Confession

For the year and a half before he died, my father was bedridden. I visited him often, both to cheer him up and because during that period we had most of the really good conversations that we ever had. He had always been a remote figure, completely wrapped up in making a success of his business, working eighty hours or more each week. Now his confinement opened him up and made him conversational, and I took pleasure in getting to know the man in whose house I had been raised.

One day I casually asked him if the years when he was first building up his business had been the happiest time of his life. "NO!" he thundered. "I hated those years! I was never cut out to be a businessman. I never enjoyed business, not even one day of it. I forced myself to do it every day." When I recovered from my shock, I asked him what he would rather have done with his time. "I wanted to be a musician," he said, "more than anything else I ever wanted in my life. I earned some money as a teenager, helping a neighbor get his crop harvested, and I spent it on a guitar. But my parents made me take that 'devil's instrument' off their farm. They forbade me to have anything to do with music. It was sinful to them. Back then, in the 1920s, young people had to do as they were told, and I obeyed. I gave up on music and eventually drifted into business. But I never liked it."

"But why, then, did you throw yourself into business with such eneregy?"

"Because I wanted to 'be somebody.' I wanted to do something with my life that I could be proud of."

Suddenly a mystery was solved: For all his confidence and hard-driving success, my father had always seemed to me a little hollow, a little lost. Now, to my horror, I saw why: all of that precious time, wasted in a business he hated. He had indeed "been somebody," but not somebody who he very much enjoyed being. I found myself feeling intense admiration for his fortitude, and pity for his loss.

Later as I was driving home, I realized that my father had just taught me a lesson about the use of self-discipline. All his adult life he had used heavy doses of discipline to keep his own nose to the grindstone of his business. But his effort of will had only served to keep him trapped. Many years earlier, when he was a boy, he had allowed his parents' disapproval to tarnish his personal dream. And so when he became a man and could do as he liked, he still did not pursue music. After all, his parents and other relatives would have known and disapproved. It was there that he really needed to discipline himself -- to defy everybody and do what he wanted. But like a lot of people, he wasn't prepared to do that.

I will never forget that conversation.