Use Your Talent, Don't Deny It

The Boston Herald

A senior in college sends me a story she wrote. What do you think, she asks. Is it good enough? Am I good enough? An 80-year-old mails me an essay. 'I know it needs work. I know it could be better,' he explains. 'What do you think?'

I think that my opinion shouldn't matter. I think that my two writer friends need to listen to Ricky Nelson's 'Garden Party' and repeat these lines 'You can't please everyone, so you've got to please yourself.’ 

Adults need to be reminded of this. Children please themselves naturally. They will sit for hours drawing buildings and houses and animals that don't look a thing like real buildings and houses and animals, but they don't care.They love what they're doing. They love the feel of the waxy crayons in their hands. They love turning clean, white paper into a city or a farm.They're satisfied with their work; they're puffed up with pride. Until someone comes along and tells them that the houses and farms they drew are all wrong.

Kids create with blocks, words, wood and nails, with anything they can. 'Listen to my poem.' 'Look at the bird house I made.' 'See my tent,' they say. Until people who don't look through a child's eyes see not a tent, but a mess where a neatly made bed used to be.

I remember a little girl who used to do cartwheels on the front lawn, on the sidewalk, at the beach, in the grocery store. You couldn't stop her from turning upside down any time and anywhere she pleased.

She enrolled in a gymnastics class where she learned how to do one-handed cartwheels and aerials, balance on the beam, swing from the bars. It was so much fun, so much joy. Until it became competition.

Even then it was fun sometimes, because winning always is. But losing wasn't fun at all and on some days when she tried her best but didn't do her best, the quick, exact movements that had brought her happiness her entire life, brought her only tears. Eventually she gave up gymnastics.

That's what happens. A child takes piano lessons, practices every day and plays on cue whenever his parents ask. 'How long have you been playing?' smiling adults ask and when he tells them three months, six months, a year, they say, 'Why that's amazing. You do so well!'nBut when he answers two years, three years, five years, the praise isn't so forthcoming. The child hears criticism in the silence. He believes he's not good enough. And then he gives up, which is self-defeating because everyone can't be the best. What's important is that people ENJOY what they're doing.

Tonight while dozens of young Olympians compete for their 15 minutes of fame, about 100 girls will compete for the Massachusetts Gymnastic Championship at Algonquin High. All the girls will do well - they've been practicing their moves for years. But some won't do as well as they could. That's life. People have good and bad days.

What you hope is that the girls who don't excel, don't give up. What you hope is that a well-meaning someone doesn't say, 'What you should have done is...' or 'If only you had done this...'

There's an old Harry Chapin song 'Mr. Tanner' about a small town cleaner who sings all the while he works. He loves to sing. Tanner's a baritone with a voice so fine that strangers tell him he should go to New York and sing professionally. After a while, he does. He closes his shop, takes his life savings, rents a concert hall, stands on a stage and sings his heart out. The next day in the papers, the critics destroy him. Tanner returns home and goes back to cleaning.

And he never sings again. 

'Music was his life it was not his livelihood.And it made him feel so happy and it made him feel so good. And he sang from his heart. And he sang from his soul. He did not know how well he sang, it just made him whole.’

It made him whole. That's the important thing. When you give up what you love to do, you give up part of yourself. A friend used to play the trombone every night after work because making music made HIM whole. But he quit because he felt he wasn't 'good enough.'

Good enough is an imposed standard. It robs us of talent, modest or grand. And talent is an inherent gift to be accepted and used, never  denied.