The Better Influence Against The Odds

"No man is an island, entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main."
John Donne c. 1624

Donne echoes the idea that individuals (unless forever isolated) come into contact with manifold influences, which alongside their genetic makeup, will determine the course of their lives. We rub off on one another, intentionally or not, leave a mark, and morph continually into altered, for better or worse, beings.

As parents we are expected to provide a clear reference point for what is right and what isn't for our children, sometimes it seems irrespective of their age and personalities. This would include everything from the mundane -- like table manners -- to the stuff of which character is made -- like optimism, grit and perseverance. We are expected to prepare them for the "future," for the great unknown.

Not only is this expected. Notably, we put this burden on ourselves, we live the pressure of having to know how to receive, process, and then act in any and all situations, present, impending, or completely hypothetical and unforeseen. It keeps us up at night, makes us crazy. But what happens when the answers that are built into our life circumstances seem inept, unsatisfactory, even dangerous. How do we teach our kids to surmount challenges that we are unsure of how to surmount ourselves, or better yet, haven't even fathomed?

I recently saw "Salma," a film titled after its main protagonist and subject -- a woman poet, who having grown up in a decidedly conservative cultural setting in Tamil, India, found a way (with determination and much serendipitous help from relatives and beyond) to fulfill her life's calling, despite otherwise impossible circumstances. In this particular locale of the world, upon getting their period,  girls are sequestered in basements with little to no view to the outside world until they are married off. Henceforth, they are neither encouraged, nor allowed to attend school. The isolation in which Salma found herself intensified her need to connect with the outside world. She accomplished this through her now of  global renown poetry.

Besides her writing, Salma has welcomed another calling, of reaching out to women in her community and encouraging them to pursue an education against the heavily-stacked odds. She visits homes to lend an ear to each woman's tale of adolescence and marriage and motherhood thereafter. As a film viewer, you are introduced to the same story with varying characters: "I went to school, I got my period, I was forbidden to go to school, and I was married." 

That is, until we are in what appears to be a relatively poorer home of a mother, who shares how instead of submitting to the norm, she opted to send her daughter to the nearby village, postulating the need for continued education. One might infer that this decision came from an already better-educated, enlightened mind, if you will. Instead, the woman admitted she herself had never gone to school. It left me in awe of her foresight and fortitude to withstand what must have been a constant flow of badgering glances and remarks. What prompted her to choose such an uneasy road? Why would she deem education to be important enough of a goal to risk social isolation, when she herself had never experienced the benefits of education?

There are people around us who possess a combination of natural intelligence, intuition, and drive, that are particularly attuned to picking up the cues of impending change around them. Just as they are daring, so are they inspired and encouraged by indirect influences of people of similar make. Just as Salma, the poet, was not truly a self-made story of success, so did not this mother raise her daughter in a vacuum of influences. She planned to do better, inspired by Salma, probably having been all too keenly aware of her own impossible odds. But never fully surrendering to her set of life circumstances. She is one of those of whom we call "a natural born leader," because they never got a chance to lead a school, a company, a country, but nevertheless guided us to a new, augmented understanding of the world. 

In this family's case taking a chance didn't pan out. Her daughter suffered from the  extended separation to the extent that she ended her life. She set herself ablaze, the last horrific memory her mom would ever have of her. I can't imagine the heartache of losing your only child. However, I couldn't help but wonder, were this woman to have another child, would she insist on her continuing her education again? She'd already done one heroic thing, and lost everything. Could she do it again? 

There are, of course, plenty of other more fortunate examples of the same kind of foresight. I recently met Anita Hill at a showing of Frieda Mock's new documentary "Anita: Speaking Truth to Power." During the Q&A, Anita Hill  mentioned that her mother placed a high value on education and was a driving force in her continued education. Born in the 1950s to black parents with unfinished high school careers, farmers from a small Oklahoma community, Hill did not fall on the path of a distinguished legal, academic, and advocacy career by happenstance.

In her book "Re-Imagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home" she zeroes in on the connection between her personal and professional accomplishments and her family upbringing. Hill speculates with a fair dose of certainty that despite her relative lack of formal education, her mother had taught her the value of education, hard work and independence. In Anita Hill's memory Erma Hill, her mother, displayed significant prowess "in the areas of human and fiscal resources." Erma had managed a farm and raised 13 educated and self-reliant children  in partnership with  her husband starting with the mid-1920s onwards, a time beseeched by racial and, slightly less obvious, gender segregation. Even though she didn't have an opportunity to transfer her skills onto a larger stage, she was palpably aware of the changing current of the social getup, and knew instinctively that her children would benefit from an expansion of both their intellectual and geographical domain. She sent them off to study, where she thought they'd have a fair shot at a different life. It is due, at least in part, to this awareness and adherence to a higher standard of self-discipline that Anita Hill ended up pursuing what can be qualified as a socially responsible and remarkable career.

It is an extraordinary feat to imagine a life drastically different from your own; a life that deviates or completely departs from your particular set of circumstances. The large majority of us are capable of such change, but we have to feel the hunger, we had to have either been born with it, or it had to have been instilled and nurtured in us. Plus, there had to be a confluence of external conditions, including someone to believe in and influence you into the direction you already long to go.

On the opposite end of this spectrum are generations of individuals who subsist on social welfare. Adept at what may be deemed as manipulating this intricate system of gives and takes, some people appear to be content with what life, or the state, has allotted them, in the very least,  because they don't seem bent on rising above their dependence. If you talked to the guy making my terrace door screen, you'd find out that he believes this dependence is an entrenched mode of thinking, akin to slavery. It happens to be a sure-proof way of keeping the lowest-income groups from stirring the pot, and becoming harbingers of real social change. 

When you are born in depravity, of the financial, social, and worst of all, intellectual kind, and your parents and everyone else around you genuinely believe that there is no way out, it will rub off, it will force you into a mindset of complacency, acquiescence, and general despair. There are no dreams to be had, or empowerment on a very basic level to be sought. However, if you are lucky enough to see, hear, feel, think something different, something that would feed you from the inside out, you are likely to start on a path of personal growth, which who's to say where it's going to lead you? Imagine that for yourself, for your children, and dare I say it ... for the lives of others.