On Practical Education

I was ten years old the day I first found my first bosom friend among the girls of my school, and the bonds of our friendship grew so firm that she came to hold the highest place in my heart. Being possessive by nature, I found myself fiercely jealous of everything she cared for, if it was something in which I had no share. Nor did I hide from her what I felt; this troubled her, and she grew weary of it.

My mother perceived what I was betraying. One day we were watching some newly hatched chicks and admiring them, and I lifted one of them in my hand and tightened my grip on it until it nearly suffocated. It struggled to slip from my grasp — and before long it did.

My mother said, as though paying no heed to what had happened: "If you tighten your grip on a newborn chick, its desire to escape you grows. Be gentle in holding it."

When I took the second chick in my open palm, it settled down and rested easy with me, and my mother said, passing her hand over its feathers: "Do you know, my daughter, that people are like chicks? The more eager we are to bind those we love, the more eager they grow to seek release and freedom. If you are gentle in your care for them, they will feel from you no oppression and no weariness."

The lesson bore its fruit. And though I sometimes feel jealousy taking hold of me, the image of the chick resting content in my open palm has kept me from showing what seethes within me.

*

I was, like the other young devils of my age, forever falling into scrapes of no happy ending, and then running to my mother to rescue me from them. My mother, however, preferred to see me solve for myself the problems I fell into. I could not understand why she refused to help me — until the day came when I saw a butterfly's cocoon pulsing and stirring. I cried out with joy at what I expected to see, and hurried to the cocoon, slitting it open with my penknife so as to make it easier for the butterfly to come out. And there was my mother, watching what I did. When I had slit the cocoon open and found that the butterfly could not fly, a sharp disappointment came over me — and that was what moved my mother to speak. She said:

"My son, the butterfly's struggle has a purpose — to enable it to gain the strength that will let it soar above the world in which it once crawled. You did not allow it to complete its strength, and here it is, able neither to walk nor to fly. And such is the case with children too. If a boy like you finds someone to solve all his problems for him, he is robbed of the opportunity that allows him to grow. And every struggle in life whose depths we brave strengthens our capacity to meet the struggle that comes after it."