The Late Bloomer

It turned out that I was a late bloomer. That’s not the way I wanted it. I wanted to be a prodigy. My father was impressed with Mozart’s genius. There was a family story I grew up with. I was maybe two years old, and my grandpa, my father’s father, was dying. He was lying in a bed in my aunt’s living room, and I was playing with my baby puzzles – puzzles with only five or six pieces – on the floor. I dumped three puzzles out at once, mixed them around, and then assembled them. Grandpa was impressed. According to my mother, he thought I was a genius. That’s as close as I got to being a prodigy.

After that, I was an underachiever. Mr. Redmond, my high school guidance counselor, told me so. And I believed him, made sure he was right. In college, an “A” on a midterm was enough to coast for the rest of the semester. I felt bad about underachieving although I hadn’t done bad for a social worker in mental health. Of course, I hadn’t gone to medical school. Medical school was not for underachievers.

I didn’t take any comfort from the fact that my father was an underachiever. Everyone said he was such a talented artist: “What a pity!” He died in his mid-sixties. I had just turned thirty. Twenty-seven years later years later, our daughter, Morri, was born. I became a father for the first time. My life was moving in a new direction. I gave up my private psychotherapy practice. Seeing private patients in the evenings and on Saturday mornings, I figured I’d never get to see Morri. That winter, my Zen teacher, Bernie Glassman, made me a “Dharma Holder,” indicating that he expected – sometime in the future – to make me a Zen teacher. Another surprise. A year later, I grabbed an opportunity for early retirement. More surprises. Where would my peacemaker path take me? I thought about my father and worried about how much time I had. How many years would I have to watch Morri growing up?

The answer evolved slowly. It was another nine years before Bernie finally made me a Sensei, a Zen teacher, and that same year, we opened our first charter school. I was outliving my dad. Over the next twelve years we opened three more schools. As I received recognition for our achievements, I began to think of myself as a late bloomer. “Late bloomer” felt good.

I look back now on that high school moment and that guidance counselor who now appears as one of the great villains of my life: What if he had told me that I was a “late bloomer” rather than an “underachiever”?

Labels are so powerful, but we don’t see them for what they are, mental constructs which we attach to our experience, not our experience, not what is happening. And then we stop reacting to our direct experience and begin to react instead to our labels, whether we invented these labels for ourselves or they were put on us by others. How did Mr. Redmond get so much power? Sad to say, I gave it to him. And I didn’t have to.