Hamlet Reminds Me of My Mentor
“Shakespeare asked in Hamlet: ‘To be or not to be?’…the answer is to become. To become the beautiful person you are and should be.”
When I was 24 and my world was collapsing around me, a mentor came into my life. It was the most fortunate timing that had an impact that redirected the course that I was on into one that has led me to a different life than the one I might have had.
His name was Mike McConnell. He was the polar opposite of what I would have ever conceived would be a mentor for me. He was a big, burly, crusty old Camel non-filtered smoking biker who read Jean Paul Sarte and quoted William Blake. And, when I first met him, I couldn’t stand him. Probably because, in my mind, we didn’t hit it off at all. I was in a place where I was seeking help and support, and I brought some music tapes with me to the facility. He told me that I could keep the tapes, but not the player, if I could figure out how to play them. He said this as he mischievously put one of the tapes up to the side of his head and grinned. I thought, ”What a dick! Who is this joker?”
I think this is common among those of us who have had people we need to come into our lives at times when we are in crisis. It isn’t what we expect or imagine, but, it is what is needed and vital.
Funny thing was that, years later, when I related to him that I couldn’t stand him when we first met, he replied that he had always liked me. I guess he saw what I really was, and could be, and the rest of what he saw was just where I was at the moment, including my struggling.
I remember at times calling him up and just ranting and raving about this or that. He would just chuckle or laugh, which pissed me off even more. There I was opening my heart, being vulnerable about the injustices that the world was perpetrating against me, and he was just laughing at it all. He would say “Yeah, right on, get all of that out of your system. There you go, now you’re feeling and dealing with it.” It was only years later that I looked back on those incidents and realized that he was right, and was helping me to get back to life, rather than continuing down a dark road into the abyss.
There were other times when he would say things that I just didn’t get until much later, if at all. He was a Yoda before that popular archetype was mainstream. He would talk about Sarte’s “Being and Nothingness”, postulating on the consciousness of consciousness, and how diving into these rabbit holes of thought was much like the act of intercourse…a metaphor that I never figured out.
The Shakespeare quote answer “to become” was yet another. At that time and place where I was, where my mind was, where the world had me, I could only manage to scrunch up my eyes and squint at him, then walk away shaking my head. Later, the amazing depth and insight of his statement to me still has a hold on me. And, like a beacon guiding the way home for a storm-tossed boat, it continues helping to center and guide me.
I think mentors are important. It doesn’t matter what stage of life you’re at when you meet them. It doesn’t have to be when you are in crisis, though many times that is when they appear. It isn’t only a young person thing either. Even those in advanced years sometimes look for a mentor. I am in the twilight of my career, and still seek out mentors to guide and inspire me. Maybe it is because a mentor can feel like a parent figure in our lives when we feel like a child who has lost their way, or think we know everything, but don’t — or just need to get a model of behavior to follow.
Mike McConnell died of lung cancer quite a while ago.
He called me up a couple of months before he passed away. I had just come back from living in Japan and hadn’t talked to him for ages. I really missed the whole point of the call. He told me about his diagnosis and was calling me to tell me how much I meant to him. My head was not in touch with the reality of the situation, and I remarked that we would stay more in touch, and I would call him soon.
Only, later, after I heard that he had passed, did I realize that this was the last time that I would talk with him, and he was giving me one last gift and insight…this man, who at the beginning totally rubbed me the wrong way, but then became a predominant force that put me back together and on the right path, was letting me know that he loved and cared for me. This mentor was, even up to the end, giving much-needed guidance to his mentee. Even if the lesson took me time to fully accept and embrace. I finally got it.
