'Your children are not your children'

By JoAnne Young 

 

Reading a book recently, I came across a page in which one of the characters quoted a line from "The Prophet." I had been feeling rather indifferent about the book and its somewhat unlikeable characters. This reference by the author, however, caught my attention, and I finished the book with more enthusiasm.

And then I went digging through my shelves to find my decades old copy of “The Prophet,” one I have had since college. A book whose words sat with me in my youth and walked with me as a touchstone guide as I passed through work, love, marriage, children, time.

 

Gibran was a Lebanese-American writer, poet and artist who published “The Prophet” in 1923. But his words, to me and many others, both the common and the famous – John Lennon, for one – were timeless. 

 

In my late teens and early 20s, Gibran’s words spoke to me and other young people, suggesting interesting ways to think about love, marriage, children, work, laws, freedom, talking, self-knowledge. 

 

Through my years of helping raise three children, his words came to me so many times: “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life longing for itself. They come through you but not from you.” 

 

They don’t belong to you. You can love them, but you can’t make them think like you (although gosh, we’d like to, wouldn’t we?). You can’t make them eat their peas just because you know vegetables are good for them. You can’t automatically install those lessons or that wisdom you learned the hard way. They have to learn the lessons they need in their own way. 

 

You can give their bodies a home, 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,” he wrote. “But seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.”  

 

In the early years of reading these words, I thought about them from the viewpoint of the child, how different was my thinking from that of my parents. But as life progressed, I shifted to reading them as a parent. In both, Gibran’s words rang true. 

 

His words on marriage also lingered in my head. 

 

“Let there be spaces in your togetherness,” he said, “and let the winds of the heavens dance between you.”

 

Let love be a moving sea between your shores. 

 

And so our lives have been filled with love, with children and now grandchildren (whose young souls also dwell in their own universe) and with our work. 

 

Gibran wrote on the lifelong tasks of work. I had one job or another from the time I was 15. Through high school and college I worked in the service industry: restaurants and retail. Then my work moved to communications, writing and reporting. 

 

Writing, it turned out, was true labor, as much as any physical task. It gave shape to my brain, as much as any exercise would give to the body. I felt lucky to get up every morning and look forward to the day ahead, the variety it would bring, the communion and conversation with smart and irreverent coworkers and those I would encounter in the act of gathering information. 

 

Working allows you to keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth, Gibran wrote. For me, that meant the good, sometimes the great, of it. The politics of it. Also the unpleasant, even the grim. 

 

Gibran planted this thought that continued to resurface in my work: “Say not, ‘I have found the truth,’ but rather, ‘I have found a truth.’”

 

Working, he said, puts a person in step with life’s procession, no matter what that labor involves, he said. 

 

“When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music. … when you work you fulfill a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born.”

 

Life is darkness, Gibran wrote, except when there is urge. And urge is blind except when there is knowledge. And knowledge is vain, except when there is work. And work is empty, except when there is love. 

 

That love is in big jobs but also the many smaller ones. Paid or unpaid. 

 

“The wind speaks not more sweetly to the giant oaks than to the least of all the blades of grass.”

 

I get it why people are eager to retire, and even retire early. I did so later than most but have no regrets for waiting for the right time. My work taught me about life and how to function in it like no school could. It enlightened me, gave me reason to believe I had relevance. Showed me as much how to be as how not to be. 

 

The love of work has been not only about vocation, but also about children and marriage and friendship … “to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit,” as Gibran directs, “and to know that all the blessed dead are standing about you and watching.”

*  *  *

Read us, like us, follow us on Facebook at 5 Women Mayhem.