Family Matters

If you remember typewriters and 8-track players in the car and ditto machines and such, if you listened to the Beatles and Bob Dylan and Smokey Robinson and Joni Mitchell as each of their new albums came out, if you were deeply influenced by books like The Catcher in the Rye, On the Road, Catch 22, Cat’s Cradle, The Autobiography of Malcom X and more, you might be around my age. And perhaps in those formative college years, you acquainted yourself with a book called The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. Gibran was born in Lebanon, came to the U.S. at 12 years old and published this book in 1923 at 40 years old, a book that became one of the best-selling books of all time, translated into over 100 languages.

 

I haven’t thought it about it for a long time and now am curious about re-reading it and seeing if it holds up. I thought of it this morning wanting to write a bit about my children, since my second daughter Talia just turned 39 yesterday. I remember there was a passage about children and here it is:

 

 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.

Not bad, Mr. Gibran! A good reminder to parents with children of all ages. Combined with James Baldwin’s  'Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.' they cover two essential truths:

1. Each of us is born with our own ingrained destiny, our own essential purpose and style and character that is wholly independent of our parents. 

2. That inner sense of our particular genius is also influenced and affected by our parents, both in our rejections and our carrying forth. 

I feel both with my own children. I’m deeply connected with Kerala through our mutual love of writing and the similar themes we write about. Likewise, deeply connected with Talia in our mutual paths as teachers and our leadership in ceremonies and group gatherings. In both cases, the uniqueness of their voice and perspective is clear, coming from their own experience, their female point of view and the influence of their different generation, friends and peers. We all love to cook and hike and read (sometimes the same books, sometimes quite different) and travel and play games, all of which is a great pleasure whenever we gather together. We rarely have a single political disagreement. 

At the same time, despite piano lessons for both and four years of Talia playing sax in high school, neither followed the music path as players and both listen to music much more to the current pop side than the timeless jazz and classical and world music side. Neither sits zazen (though I did do a one-day Zen retreat with Kerala many years ago) nor does Crostic puzzles. Neither tends to go to concerts or jazz clubs or to my wife’s dismay, to art museums. Likewise, she has not been able to convince either to knit or sew, though they both have solid visual art skills. 

You might note the slight edge of disappointment about the above— and likewise with our grandchildren. Zadie doesn’t care to read, though is loving drawing and Malik loves to read and draw, but not sing. Both are athletic, funny and love to play games and Zadie is starting to play my favorite Solitaire game. 

So thanks to Mr. Gibran for the reminder that all of them are their own people, with their own bodies and thoughts and Souls that “dwell in the house of tomorrow” and my job as a parent and grandparent is, has been, and will be to be the mere bow aiming at a target I can’t see and they can, doing my best to shoot the arrows swift and far. 

And so a happy birthday to Talia! Twang!