Letters to My Son. Kent Nerburn

making substantial alterations to the text. There may be things I would now say differently or with different emphasis. But the book has a magic about it, and I have learned, through long experience, that where there is magic, whether human or literary, you do not intrude upon it, but honor its presence and try to serve as its shepherd.

      So I have made just three significant changes in this edition.

      I have added a chapter about being gay, an oversight in the initial book that has been pointed out to me by young men and fathers who feel that they or their sons were left out of the original edition’s otherwise broad embrace.

      I have added a chapter on the difficulty of leaving one phase of life for another — an experience I have known in my own life and seen many times in the lives of others.

      And I have included a final chapter, previously published in my book Simple Truths, that speaks with quiet eloquence about the mystery and majesty of life’s journey. It seems a fitting conclusion to this book born in wonder and gratitude for the inexpressible gift of fatherhood.

      I hope this new edition finds favor in your eyes.

      — Kent Nerburn

      Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2014

       FOREWORD

      We all need advice growing up and facing the big stuff life gives us. We all need the voice of a parent or a good friend who has lived through joy and suffering and has thought deeply about it. Kent Nerburn is an extraordinary writer who can be that voice when we are lost and in need of guidance. Letters to My Son — written for his son, Nik, but true for all of us — shows us that life isn’t always easy or fun but that it is always a gift to be treasured and shared in all its richness with those we meet along the way.

      We live in a time when no one wants to take the responsibility to say what’s right and what’s wrong — when no one wants to be told what to believe. Kent is that rare individual who’s not afraid to be vulnerable, to stand up and speak from the heart. He shares with us what he believes, and makes us look at the hard questions, but never offers easy answers. Like a wise and gentle friend, he guides us to the truths that emerge when we approach life openly and honestly.

      Letters to My Son gives us Kent’s wisdom and experience, in beautiful, moving writing that speaks with amazing clarity and directness to the most important issues — the big stuff! — we all face in trying to live life happily, compassionately, and wisely. May you hear, enjoy, and prosper!

      — Richard Carlson

      Author of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff… and Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff with Your Family

       INTRODUCTION

      This is not a book I intended to write. The world is full enough of grand moralizing and private visions. The last thing I ever intended was to risk adding my name to the long list of those involved in such endeavors.

      Then, in midlife, everything changed. I was surprised with the birth of a son.

      Suddenly, issues that I had wrestled with in the course of my life and questions that I had long since put to rest rose up again in the eyes of my child. I saw before me a person who would have to make his way through the tangle of life by such lights as he could find. It was, and is, incumbent upon me to guide him.

      For now this is easy. His life does not extend much beyond his reach. I can take him by the hand and lead him. But before long he will have to set out on his own. Where, then, will he find the hands to guide him?

      I look around and I am concerned. The world is a cacophony of contrary visions, viewpoints, and recriminations. Yeats’s ominous warning that the best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity seems to have come to pass. Good men everywhere realize that the world we have made is also the world we have failed, that our brightest dreams and our greatest fears lurk just over the horizon. Acutely aware of both, we stand mute, driven by our hopes, silenced by our doubts.

      I can no longer afford this silence. I want my son to be a man of good heart who reaches out to the world around him with an open mind and a gentle touch. I want him to be a man of belief, but not a man of judgment. I want him to have explored his own moral landscape so that he will not unwittingly do harm to himself or others. To be such a man he needs to hear voices that speak with empathy, compassion, and realism about the issues of becoming a man.

      And so I take my place among those attempting to provide such a voice.

      I bring to the task such skills as I have: a love of the language; a belief in the higher visions of the human species; a complex mélange of anger, wonder, and despair at the world in which we live; years of learning, miles of travel, a love for the wisdom of all spiritual traditions, and a faith in the inexhaustible miracle of the experience of life all around us.

      But above all, I bring this:

      One day last week a former student of mine methodically drove his car to the end of a street, pushed the accelerator to the floor, and catapulted himself off a cliff into a lake far below. On the same day I listened to a man speaking about his journey to India to study with a woman who could read his spirit by laying her hands on the sides of his head and staring into his eyes. That evening I found myself sitting with an old drunken man on a bench outside a store talking about the pleasures of catfish.

      It is my gift to be able to embrace all these people and all their truths without placing one above the other. I can enter into their beliefs and give assent to each of them and learn from each of them. And I can pass their truths along.

      This may not seem like much. But I value it above all else. The lonely old neighbor with her thirty-six cats, the shining young man at the door with his handful of religious literature, the good teacher, the honest preacher, the junkie, the mother, the bum in the park who told me never to take a job where I had to wear the top button of my collar buttoned and not to mess up my life like he did — I can hear all their truths and I can celebrate them.

      If I can take these simple truths and elevate them beyond the anecdotal, I can offer something of value to my son and to other fathers’ sons. I can offer a vision of manhood that is both aware of our human condition and alive to our human potential. I can offer the distilled insights of the dreamers and the doubters, the common and the rare. And in the process, perhaps I can reveal something about manhood to those readers, both male and female, who seek a compassionate place from which to survey the vast and confusing landscape before us.

      — Kent Nerburn

      Bemidji, Minnesota, 1992

       PROLOGUE

       A FATHER’S WISH

      I write this book as a father — not just as your father but as any father. Until you have a son of you own, you will never know what that means. You will never know the joy beyond joy, the love beyond feeling that resonates in the heart of a father as he looks upon his son. You will never know the sense of honor that makes a man want to be more than he is and to pass something good and hopeful into the hands of his son. And you will never know the heartbreak of the fathers who are haunted by the personal demons that keep them from being the men they want their sons to see.

      You will see only the man that stands before you, or who has left your life, who exerts a power over you, for good or for ill, that will never let go.

      It is a great privilege and a great burden to be that man. There is something that must be passed from father to son, or it is never passed as clearly. It is a sense of manhood, of self-worth, of responsibility to the world around us.

      And yet, how to put it in words? We live in a time when it is hard to speak from the heart. Our lives are smothered by a thousand trivialities and the poetry