Heartbreak

Dear ones, and I mean every reader, every American, every other human. Again today our hearts break as we read the news of the little children killed in Connecticut. Again we ask ourselves what we can do to prevent this violence, to change our laws and our culture and ourselves so that children are not in danger when they go to school. Again we weep. Friends and colleagues have been posting about the need for tighter gun control, and about the very human need to hug our children, any children, hard today. Both of those needs are true for me. And true, too, is the need to weep, to keen, to lament loudly. Sometimes at a memorial service a family member will warn me they might cry, or apologize later for crying too much. I usually say the same thing in response: this is the right time to cry. This is a moment that deserves the respect of our tears. And so if you are crying today, I say thank you. Thank you for having a heart that still breaks, for recognizing in these children your own children, for seeing that we are one human family and that when tragedy hits one of us it hits each of us. I will be crying too. Don't forget--after the crying, we organize, we protest, we legislate. But first, we weep. Again, we weep.

Swimming, Piano, and Lessons of Life

As readers of this blog may remember, my older daughter recently started taking piano lessons. I wrote a few months ago about my excitement for her, and how I was trying to rein it in and allow her to have her own experience. Turns out, she loves them. She has a fabulous teacher, but she also clearly has at least some natural interest in and aptitude for music. She's doing well in the lessons (whatever "well" means for a 4 year old...she's no prodigy!) and most importantly she's having a great time. The last lessons she took were swimming lessons at our local Y. She also had great teachers, but she didn't have much interest or aptitude for swimming. And although I think it's important to learn to swim for safety reasons, we're giving her a break from that...trusting that somewhere along the line a camp counselor will get her the rest of the way from the doggie paddle to proficient. What's interesting to me as I look at her two experiences is how much differently she behaves--and, I think, feels--when she's learning about something that is the right fit for who she is. It has me thinking about all the kinds of things we try to convince ourselves to be: to be a certain kind of parent, or a particular profession, or a kind of exerciser. All the boxes we try to fit into, and then the freedom and joy we feel when we move from that box into another box, an us-sized box, one that really fits our true selves. We can become completely convinced that we're an inept exerciser, only to discover that it's just that we didn't like running, but we really rock at kick-boxing. Or think that we can't study worth a darn, until we discover a subject that we're passionate about, and suddenly we're making flashcards and absorbing material like the A student we never thought we could be. Who knows if piano will stick, or if my daughter will eventually come to love swimming. I just hope that all of us find the freedom to explore until the right box comes along.