A Friendly World

My son, whom my wife and I have homeschooled for the last five years, turned eighteen this winter and now talks frequently about how worried he is about his future. We – my wife, my son, and I – would all have preferred it if he could have graduated from public high school this spring. The known, after all, is always less unsettling than the unknown. But that was not our path. It became clear that he could no more have stayed in traditional schools than I could enjoy the life of a door-to-door salesman. So here we are. Fortunately, I’m a writer who dropped out of college, which means I too have taken a somewhat less traditional path. I have had to make peace with the uncertainty of writing so that I could enjoy the freedom it affords me. This is not always so easy. There are times I envy my friends with careers that bring them into an office every day and for which they receive a weekly paycheck. I don’t envy them for long, however. I can’t pretend I could live any life other than the one I am living now. So here I am.

The biggest obstacle my son faces, however, has less to do with having been homeschooled than with his belief that the world is an unfriendly place. It is an odd perception, since for years I have watched the world of strangers treat him with staggering kindness. No matter. His experiences in school, where he was asked, for perfectly understandable reasons, to do things he wasn’t interested in doing, left him with the idea that to grow up and get a job and live an adult life would be school ten-fold – endless days of doing what he has to rather than doing what he wants to. As is always the case with these nightmare ideas, it is other people who will require him to live this life he doesn’t want to lead.

And so, as our academic schooling winds down, I have come to understand that my job as his father is to help him see the world as the friendly place it has always been. It is a good lesson for a writer to learn again and again. I cannot write for an unfriendly world of strangers whose reading desires I must somehow guess correctly in the privacy of my workroom. All I can know for sure are my creative desires, the guidance of my imagination and curiosity, whom I have followed faithfully now for these many years. How certain the future becomes the moment I remember that this is all I have ever needed to know.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual and group coaching.