Telling Is a Difficult Thing

My dad asked me to go with him to the store to pick something up.  I sat in the car silently, thinking of the other things I wanted to do.  I sat silently because at 18 I had no idea who my dad was or what I would ask him.  We did not have much time together.  Having fled Cuba with no money and little formal education, he was on continuous survival mode and work was priority number one.  

That absence early in my childhood and my own quiet personality allowed me to make good friends with silence.  (This is why writing this may be so difficult as I break the quietness of my exterior to sound out what has been important to me.)  As I look back at that ride now, I would do just about anything to have changed the dynamic of the situation and broken the quiet in that car. There was genuine love between my dad and me, but somehow we could not breakthrough to one another, not at that time.  

The people closest to us often present the strongest challenges to our own constructed worlds.  I mean, we often place on these challenging or struggling relationships the burden of our own happiness and well being.  If I only had a better relationship with....then.  If the struggles are intense, they often distract us from the very joy and pleasure of the moment in front of us and move us away from the work of consciously walking down our own creative paths.  We spend most of our time looking back and licking wounds rather than on taking a step forward in fulfilling what is our own song.  (Have I mentioned already that life is short?) 

If we look carefully at these and the many sources of our own wounds, we may find that these strong challenges can become our best teachers, leading us to find life's purpose and mission.  

A couple of months after that car trip, I had started college and was busy doing my college thing. The day before finals were to start at the end of my first semester, I got a call, Your father was killed in a work accident.  My world stopped.  I had no idea what to do or how to proceed. Suddenly the comfortable world I had grown to ignore was now something very different and vastly more difficult.  

I added another word to my list of good friends--complication.  I had been warned at freshman orientation but somehow I did not understand that the warning was not merely one given to college students at the start of their freshman year.  The warning was an age old signpost given to all humans, letting us all know that we should expect difficult times up ahead.  That semester, I got incompletes in most of my classes.  The following semester I got C’s and one D in a geology lab.  I had lost my way and had no idea where I was anymore.  I took classes because it was the thing to do but felt numb and lost.

I take this time to tell this story as a means to connect with you wherever you are in your college career.   I offer it as a signpost and an invitation.   Telling stories is part of our way of finding out who we are and where we are.  It’s also a way of honoring our lived experience and acknowledging those before us and inviting them to help us break the silence that distances us from our dreams and aspirations.  

But telling is a difficult thing.  And inviting the ancestors or those significant people that mark our lives is even harder to explain how to do.   It primarily involves sitting and wrestling with a multitude of ideas often disguised as silence.  Maybe the sense is that if we stay with our constant chatter, our deep desire to discover, and our less than perfect practice of expressing ourselves, that we can begin to figure out which stories help us understand ourselves and our direction.  

Glad to share the road with you.