Being led deeper down the path by youthful inquiry…
I had a conversation this week that gave me pause. It was with seventeen-year-old high school student from Michigan. Chelsea had read Waking for school and was doing some sort of project. I find it encouraging that Waking is making it into the classroom and the minds of forming adults. I also find it amazing that we live in a day and age where young students think nothing of reaching out to an author directly. Chelsea was quite persistent and gave her questions to our Mind Body Solutions’ office manager Kathy. She also let Kathy know that her project was due on Wednesday so if I could please hurry up and get her the answers.
I did not know that Chelsea was young until I saw her questions. I could hear both her seventeen-year-old wonder and her youthful inability to formulate something concise. She asked, How did you stay so strong for all the stuff you went through? How did you make it through that? I smiled and shook my head. How do you answer? What’s the secret to being strong, what’s the formula? Contrary to the myth that our culture likes to tell itself, strength is as intangible as it is invisible. I looked at her questions and honestly thought to myself, I have no idea.
After giving it quite a bit of thought: my reply was: I stay so strong because I only get one life. What happened to me happened and my choices are to go forward with my only life or to not go forward. I choose forward. I made it through because I kept moving forward with the only life I have.
We too easily dismiss the profound content in youthful questions. They are often so honest and so direct that, rather than admit our own adult shortcomings, we write off the questions as naive. Chelsea’s questions reveal an uncomfortable truth about us. She wonders what is the fundamental nature of human resiliency. Our answer is inadequate, not her question. All we can truly say is that we just do it…we live on.
Chelsea was impressed with my deep-sounding answers. I was not. The recognition that each of us only gets one life does not explain the choice to move forward. The thirteen-year-old-boy that was me could have recognized that he only gets one life and chosen not to move forward. Pondering Chelsea’s questions have now pushed me to an even simpler answer, one that I often forget to feel: I move forward because I care. Living life makes me care; and that I care makes me want to keep living.
This Holiday season remember what is at the center of Holiday spirit. See past the stress and the commercialism, past our crazy families and our implicit loneliness. Let’s share the best part of ourselves for a simple reason: because we care.