 

Finally, a word on love.  About two years ago, I asked you about dating.  You shared that you had read a statistic that only 7% of high school romances result in marriage, which surprised you.  A source of "unnecessary heartbreak."  I hoped to convince you then, as I do now, that we humans tend to get better at love when we practice a bit.  I hope you won’t be afraid to date, to get your heart broken, to fail and try again, and to find meaning and joy in your relationships with others.

 

I say this because there is nothing better than love.  Love from your family, romantic love, love of a friend.  It is the most important thing in life and the one thing that makes life worth living. 

 

When I was in college, I read a passage by the philosopher Bertrand Russell entitled “What I Have Lived For.”  I was so enthralled with it I saved it and would quote from it from time to time.  Russell shared that he lived life for three passions, the first one of which was love:

 

“I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness -- that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined.”

 

I imagine in the first and last sentences, Russell was speaking of romantic love and surely it does bring poetic ecstasy -- although that seems a bit artificial and saccharine to me today.  What I notice now is that Russell leaves out the opposite face of love – that it can also bring sorrow or grief through loss.  

 

Loss through a death, a slow drifting apart, or an angry parting.  I lost my dad to a sudden heart attack in my 20s.  His death rocked me.  How could someone I loved be here one day and gone the next?  This duality of love – that it brings both “ecstasy” and pain – is why some people avoid it.  To protect their hearts from the pain of loss.  They may even enter into relationships but never open up or share what’s inside themselves with another.  They do not want to be vulnerable.  

 

C.S. Lewis, in his book The Four Loves, wrote this about those people:  

 

“To love at all is to be vulnerable.  Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give it to no one. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

 

Do not let a fear of being hurt prevent you from loving.  There is so much beauty and comfort in love.  We go out into the world stronger and truer when we know there are people who love us at home or in our hearts.  There is often something akin to relief in being understood and loved.  

 

So many times, I have shared a problem with a friend and have felt the peace that comes from seeking solace in someone who knows me.  Knows my intentions.  Knows my inclinations.  It’s a sort of a shorthand developed over years of love that allows one to start any conversation with an assumption of good will.

 

Adrienne Rich says:  “An honorable human relationship - that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love" - is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.  It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.  It is important to do this because in so doing we do justice to our own complexity.  It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.” 

 

There are many important ideas here – love is not a feeling, it is a set of actions.  It is a process.  True love takes time to build.  And it should be built slowly, faithfully, carefully, and honestly.  Building love requires vulnerability.  Building it requires you to share yourself, even the parts you don’t like or want to change.  And building it makes you a better person – because someone who loves you will not let you live in self-delusion.  Someone who loves you will help you be a better you and will grow with you.

 

The Intersection of Change, Knowing, and Love

 

So here is where my three offerings come together.  The basis of any true loving relationship between two people is the courage to share our true selves, and in order to do that, we must first know ourselves.  Just like the Bard taught us:  “This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou cannot then be false to any other.”  

 

Tell the people you love, with integrity, who you are and what you want.  Avoid attempting to “control narratives” so that you are always the good guy or the best.  Do not be afraid to let someone you love see you, warts and flaws and all.  We all have our weaknesses.  But the people who love you know your weaknesses and love you anyway.  So be honest with them, and in your sharing of your true self, you will have a partner in your continued growth.

 

The people who love you will be with you throughout all that inevitable change in life.  They will be with you when you’re soaring to celebrate you.  They will be there when you’re nose-diving to help soften the crash landing.  They will be there to tell you when you’re not being your best self – and that, my son, is an act of love and courage.  

When someone who loves you invests in you to help you see something about yourself that you’re not seeing, accept it with gratitude.  Sometimes, I have been dragged kicking and screaming into understanding something I didn’t want to know about myself by someone who loves me.  After I got over my righteous certainty, I felt gratitude that someone would go that hard way with me and take the time to make me a better me.  Listening to those who love you is not inconsistent with listening to your knowing.  Your knowing will tell you whether those people have your best interests at heart, whether the source of what they are sharing is love for you, and whether there is wisdom worth considering in what they are sharing.

 

Launching

One of my favorite books is The Prophet by Khalil Gibran.  In it, he writes about the relationship of a parent to a child:

 

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, 

which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and 

He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

 

That is how I picture this moment:  your launching off into the world and my being so honored to have had the time with you to prepare you.  I know your arrow will go far.  Enjoy every minute of the journey and know how much I will always love you.  

March Forth With Less Ego

During the height of the COVID pandemic, while flipping through old copies of America’s Best Essays in search of light or meaning, I read the forward to the 2007 edition by David Foster Wallace.  The pandemic was a dark season in my life for many reasons, and in that space, David Foster Wallace’s words resonated: 

“Part of our emergency is that it’s so tempting ... to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed positions, rigid filters, the 'moral clarity' of the immature. The alternative is dealing with massive, high-entropy amounts of information and ambiguity and conflict and flux; it’s continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time and to need help.  [To be a free, informed adult] requires not just the intelligence to discern one’s own error or stupidity, but the humility to address it, absorb it, and move on and out therefrom, bravely, toward the next revealed error.” 

The older I get the less I realize I know.  Acquiring the humility to understand not only that we know very little but that we have far less control over what happens to us comes through a painstakingly slow process.  When I think of what I know now (that I “know” very little), I must confess I shudder a bit at my own past “moral clarity of the immature.”  How many things I fancied I “knew.” How many filters I used that distorted what I saw. How many people I did not hear because I assumed things as I “listened.”

Being trained as a lawyer, I was and am open to the idea that there are myriad sides to any story or conflict.  I also have seen in courtrooms how flimsy “eyewitness” testimony is and how many different psychological factors go into what we perceive and remember.  Five witnesses to the same car accident, if taken to different rooms, will all remember something different.  The driver was distracted. The pedestrian darted out of nowhere. The traffic light was green. The extent to which we are not fully and accurately perceiving the world becomes increasingly evident any time different people describe the same event or conversation. 

As a diplomat, I learned and relearned how much our cultures affect how we perceive the same series of events.  Whether it is the directness or circularity with which we say things, the way we maintain or avoid eye contact, how and when we press someone to do something, or even whether we show someone the bottom of our shoes, the tiny corner of the world into which we are born colors everything.  

Thankfully, these experiences and professions left me quite open to what David Foster Wallace wrote. But it wasn’t until I stumbled across another quote, that led me to listen to countless podcasts and read books by its author, that I invested significant time in considering the “ego” and the role it plays in our sense of certainty and righteousness about what we “know.”  The quote was from Eckhart Tolle:  

“To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness.” 

I had never read anything by Tolle when I came across the quote, and I found myself re-reading the sentence over and over.  Grace is my favorite word, and I wanted to understand how to be in a “state of grace, ease, and lightness.”  Everything around me felt ungraceful, difficult, heavy.  But I kept mulling the words “to offer no resistance to life.”  What did that mean?  We surrender to all that happens to us?  We give up? How do we do that and is that desirable?  I wrote the quote on a scrap of paper and put it on my refrigerator door.  

I then read two of Eckhart Tolle’s books The Power of Now and A New Earth.  He is a quiet German-American who, at 28, lying in bed in a fit of existential, suicidal panic thought “I cannot live with myself anymore.”  This triggered for him an epiphany about how much we are “with our own minds.”  How much we are consumed by our thoughts that look into the future with anxiety, into the past with regret.  If we were able to reduce our racing thoughts and focus on just the present moment, much suffering would disappear.  Of course, monks have spent decades perfecting the art of being present, and I doubt I will ever come close.

But what I found most interesting about Tolle’s writing is his emphasis on the “ego.”  To Tolle, our ego is essentially what we identify as.  Our form.  Mother, father, wife, student, doctor, drunk, loser, philanthropist, hero.  It’s the list of things we put in our social media description.  The things we would tell someone at a cocktail party.  We all have our narratives of who we are, and by adulthood, we can rattle off our roles and our “story” with ease.  And in all of that identifying, by necessity, we are also saying what we are not.  

Social media, in many ways, has reinforced our egos and our associations with roles and identities.  I recently spent a year at Georgetown and Carnegie reading and teaching about social media and disinformation.  At the heart of my quest was to understand why America felt so polarized.  Of course, much ink has been spilled about the algorithms of social media and how they amplify both all the things with which we already identify and then amplify the “shock value” of content about those things.  Over the past two decades, we have become increasingly rigid about who we are and rejectful of who we are not.  This phenomenon is not only happening between the separate poles of political spectra, but within each pole as well.  One of the most common verbs used at the moment to describe what is happening *within* similarly-minded groups is “cannibalize.”

We have also become quick to dispense with people.  Last year, a documentary, 15 Minutes of Shame, explored the ways both public personalities and private citizens must now navigate harassment and public shaming online.  Thankfully, the documentary does a good job of noting that some forms of public shaming have resulted in progress toward better outcomes.  But in painful detail, the documentary describes stories in which every day people were subjected to a weaponized form of shaming or false accusations that were intended to hurt or destroy – often without an understanding of even the basic facts.  People lost their jobs and had their lives destroyed by a 15-minute whipped up frenzy of unexamined outrage.  And then the outrage moved on to a new target.  

A few years back, a close friend told me about the author Jonathan Haidt. I have now come to believe that his book The Righteous Mind should be required reading for anyone living in the modern era.  He examines moral psychology and the spectra across which we make several kinds of moral judgments and explains why conservatives value the traditional and liberals value change.  The overarching message is that conservatives and liberals frequently come out differently on moral questions, but each gets there in a “rational” way.  And neither is “wrong.”  We have become so certain that the other “side” is “wrong” that we do not even have conversations with each other anymore.  We do not try to understand.  We label and move on.

Jonathan Haidt famously quoted Zen master, Sent-t’san, from 700 CE in a TED talk:  

“If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be ‘for’ or ‘against.’  The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease.”  

This is very much in keeping with the philosophy of Eckhart Tolle about the “ego.”  Tolle would say the more we identify with labels or roles, the more inclined we are to defend that role or mindset in a knee-jerk, unexamined way.  The most liberating thing we can do is to identify less with the avatars we create of who “we are” and simply be present in the moment, with an open heart and open mind, willing to listen and see others.

It's a bit hyperbolic, but I would submit there is no such thing as “good communication.”  Very rare is the conversation in which each party walks away with the same understanding.  I have come to believe that communication is instead a whittling away of misunderstanding.  Adrienne Rich, in her essay "On Women and Honor:  Some Notes on Lying," defines an “honorable human relationship” as “a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.”  As a society, we must get better at the long, sometimes terrifying process of listening to each other – of whittling away our misunderstandings.  Of restating and clarifying. Of repeating back. Of coming to conversations with an assumption of good will.

We all go around this earth asking “Do you see me?  Do you hear me?  Does what I offer matter?”  Many of our conflicts, since time immemorial, have arisen when the answer to those questions is a dismissive, self-righteous “no.”  So, this March Forth, I commit to trying to distance myself from my ego, from my avatar, from my righteous certainty of things I “know.”  I commit to listen and see more, and speak second, not first.  I commit to using less labels for myself or anyone else. Perhaps the only label that should matter is Open-Minded Human (the acronym is even onomatopoetic – oommhh).  For sure, we do not need to be so open-minded that our brains spill out.  We can still make moral decisions, improve other people’s lives, and do good things in the world.  But we can do all of those things with much more humility.