Lessons From My Father

The number of times I will feel like writing about my father in my lifetime will not be infinite.

I had written about him maybe twice before, here.

It feels a little bit…wayward, to write about him. But maybe I will appreciate it later, or maybe somebody else will.

Anyway. This is a fragile post, so I will just write it and submit it for the Foreverhaven, without thinking too much. Already I had the thought to write a different post, and had gotten caught up in some other writing.

The truth is I find thinking about him difficult. But every so often, something happens, or I look at something, and I notice that I am thinking about something that he once has said to me. When I was younger I would think that the advice is pretty general. Now I know that everybody gives different advice, everybody’s mothers and fathers emphasized different things.

He told me once, not to judge how smart a person is, based on how tormented they look. Sometimes, very smart people look tormented. But sometimes — often — very smart people look very relaxed, like they are not trying at all. Life is easy for them, thinking is easy for them. It is no trouble and would not look like trouble. He told me that if a person looks “normal” this is not evidence that their intelligence is not actually substantially above average.

I have met people like this. I have sat next to a football player in a class, and we were given the same assignment, and had the same amount of time, and he blew everybody out of the water. The former cheerleader COO of SpaceX seems like this.

Another thing he told me, is that if a person is really really good at something, do not assume that they are going to be very good at some other thing. Sometimes skill and intelligence are transferrable to other fields, but sometimes they are not. It would be a mistake, therefore, if I see somebody being really good at something, to throw some task at them without checking if they can do it, or if they want to do it, or if they would do it well. It is possible I myself have not even checked how hard the task is.

Probably one of the lessons I am most grateful for is to sit down with a movie or a book and to respect it as a work of art by the artist. The point was to not learn anything about the material at all, and to just devote an amount of time to it and absorb what the artist had to say, from beginning to end.

I have met very smart and literary people who do not have much patience for this, these days. They want to learn about what they are reading or what they are watching beforehand, evaluate it against what they have seen before, check if they are currently in the mood.

My father’s concept was that maybe I would not be in the mood, but now I am following the artist into whatever mood is created, and letting that process of emotionally alchemy happen on that ride.

My father is particular, and himself does not have sensibilities for very diverse or artistic art forms. This would be a scenario in which the student has taken the lesson and has run with it much farther than the teacher. I do not think I would be able to do half of the emotional alchemy I currently am able to do, without his putting me on a couch at a random time, putting on a movie, and telling me to sit there and watch it for sometimes three or four hours. I would have no idea what the movie would be, or why he was showing it to me. I have watched Dogville like this, and La Vita E Bella, and Once Upon A Time in America.

Respecting the artist, respecting the experience that the artist wanted to create — admitting that there is another experience I could be feeling right now, entirely different from my own, if I allowed myself to relax and be pulled by something, moved by something…

I use this a lot