Self-Reliance

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Author of "Self-Reliance"

(Relying on Wikipedia)

My father was a big, powerful, hardworking man of little education and no particular interest in the life of the mind. He drove a truck to pay his bills but didn't pay many of mine when I was growing up because he and my mother had separated. He therefore had little influence on me but once recounted how he had saved my life when I was about a year old by getting me off the baby formula, which I couldn't keep down, and starting me on regular food.

He said that he had looked at me, weak and skinny, and told my mother, "I believe that boy's starvin' to death."

He threw out the formula and scrambled some eggs, which I quickly ate while crying for more. After that, they fed me and fed me until I grew fat ... not obese, but fat in the way that babies should be. Apparently, I liked eating because I would eat and eat and eat and eat until I couldn't swallow any more but would grab the table and bawl for still more food if anyone tried to take me from my meal.

I suppose, then, that I should feel grateful to my father for making his lifesaving decision to change my diet ... except that I don't recall the incident, so any gratitude on my part will have to remain abstract.

On the other hand, I do recall his method of toughening me up for life and making sure that I became self-reliant. Only five years old, I was playing barefoot outside with other boys while my father stood talking to some neighbors who were laying concrete for their patio. A dump truck parked in their driveway contained sand for the cement mix, and as the day grew progressively hotter with the sun climbing ever higher in the sky, heating the streets, the sidewalks, the driveway, the ground, and the sand in the dump truck where I happened to be playing, the soles of my feet started to burn.

I climbed down from the truck, burning my feet even more on its hot metal, and ran to my father, asking him to pick me up. He refused.

"But my feet are burning," I told him, hopping first on one foot and then on the other.

"Go home, put some shoes on," he retorted, not offering to help.

I went, running alone from shade to shade, until I reached our empty house, where I rinsed my feet with cold water to quench the fire...

I asked nothing of my father after that, which was perhaps his intention, and I grew up without his influence, which was perhaps not his intention.

Last Saturday, my wife and I took our kids swimming at some pools here in Seoul, and the day grew fairly hot ... for Korea, anyway. I don't like the sun, so I stayed under our umbrella most of the time, reading, but my turn eventually came to swim with my seven-year-old son. As we were walking to the pool, I noticed that the concrete was getting a bit hot, and I asked my son if his feet were burning. He said yes, so I picked him up and told him the story of my burning feet.

Later that evening, my wife and I decided to treat the kids to a meal in a restaurant. As reward for my own good-parenting behavior and to quench my powerful thirst, I received a pitcher of ice-cold beer along with a deep-frozen, frosty mug.

I had just reached the bottom that pitcher when my son began telling my wife the burning-feet anecdote. After he had finished, he asked, "Why did the bad man marry the good woman?"

He had never met my father, and knew only this 'bad' story, but he had met his grandmother and liked her. Hence, his question.

My wife -- who had met my father on what, ultimately, became his deathbed -- began to explain that he wasn't a bad man, just a tough man. She asked for my confirmation, but I found myself unable to speak ... for a couple of long minutes. When I could talk again, I spoke of other things and said nothing about my silence until Sunday afternoon, when I reminded my wife of the incident.

"Ironically," I remarked after we had discussed my father, "his refusal to help me did have the effect that he wanted, in part. It toughened me up and made me more self-reliant ... but it left him without much positive influence on me. I wouldn't recommend his approach."

My son can become self-reliant when he's grown old enough to understand what self-reliance truly means, namely, when he's old enough to read and understand Emerson: "Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet."

Even if the ground does get a bit hot sometimes...