Clarity for Teachers: Day 6

‘Find people who make it easier to be clear and spend your time with them.’

Today’s advice has me thinking again about what it was like to be young — late teens, early twenties. At the time it seemed like there were others who were good at being that age, but in hindsight I suspect that most of us were just varying shades of lost. But when I think of those years, I remember how certain encounters would stand out like islands of clarity in the fog.

Two evenings of conversations in an Amsterdam hostel. A man who gave me a lift when I was hitching in Finland, north of the Arctic circle, headed towards the Norwegian border. An afternoon on the banks of the River Tees.

These were encounters in which I seemed to know who I was and to have something to say for myself, conversations in which my words didn’t embarrass me the moment they left my mouth. (There were books I read that had a similar effect — and, more rarely, things I wrote that seemed to come from this place, to come from a person I hardly knew how to be yet.)

The contrast between these encounters and the rest of life could be painful, lending them an unhelpful intensity. It was easy to load too much onto a person who could bring out all this: to need that person because I needed to be the person I seemed capable of being when we were together. (No wonder I wrote so many songs in those years…)

Later, I learned that isn’t how it works. Yes, someone can give you a glimpse a place within yourself that you don’t yet know how to get to — but that doesn’t make it their role to help you get there.

So now I think about this advice, about the people who make it easier to be clear, and after carrying it with me all day, I make a little room at day’s end for my gratitude towards all the people I’ve known of whom that was true — especially the ones I met in the early going. There’s gratitude, too, for how far the journey has taken me since then, how much I’ve learned, and how much more at ease I feel these days with all that I still have to learn.

Västerås, 9 March, 2020

This is the sixth in a series of commentaries on ‘A teacher’s advice on how to be clear’, Charlie Davies’s reworking of the 1000-year-old Buddhist text, ‘Advice from Atisha’s Heart’. I’m writing these as I take part in Clarity for Teachers, a course that Charlie is leading. You can find out more on the How To Be Clear website.