If you want to live a quiet life, live a quiet life.
Seven things my father taught me, by example.
Thanks to all who came out for our Candlelight Chat last Sunday with the glorious Dr. Ellen Hendriksen, on the topics of perfectionism, social anxiety, and Ellen’s latest book. The video replay—along with Ellen’s famous chart that shows you how to avoid counter-productive loops—will go out in a few days to paid and scholarship subscribers - please stay tuned!
Today is the fourth anniversary of my father’s death. In his honor, I’d like to do my annual share of these seven things that he taught me by example.
Do beautiful things, just for the sake of them. If you love orchids, build a greenhouse full of them in the basement. If you love the sound of French, learn to speak it fluently, even though you rarely have time to visit France. If you love organic chemistry, spend your Sundays reading “orgo” textbooks. My father pursued these passions, and many others besides (stamp-collecting, classical music, the list goes on).
Find work you love and work that matters, and do it as excellently as you can.
Make a life where you’re as free as possible from the forces of dogma and bureaucracy.
If you want to live a quiet life, live a quiet life. If you’re a humble person who has no use for the spotlight, be a humble person who has no use for the spotlight. No big deal. (I got the tendency to march to my own drummer, from my father. On many subjects he would shrug his shoulders, with no fanfare, and go his own way.)
If you happen to be a doctor, take care of your patients – really take care of them. Study medical journals after dinner, train the next generation of physicians (my father kept teaching until age 81), spend the extra hour to visit the bedside of your patients in the hospital. (Here’s a letter from one of those patients, which we found after my father passed away. He never showed us these things while he was alive.)
If you’re a husband, take care of your wife, even when she has Alzheimer’s and can’t walk and asks you the same question again and again and again and again and again and again…
If you’re a parent, teach your children the things you love, like music and poetry, so that one day they’ll love them too. One of my earliest memories is asking my father to play the “chair record” (Beethoven’s “Emperor’s” concerto, whose name I was too young to pronounce) over and over again.
My father and I talked, just before he died of COVID. He was in the hospital, trying to breathe.
“Be well, kid,” he said, as he hung up the phone.
And I have been well. And so, I hope, will you.
*
What are some of the most important things your parents or other guides have taught you, or that you hope to teach other people?
If you’d like to share your thoughts below, or share this Kindred Letter with a friend, you can do those things here.
Susan, this brought tears. How blessed you are to have had such a close relationship with your father!
A couple of things passed on by my father:
Keep choosing life. No matter what. Even when things appear utterly hopeless, choose life!
Humanize, humanize, humanize every space you enter. The cranky nurse in the palliative care unit? She’s having a tough day, just like you. Flirt with her. Make her laugh.
If you find something or someone to love, go all the way. Don’t worry about what that looks like to anyone else. Give. Be a giver.
And never, ever, EVER underestimate anyone.
It’s actually my father’s birthday on Monday. Such a gift you gave me to spend these few minutes remembering him today.
Much, much love, Susan!
When I was younger I regarded my dad as cold and harsh. When I was 16 and my mother died, leaving just the two of us, he didn’t talk to me about grief, he didn’t let me grieve. He expected me to attend the 3 nights of a wake, the funeral, and then life would go on with small adjustments to routine. I thought that was cold and harsh and later I found out that WAS cold and harsh as I read the new psychology. Yes, I had to deal with buried trauma for years.
But now that I am in my 70s and I have survived so much trauma, I see the legacy, the positive legacy that he DID leave me. While I was reeling from my mother’s death, he provided me with financial security, a house I had lived in all my life, food on the table, the clothing I asked for. I never had to fear for myself physically from him. We argued and then he would apologize and try to make amends. He tried to understand when he’d had no experience of really understanding women; my mother had looked after all that while he made his way in a man’s world. But, mainly, he taught me how to survive until I could thrive.
He taught me to be strong even if at times I was being strong just to “show him” I wasn’t doing as badly as he feared. And in the end, he left me a legacy where now I know how much he cared even if he wasn’t perfect at showing it while he was alive. I love you Dad and I know you knew that at the end. Just as I know you loved me.