With Each Generation, the Process of Letting Go Comes Full Cycle
Sam Venable
Department of Irony
This one is for mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts, uncles and other adults everywhere: If parting is sweet sorrow, there is sugared woe aplenty whenever and wherever school bells begin to ring. Here is a time for long hugs and tearful goodbyes.
Any mom or dad with sentiment in their blood can attest to this truth. And it doesn’t matter if the fruit of their loins is entering kindergarten down the street or graduate school halfway around the globe.
Where did the years go? How could these babies have been wearing diapers only last week, yet be moving into a college dorm the day after tomorrow?
This process isn’t the sole purview of education, of course. Maybe your offspring have just joined the military. Or perhaps they’ve accepted a job that will take them two time zones away, rarely to return except on holiday respite. The parting is equally as sweet and sorrowful as any other.
Ironically, a man who had no children of his own captured this moment in some of the most moving verse you’ll ever read.
Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) was a Lebanese-American painter, writer, poet and philosopher. His 26-chapter work, The Prophet, ruminated on various facets of the human experience. Released in 1923, this book has never been out of print. It has been translated into more than 100 languages. I suspect its fourth chapter, titled “On Children,” has played a major role in the publication’s success.
My prescient mother, who watched her own brood of four take wing, shared “On Children” with Mary Ann and me more than 30 years ago when our teen-aged son Clay flew the nest in a literal sense: on a 727, bound for a summer job in Yellowstone National Park.
We found great comfort in the words, then and now, and emailed them to Clay and his wife Kim when their own teenagers hit the road on adventures this summer: one to the Minnesota-Canada border, the other to the Florida Keys.
Here is part of Gibran’s text: “(Children) are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams…for life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer’s hands be for gladness; for even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.”
It’s the story of life. One generation yields to the next. The same bonds you broke will one day be shorn from you. ’Twas ever thus; ’twill ever be.
Sam Venable is an author, comedic entertainer, and humor columnist for the Knoxville (TN) News Sentinel. His latest book is “The Joke’s on YOU! (All I Did Was Clean Out My Files).” He may be reached at sam.venable@outlook.com.