Self-help, spirituality, career success books can be way too clean, too perky, can’t they? Where are the books for the unshowered, tumult-surfing, hung-over, indebted, overfed? Beautiful parenting and teaching??!*?#!*# Uhhhg!

Some people write books and speak in public like they have had clean, charmed, perpetually motivated lives. In the sharpest possible contrast to them is the group that I used to pass on my way to teach school every day who slept against a wall, between some cars next to an abandoned building.  I would wait at the stoplight and watch them emerge in the morning sun, no place to get a glass of water, sunk under whatever they had drunk/smoked/shot from the night before and from the decades before. Many days I felt so bad (paying a high price to learn to teach at my quite tough school) that I could easily imagine myself stumbling headlong through my life to end with them. Self-help, spirituality, success writers, and the always clean and successful looking would stumble right into that lot as well with enough bad luck, and no help.

The blizzard of theories about human dysfunction, potential, psychology, neuroscience distract us from the simple balance of how much good and bad have been poured into a life. The quality of the teaching, counseling, parenting you do depends just on what’s been poured into your life: e.g. the kindness and inspiration vs. the rage, despair and senselessness that’s come to you: again the simple balance.

I would watch the people in the vacant lot on my way to teach and wonder which of my students would end up there. I’d watch them pour hideous cheap wines into themselves for breakfast. If enough was good in my life, I would decide to pour some SCHOOL into my kids that day. My wonderful young people in that sleeping out there? NOT IN THIS LIFE!!!. So I would roar into class and pour hope into my students, knowing that only luck, support and uplifting influences, kept me out of that alley, knowing that those things were mighty.

Those clean-clean smiling successful people on TV can make it seem like the rest of us are from a lower order, but they have days of feeling just as bad as any of our worst days. The most successful people in history found resources to pour into their lives to keep their balance tipped to the positive side. We can always pour more good into, and subsequently see more good in our lives, see the “majesty” all around us. We can spread it to our children, our students, our clients, and lift the balance in our lives towards the best work that has ever been done.

Pour into your life the stories of Archbishop Tutu who endured years of looking at his children’s faces, after they had received telephoned death threats against him at the height of the apartheid struggle. He built his faith, persevered and became a towering spiritual inspiration. , Women from uncountable generations of huge families receive Grameen Bank micro loans and consulting support, and they decide that just one or two children will be fine. They’re so excited about their business futures that they remove themselves from the seemingly unstoppable cycle of overpopulation. Grameen and its founder Muhammad Yunus have also turned 100,000 beggars into loan-repaying businesspeople. Frederick Douglass carried out a one man challenge to “whites only” seating, 120 years before Rosa Parks. He would be beaten out of his seat by as many as it took, proceed to his next speaking engagement, and present with power and eloquence. All of these stories have mighty lessons for teachers, counselors and parents in our beautiful work.

Studying the successes and profound personal struggles of those who have bettered our world the most can allow us to ask for

more profound help,

more often,

more honestly.

Knowing their struggles takes the shame out of our struggles.  Sydney Poitier’s battle with self-loathing; Churchill’s alcoholism and months-long bouts of depression; Gandhi’s shame and insecurity; Jane Addams’ arrogance, MLK’s infidelity, Darwin’s tortured grief for his daughter — in the face of their incredible qualities and achievements– show us the reality of being a decent person in our still-evolving human species. With your gifts and your dreams: each of your struggles merits all the support, healing, and training necessary to overcome it.

There are painful waters all around us that we can drown ourselves in, oceans of numbness and distraction that take us away from the clients and youth that depend on us.  Instead we can pour into ourselves true histories of successful struggle that technology has made more accessible than ever before, along with the world’s most uplifting singing, poetry, literature, public speaking etc.  Along with that we can open our eyes to the “bright blessed days and dark sacred nights,” open our souls to the “majesty all around us” and shine that into troubled schools, families and lives.

(The quoted lyrics “The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night” were created by Bob Thiele and George David Weiss and first recorded by Louis Armstrong: Our great thanks go out to them for such beauty.)