For Either Love Or Money

Happy New Year!

I found myself weeping with joy this morning as I watched a PBS program called From The Top At Carnegie Hall. I've seen it several times before. They bring three musical prodigies to Carnegie Hall to perform, but they provide a lot of background content that allows the audience to see that they're real kids too. These prodigies don't know they can't do what they wanna. They're practically unstoppable. The music just BURST outta them, and they laugh... oh, how they laugh. It's so moving for me to witness, even over television, human beings truly enjoying what they do.

I've never understood why classical music didn't happen for me. By that I mean that I did know what I couldn't do, and had no adult supervision to talk me out of this ridiculous notion. I would have needed a lot of personal attention to accomplish what I saw those kids doing this morning, but the ones who succeed seemed to attract the attention they needed to progress without the total enthusiasm of their caretakers to any extreme degree.

One of my big problems in getting the attention I needed to overcome my lack of confidence that I could do what I wanted to musically is that I'm hard-headed and stubborn. I don't take instruction well. Probably because I like to argue more than just about any other system of expertise, and I'm not too good at arguing either.

That's where I really screwed up. As a part of his agriculture classes my father was the Adviser to the Future Farmers of America organization. This national group sponsored a variety of contests for students, and my father took these contests very seriously. The two contests my father seemed to like best was debating and parliamentary procedure. Robert's Rules, and all that jazz. My father's students consistently won the State level contests and went to the national finals for one or the other topics nearly every year.

The long time Governor of North Carolina, Jim Hunt, was a national public speaking and debate champion of the FFA contests. He was a sort of prodigy too. I had one of the finest teachers of arguing around as my own father, and I stubbornly refused to take his instruction. I had to have my own identity or nothing at all. That's about how it's turned out too. I have my own identity, and nothing much more than that.

My younger brothers did as my father asked, but it didn't appear to influence their decision to choose a public life or run for political office. Sometime I think my rebellion against my father's ways influenced my younger brothers in a negative way, and I feel a little ashamed of any responsibility I bear if such was so. It was so difficult for me to understand that what I did had any influence over anybody.

I understand a little better now. I influence the people I do, in the way that I do, for the same reasons other people influence me. They don't have to know they're serving as a model of behavior for me. They don't have a clue for the most part, that they have been "the wind beneath my wings."

People have approached me to express gratitude for what they claim to have learned from me, and I don't even remember them as an individual, much less that they have been using me as a model for for their own behavior. It's not unusual for me to treat these sorts of encounters with suspicion at first. Since I don't remember them, I figure they're just saying that to flatter me and soften me up for either love or money. It works for them too.

Not only am I naturally suspicious, what with having Scorpio as my Ascendent sign in my natal astrology chart, but I have studied for decades how to hone my suspicions into a system for treating life with great and abiding caution. How else could I aspire to live a life of no blame?

Living a life of no blame isn't my idea. I copped it from the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching. In the middle section of the Yellow Book published by the Princeton University Press there's a sort of tuitional guide of how to approach and use the I Ching both as an oracle, and as a book of wisdom.

It's in that section of the Yellow Book that it's written that the purpose of the I Ching is to aid in helping it's adherents to become aware of how one needs to be extremely cautious about placing blame on the other instead of where it truly belongs, upon oneself. To live a life of no blame requires me to stop blaming others. I have to help other people stop blaming me for their troubles by not blaming them for mine.