Today is my fiftieth birthday. I’ve been a school librarian for twenty of
those years and a writer for a lot longer than that. My first multi-volume epic was written at age
nine, the story of a boy who created a planet by firing a square stone out of
his sling shot so hard it fell into the orbit of a distant star and formed the
planet Cuberon, the denizens of which fought an eons-spanning war against the rapacious
Lizard Men. A librarian is a kind of
story-teller, too, and also a custodian of stories. Stories echo through time and offer deep
insights into what changes about us.
As a
custodian, especially if you work with children, you hear a lot (from parents)
about the messages some older stories inadvertently give us, holdovers of
obsolete thought, bad ideas from before we changed. There’s an urge to make those ideas
disappear, at the cost the entire story they're embedded
in. But those stories are an opportunity to
educate people in how we’ve grown.
Surely there’s no more important lesson for a child than that we can evolve
from what we were.
It’s not as
though we have reached the pinnacle of our enlightenment, not as though there
are no ideas we hold true now that people down the line won’t read about and think
us monsters. Maybe every time someone in
the future reads about one of us using a phone, they will think about the
enslavement of children in the Congo who mine for cobalt, a component crucial
to our smart phones. We text away
without much thought of that, just like someone long ago took certain things
for granted, until something cast a light on it. Usually a book.
Librarian
or not, something else you hear a lot about these days is the bad things
people have done in their lives. Bad behavior
they’ve exhibited, bad words they’ve spoken which, some contend, should be
grounds for dismissal, for shunning. But
it doesn’t take that much work to see what their record shows:
do they continue to act this way, hurt people around them, propagate bad
ideas? Or has their trajectory been
upwards, do they appear to be improving, do they regret what they’ve done and
are they doing predominantly good things?
There’s an
urge to sweep away a person’s present along with their past, just as we seek
sometimes to banish the bad ideas of our past so our present won’t be infected
by them. As if we could ever have grown to
where we are without learning from the mistakes of our past.
Turning
fifty is an opportunity to think about growth.
Making the bad ideas of the past vanish, or suggesting that who we were
is a trap we’re stuck in forever, is to deny our greatest strength: our ability
to rise, to become better.
Thanks for
coming on this journey with me. As the
name of the website suggests, the journey is what it’s all about.
