Month: October 2018

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Resilience Trumps Resistance

An Open Letter to Students Anywhere, USA

Dear Young People,

On a sunny June day, some 23 years ago, I stood on a high school graduation stage about to deliver a speech packed with what I thought were words of meaningful reflection and nuggets of worldly wisdom. I have since come to realize that graduation speeches tend to be fairly similar regardless of who delivers them…cliché life lesson or challenging moment, a joke or self-effacing thought to engage the audience, Pollyanna advice about the future finessed with more cliché for the big finish as we send you off into the world.

Graduation speeches are a great tradition. We share the “best” ones on social media and try to grasp onto their fleeting bits of inspiration, but they are just that…fleeting bits of inspiration. If you’ll allow me, I’d like a bit of a do-over on that speech I delivered some two decades ago. I’m aiming at more of a mini TED Talk than a graduation speech, but please indulge me nonetheless.

You have probably heard your parents and other adults tell you that you are growing up in a more difficult time than we did. While that may be true, let’s take the conversation away from difficult and talk about why it is different for you. Media and information literally bombard you everywhere you turn. And while your thumbs may be stronger than mine from all that texting you do, I had to read a newspaper or wait for the evening news to get my information. Stories took time to develop and verify and information was not instantaneous.

I grew up studying—from textbooks (gasp!)—figures like JFK, Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi. You doubtless learned about them too, but here is the big difference—our contemporary leaders used to hearken back to those revered historical voices in an effort to bring us hope about our future. They endeavored to embody strength of character, tolerance, service to our nation and its citizens and non-violence. Our leaders didn’t Tweet or have any social media presence. In fact, they had to take their time, choose their words wisely and wait to deliver them during set speeches and press conferences. We hear some of the aforementioned values today, but they are not truly part of our actions nearly enough.

For myriad reasons, our country is deeply divided. Such a rift is not a new thing, but under our recent stewardship we have allowed the message of RESISTANCE to be king. We have told you that if you don’t like something, the best way to handle it is to #RESIST. I think we meant well, but we have done an immense disservice by encouraging this to be your call to action.

If my senior year AP Physics course taught me anything, I recall resistance to be a fundamentally negative force. Resistance is friction, it slows forces down, it causes things to come to a halt. By it’s very definition, Mr. Webster tells us resistance is defiance, intransigence. Regardless of political affiliations, we can disagree, we can speak our minds, we can fight for the underdogs and against injustice, but when did we begin to believe that resistance would usher in progress? Where is the civility in resistance? Where is the kindness? And how does resistance help you cope when you don’t get your way?

It’s not your fault, young people. We adults have given you this notion of resistance when we should have been teaching you about RESILIENCE. Heck, we have forgotten to be leaders who guide not only youth, but also ourselves to recover from adversity with grace and hope. We have wasted time pointing fingers and complaining when we should have modeled perseverance.

In this amazing country we live in—and it is amazing—we are so focused on achievement that we forgot to teach you that you learn very little from successful outcomes. We have rarely shown you how to understand disappointment and that progress does not start with achievement. I’m not saying you shouldn’t bask in your moment of glory when you ace a big test or when you win the championship game. Those may feel like big moments, but they should not define you. You are more than the sum of those bullet points on the resumes you neatly send off to college admissions offices. And by the way, if your sum of positive outcomes feels low right now, please don’t assume that you peak at 17 or 18-years-old. Learn how to make mistakes, stumble or even fall completely, rise to a challenge and #BERESILIENT.

It does not matter where you are off to on your next life adventure. What matters is how you engage people and the little things you do. So the mother in me must say, “Put down your cell phone and look people in the eyes.” Have verbal conversations and connect with people offline. I promise you can text emojis and incomplete sentences to your friends at a later point. Take the time out of your crazy busy, over-scheduled lives to smile at someone, even if they don’t smile back. Smile even harder at those who look sad.

If you haven’t made up your mind about what you want to do with the rest of your life, this adult gives you permission to go easy on yourself. Having goals is great, but figuring out your next move should be tough. There are some situations that Google just can’t fix or that your parents can’t solve for you. My Ivy League degree sits in the bottom of my basement closet collecting dust. It turns out that along with nearly $3, my fancy degree gets me a single subway ride in New York City. Hence, even with an expensive credential, I am no more special than anyone else. And for the record, I have yet to figure out what I want to do with myself when I grow up.

In closing (and here is the flourish cliché), I know you feel invincible. I did too when I stood in your shoes. In some ways, that feeling will help you bravely conquer the world and to take on new challenges. But you are not immortal. You have heard it before, but I hope you really pause to hear this: Make. Good. Choices. Treat your life and the lives of others preciously. To this end, make sure your choices are the right ones for you. Don’t make yourself into a one-size-fits-all type. You are far more unique than that. And although you may have been coddled a bit too much, you are far more resilient than that.

I am proud of you, young people, but not because of your accomplishments. I brim with pride at your possibility. Don’t go forth and prosper though. Figure out how to meet a challenge head on, get knocked down in the process and rise even stronger to try again. Then, rinse and repeat.

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No Recipe for Grief

“My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break.” -William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

Sometimes I sit down to write and my brain and fingers are at odds with one another, or more aptly, they are at odds with logic flow and topic sentences that make for poignant prose. Scattered as my thoughts may be, my fingers are dancing on the frenetic keyboards of my mind and heart, and as Shakespeare so aptly said above, I must speak my truth.

October is tough for me. That sticky wicket of a month sweeps in so quickly it always seems to issue a harsh reminder that another summer is long gone and I’m not at all in the swing of the school year rhythm, struggling several beats behind the crowd. But that busy life stuff everyone talks about ad nauseam is really just a distraction for me.

October brings me back to my 24-year-old self. It has for the last 17 years. I don’t resume the vitality of my younger self, however. I return instead to a place of deep pain, the pain of a young woman losing her father. Sometimes I try to pretend that the date doesn’t matter, but without fail, October comes and the agony of loss cuts through my heart.

I have heard the phrase, “Time heals all” uttered too often to count. I’m a highly optimistic person, but I do not believe that time actually heals the wounds of grief. The notion that the mere accumulation of time will eventually fully cushion the soul is wishful thinking that we have adopted as we attempt to trick ourselves into coping with loss. Though our bodies may betray us by physically moving forward, our hearts are not good at faking it. Death is inherently unfair and our hearts just can’t behave like bouncing rubber balls.

I talk often of my father, especially to my children. I tell them how amazing he was, how he lived small, but loved large. I don’t talk much about the last ten days of his life, however. Watching him die, knowing he was going to die, that is too difficult for me to describe.

I certainly don’t have the market cornered on grief. I know others—too many others-who have experienced far worse than the loss of a parent. Knowing how I ache 17 years after his death, gives me only a glimpse of the extraordinary torment others must feel.

There is no recipe for how to handle grief. Whether it comes suddenly or over an extended period of time, we’re never prepared. No one likes good byes so it is not surprising that final farewells are the most painful ones. Everyone wishes for more time. The human condition is hard-wired to feel regret and to wish for more. It would be pretty amazing if we could follow a bunch of neatly packaged steps and upon completion we could feel whole again, that we could fill the gaping holes in our hearts. If only.

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Grief is an unfortunate and unavoidable part of life. It’s also exceedingly messy. It seems the best way to survive loss is to put waders on and walk right through the worst of the muck. I’m not sure I took my advice on that. I think I kind of walked around it, which means there is a perpetual lump in my throat every October, almost as if my 24-year-old self is watching my father slip away all over again.

I remember staring at his coffin during the wake and funeral. That image is irrevocably scarred in my mind. Intellectually, I knew he was gone. I had watched him take his last breath, after all. But I wished. God, I wished. I still do. I wish he was here.

I couldn’t speak in the final days my father slipped away. I just couldn’t. Words have always been easy for me to string together, and yet, I was unable to find the right ones to express the enormity of my emotions back then. The icy hand of death snatched my father and my words and it left me feeling disappointed that I never seized the chance to tell him how much I admired him, how grateful I was for his love, how much I loved him in return.

My father was not the life of the party or the most eloquent person around the table. He was simple. He was kind in the hugest sense of the word. He loved people. All people. He wore a perpetual smile on his face. I truly don’t think he ever showed physical disappointment with me. He was just happy to be around me and silently drink air with me. He was affectionate. He was proud of his children. He was not perfect. He tried really hard. He was unique. He was mine.

I’m grateful for all that he was, but I’d be lying if I said I was done being angry at his death. I’m angry that I don’t get the chance to sit across the table and see his smile. What a warm smile! I’m angry that I don’t get to hear his hearty belly laughs. I’m angry that I don’t get to see his eyes light up the way they always did on Christmas morning. I’m angry that he didn’t get to walk me down the aisle at my wedding or hold his grandchildren as they came into this world. I’m angry that I no longer get to see the look of awe he had every time he looked out at the Long Island Sound.

I’m angry, but I’m somehow also filled with hope and love. That must be my father working his magic, teaching me that hope is truly the only power we have in coping with grief. Even filled with holes, the heart finds a way to swell with love again. It has taken me 17 years to get here, to scratch the surface of what I buried deep inside as a young woman. It may take another 17 years or more before I feel a little less like screaming at how unfair it feels that he was plucked from Earth too soon.

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Do me a favor…if you have lost someone you love, please be gentle with yourself. And if you know someone who has recently, or not so recently, lost someone they love, don’t overspeak. A simple, “I’m sorry” is enough. If you find yourself reaching for clichés, please don’t say anything at all. No cliché ever invented or yet to be invented could possibly make someone who is grieving find solace. Instead of choosing the wrong words, please do something. Bring dinner or offer to do a specific errand like grabbing the dry cleaning or watering plants. And don’t say, “I’m here if you need anything,” because you can’t possibly mean that. Those who have been jolted by loss only want one thing: To bring back the person they love.

Short of working a miracle, most of us just need some space. We deserve the right to feel distraught. We deserve the right to feel angry. Be patient with those who are grieving. It takes some of us longer than you’d expect to get in touch with what we’re thinking and feeling.

I love you, Dad. I’ll miss you always.