Letters to My Son. Kent Nerburn

day I came across an article in our local newspaper. There had been an attempted burglary at a nearby country club — not the one where Haines and Calbert worked, but another one where I had caddied when I was younger. A black man had been shot and killed after breaking into the locker room with the help of a friend who worked there.

      The black man was Calbert.

      The policeman who had shot him was a man who had been several years ahead of me in high school. He had been a thug even then; everyone had feared him because he beat up people with chains and tire irons. According to the article, he had claimed that he shot in self-defense, though the bullet had entered through Calbert’s back and Calbert had not been carrying a gun. Because there were no witnesses, no case was being filed against the officer.

      I was wild-eyed with anger and grief. I went over to see Haines. I found him at his bench shining shoes. “Calbert wouldn’t try to kill anybody,” I said.

      “I know that,” Haines answered, putting new laces in a white leather oxford.

      “I went to school with that cop,” I continued. “He was a thug then and he’s a thug now. He just shot Calbert in the back.”

      “I know that,” Haines responded.

      “Well, aren’t you going to do anything?” I yelled.

      Haines looked directly at me. His eyes were clear and sad. “Calbert shouldn’t have been there,” he said. That was all.

      With all the pain he had known in his life, with all the injustice and unfairness that had surrounded Calbert right up to the moment of his last breath, Haines refused to place blame elsewhere. Calbert shouldn’t have been there.

      I raged and fumed and choked back tears. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. A man had lost his son in an unjustified shooting by a thug in a uniform, and the justice system was turning a blind eye. How could a person be so passive in the face of such unfairness?

      Haines just smiled at me and shook his head. “You’re angry. I know. I’m angry, too,” he said. “That man killed my son. I want to see him behind bars and I’m going to try to put him there. But that don’t change nothing Calbert did. Calbert got shot because he was somewhere he didn’t belong. Nothing I do is going to make what he did right. He shouldn’t have been there.”

      I stood dumbstruck before this man who had just lost his son. He was obviously filled with pain, but his sense of calm was profound. He did not mount arguments to justify his anger or a hope of revenge. He did not take rash action that would increase the cycle of suffering. He stood in his strength, contained in his grief, secure in the sense of honor with which he lived his life.

      In some men this would have seemed like passivity. But one look into the wisdom in Haines’s eyes was enough to tell me that this was not a man refusing to act out of fatalism or cowardice. He knew where the moral center of his being was, and he was as strong as a mountain.

      I could not have been that strong. I would have flown into a rage and set out to exact some horrible vengeance on Calbert’s killer. To outsiders I might have looked like a torrent of righteousness and a tower of strength. But I would not have been as strong as Haines.

      Haines, on the other hand, would never have been strong enough to go to that nursing home to ask a stranger to a concert. He accepted the harshness of life and it was not his way to reach out to create happiness for others. He would have let the ticket go unused. He might have congratulated me for my act. But he never would have done it himself. It was not part of his strength.

      Two men. Two moments noticed by almost no one. Two very different ways of being strong.

      This is important for you to know. Every man has a different strength. A man who chooses to live at home with aged parents, or a man who devotes himself to endless hours of labor to learn the violin or the secrets of quantum physics has a quiet strength that few will ever know. A man who masters his own desire for independence and gives himself over to being a kind and loving father is strong in a way many others could not match, but his strength is never seen.

      You need to find your own strength. We have an instinctive tendency to make that false association of strength with force, and to measure it by moments of high drama or grand flourish. We are easily able to see strength when a man climbs a mountain or wards off an intruder. We are drawn to him because he overcame fear, and that is something we readily understand.

      But there is much more to strength than overcoming fear. All men are afraid of something. Some fear being hurt in a fight; some fear not having a woman; some fear being embarrassed in front of other people; some fear being alone. Focusing your manhood on your fears and defining your strength by the fears you overcome does not make you strong. It only makes you less weak. True strength lives where fear cannot gain a foothold because it lives at the center of belief.

      Martin Luther may have put it most succinctly when he stood up for his vision of God. “Here I stand,” he said. “I cannot do otherwise.” When you can make this statement about something, all else falls away. You find that your fear is overcome by your belief, your anger overcome by your conviction. Like Haines, you stand in a place of immense peace that cannot be moved, and you possess a strength that is beyond manipulating, beyond arguing, beyond questioning.

      Try to find this strength in yourself. It lies far below anger and righteousness and any impulse toward physical domination. It lies in a place where your heart is at peace.

      Can you turn and walk from a fight when all those around you are jeering at you and telling you you’re afraid? Can you befriend the person nobody likes even though you will be mocked for your kindness? Can you stand up to a group of people who are teasing a person who wants nothing more than to be part of that group? These are the daily tests of a young man’s strength.

      Can you stay away from a friend’s girlfriend even though you want her? Can you turn down a drink or a joint if you don’t want one? Can you do these things with kindness and clarity rather than with self-righteousness?

      If you can, then you are strong, far stronger than those who can defeat you physically. Remember, strength is not force. It is an attribute of the heart. Its opposite is not weakness and fear, but confusion, lack of clarity, and lack of sound intention. If you are able to discern the path with heart and follow it even when at the moment it seems wrong, then and only then are you strong.

      Remember the words of the Tao te Ching: “The only true strength is a strength that people do not fear.”

      Strength based in force is a strength people fear.

      Strength based in love is a strength people crave.

       CHAPTER 4

       RAINALDI’S LESSON

      His name was Rainaldi. I was in seventh grade and I think he taught math. We were walking out of an assembly in the school auditorium when I made some smart comment, causing much snorting and laughter among my classmates. Rainaldi looked at me and said, quite gently and clearly, “Nerburn, you start every sentence with the word ‘I.’”

      Then he walked away.

      If ever a sentence had the power of a koan, that sentence did. With those nine words he changed my life forever.

      From that moment forward my perception began to shift. I could no longer look at the world as something that started with me. The self as the focal point had lost its fixed position in my life. Instead, the things I saw, the people I met, the events that filled my day started to become the subjects of my thoughts, and the world opened like a garden around me.

      I began the long and still unfinished journey toward seeing the world through the eyes of others, toward knowing the endless joy of entering another’s thoughts and feelings and experiencing them as my own.

      The change cannot be overemphasized. So often we build our lives around our positions — “I