I love it when friends send me thoughtful articles in the post, sometimes with a post it note attached to tell me how they were thinking of me while they read it. That someone has taken the time to send you the note makes me want to take the time to give it my full attention. So when old man Herb sent me a card and included this Readers Digest excerpt from 1977 in it, I took my time. After all, he'd saved it all this time and now felt it belonged with me - I was touched.
This condensed excerpt from "A Child to Change Your Life" by Thomas D. Murray speaks a good many truths that were true then and are still true today - not only to children but everyone. He writes:
"..."Wait until you have children; your life will never be the same." I always assumed those words to be a warning of the predicable price of time and care and attention one must pay for button noses, high white shoes, and soft round bottoms - for the utter pricelessness and loveliness of children. I knew I would have to teach my child a million things - to balance a bike, to tie shoelaces, that the capital of Ohio is Columbus, I guess I assumed no more involvement than these little lessons, and lots of love,
I know differently now, because now I have children.
I know that when you teach a child to divide five into ten the lesson has a beginning and an end. But when you try to teach a girl to become a woman, or a boy to become a man, the lesson is as long as your life. And to forget to teach, or to be too tired to teach, or to elect not to teach, doesn't do away with the job. It simply changes the lesson, for nothing teaches indifference or apathy more clearly or quickly than indifference and apathy.
If I teach my children only one thing, I want them to understand the absolute and profound relationship between happiness and love. But I plan to give them no long lectures on love. In the first place, I know of no way to tell they why I love their mother. And how much I love her is not something I can say, but something I must show. I'll tell my children that the happiness of human beings is too often measured in unrealistic lengths of time. I want them to realize that life is not lived in lifetimes or even seasons, but in sunny mornings and snowy afternoons, in picnics in the yard, in waiting for a child's fever to break, in sitting quietly with your husband or wife on a Wednesday night or picking up her dress or his suit at the cleaner's. That if they can't find happiness here, they won't find it somewhere over the horizon.
I think a parent owes children a good grasp of honesty and integrity. I want mine to know that these qualities are good companions that help us like ourselves. And that they seem to attract others to us. Human integrity has the same advantages as structural integrity - both hold things together through hell and high water. I want my children to understand that the world is about people, that we'll get from them no more than we give, that we will always be happier human beings when we love than when we hate, when we help than when we hurt.
I want children of mine to know that there is only one bit of real magic in this life that can truly move mountains and turn dreams into things they can touch and feel and see and enjoy. And that magic is called "Believing in Yourself". I want them to know that almost everyone can achieve whatever he thinks he can achieve. I want a child to understand that, if he believes in himself, he can use his energy to work toward what he wants to be or do, and not in wondering whether he's good enough to try. For worry will wear him out as fast as work, and worse, will tie him to the starting line.
I want my children to know that there is nothing like a good man or woman. And that whatever they most want their work to bring them - respect, praise, money, security, satisfaction - becoming and being a good man or woman will bring it to them sooner than anything else. Maybe, when they can understand it, I will tell them the story of the cabinetmaker who was showing a customer how beautifully finished even the backs of the drawers were in a small chest that he had just completed. "Why do you take such pains with the backs?" the customer asked. "No one will ever know." Whereupon the craftsman moved his fingers lovingly over the top of the chest and replied, "I will know."
I will try to give my children a sense of security, and hope that they develop enough of a willingness and ability thing, that they will feel comfortable with an open mind. I must teach them that conclusions are like cars: they need to be carefully inspected at frequent intervals; and, every so often, they may need to be traded in for new ones. Doctors may tell my child that his health and the length of his life will depend to a great extent on what he eats. I'm going to tell him that I believe they depend on even more on what he thinks, that the people among us with the most open minds - the real thinkers, the writers, the great artists and philosophers - often seem to live a very long time. I would guess that it is because attitudes, more than age or energy levels, make people seem old or young; because people who never close their minds, who never mentally retire, seldom seem to let down physically or spiritually either. They never lose a kind of child like appetite for what comes next, and always seem to be listening to the little voice that keeps prodding and pushing them to never miss a sunrise.
(January 1977 issue of Readers Digest)
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