To Harvest, We Must Plant Good Seeds

How unthinkingly we squash: Ants, pumpkins, human spirit.

Yesterday, I was thinking on how I used to listen to music in my bedroom.  I played it with the volume so low that I could barely hear it.  At first I thought, you know, if I still played my music that low, I would still have pretty good hearing.  I was allowing my ears to be sensitive.  But my father would comment on it every time he realized I was doing it.  He would ask me, “Why?”  I didn’t know why, but I didn’t know why not, either.  I considered how often we do this to each other.  So often we plant, however casually, softly, or inadvertently, so many seeds of doubt for soil fertile and receptive enough.  Doesn’t it stand to reason that if the soil is fertile enough to foster positive thoughts, it will be equally receptive to critique?  Why did he need to ask me why I did it?  I have no doubt he loved me.  But, regarding this specific recurring inquiry, I’m not sure if he was actually curious for my explanation, just looking for something to say, or if it was rhetorical and borne out of some unsettled self-consciousness.  In any case, that was middle school and this is now.  Twenty years later.  I remember it well.  It may have had something to do with the volume I use as my standard now – loud.

But, delving deeper into the memory, I realize I used to sing often.  I used to sing to music in my room, memorizing lyrics as a hobby.  If I played it low enough, I could follow along and still hear my own voice; it wouldn’t get lost in the other.  It makes perfect sense, but I didn’t realize it enough at the time to be able to put it into words when he asked.

I knew my voice.  I wanted to hear it, strengthen it, use it.  I was confident in it and when I sang, those around me could hear that; they commented on it.  My conviction was that anyone could sing as long as they did it often and mindfully.  My music teacher once asked me to sing “Silent Night” in German for our class because she said she wanted me to demonstrate the correct pronunciation and I think secretly wanted me to be outed as a kid with some talent (I was awkward and shy – and she was a sweetheart).  I sang and in the quiet, carpeted innocuousness of the music room; I surprised myself at my composure. Something in her asking gave me a calm confidence. Several classmates with whom I didn’t normally socialize, complimented me afterward in the hall.

This was before my self-doubt kicked in to full gear in high school (if you tend toward being an alto, don’t audition as a soprano singing Handel’s “Messiah”.)  However, my point is not my singing.  My point is the confidence we regularly shake out of one another as if it’s a fruit or flower of which there are 500 more.  It is hard work to get those flowers to fruit – we know that much from our own experience.  Too often we underestimate the power of words.  So, let’s mind well the flowers on one another’s trees.  Although this is critical for children, it is no less true for adults.  Would we rather be a field of stark, weather-worn branches that bear no fruit, or a grove of nurtured trees, bearing witness to our own ability and gifts to share?  We begin in this world wanting for and accomplishing so much before we learn to ask whether we can or should.

Rather than assume the over-confidence of one another, let’s assume we don’t have enough.  You never know how much encouragement can mean to someone.  Besides, why wouldn’t you give it?  It’s 100% free.  The world needs more strong, creative voices, not less.  And the world’s creatives need more encouragement, not less.