Last night I decided to binge watch the new season of Chef’s
Table. It is one of my favorite streaming series. Not just because I love food
and cooking, but also because I always manage to glean some small life wisdom from
it as I watch. This time was no different. While I watched the first episode
that featured the Korean Buddhist Monk Jeong Kwan, she said something while being
interviewed that touched me in a strange place and I had resonance with its
sentiment. She said, “I thank my parents for their energy and virtue. They let
me become who I am.” What she said struck me because you usually hear people
say “I thank my parents for helping me become who I am” or “I thank my parents
for all they did to support who I have become.” But she was very conscious in
saying that her parents had allowed her to become who she was always determined
to be.
You see when she was a young child about 8 yrs old, she told
her father that she would never marry when he told her that cooking would help
her find a good husband. She said she would live alone on a mountain in the
woods. That she would be free. She said her father was crestfallen and cried and
told her “I will allow you to do that. But it makes me sad that someone so
young would feel that way.” When her mother died suddenly when she was 17 she
fled her grief by going to the hermitage. She asked to be a monk and they took
her in, but after only a few weeks she wrote to her father and asked him to
come and get her, and he came. But by the time he arrived to take her back
home, she realized she didn’t really want to leave, she just wanted to say goodbye
to her father and siblings because she never had. He left her there to live her
monk’s existence, on a mountain in the woods, just like she had said she would when
she was 8. He returned to visit with her about a month or so before he died. At
age 70 he saw and ate the beautiful temple food that she made for the other
monks and visitors to the temple. He saw the life of beauty and peace she lived
there in the hermitage. He stayed with her for about a month and then offered
her the simple praise for her monk’s life by telling her she had chosen well
and bowing to her 3 times (a high honor in their culture) and went back home.
He died a week later. She expressed gratitude for her mother’s sacrifice of
mercy (the way she sees the death of her mother) that drove her to the
hermitage and her father’s ability to let her go not once, but twice. And she prayed
that they would be happy in the next life.
This story struck me because this woman decided when she was
a girl, before she was clear on what a monk even was, that it was her path to
the free life she wanted to live. It is not the one that either of her parents would
have wished for her. I’m sure they dreamed of a good marriage for her and many grandchildren.
But they allowed her to follow her course despite their own desires. And then I
realized that I too had been given that same gift
My parents are traditional Caribbean American people. I’m
sure they’d have rather I had chosen a stable profession and a more traditional
life than the one I’ve spent chasing this artist’s dream. But they forwent
their own desires and allowed me to follow my course and live my life on my own
terms. While my father was driving me to the bus station so I could go back to
Atlanta from my last visit home that I made in June of 2002 before he passed, he asked
me a few things about my life. General questions about work and relationships.
I answered some questions and skirted around others. And then he looked at me and asked, “Are you
happy?” I said, “yes daddy, I am.” And he said in return, “well that’s all that
matters.” It was the last face to face conversation I would have with my dad.
That moment with my dad as well as the one recounted by the
monk Jeong Kwan’s with her father revealed to me what sweet torture parenting
must be. I mean to be a good parent you must impart all the wisdom you have
gathered from living into these other beings who will one day chart a course of
their own that may be TOTALLY contrary to anything that you have imagined. And
you must trust that their course will be good for and to them even if it makes absolutely
no sense to you. It’s not something you think about often if you are not a
parent. And truthfully, if you are the child of good parents you don’t think of
it much either. It just seems like the natural order of things; what is
supposed to happen. But so many people are living lives that were never meant
to be there’s because they are living a parent’s expectation instead of their
heart's desire. So, I am grateful for the gift that both my parents gave me. The
gift to be who I am in the world, even when they didn’t always agree or
understand it. And when I win my first award for any of these artistic
endeavors I am still pursuing (and I will), I will make sure to phrase my thank
you to them as Jeong Kwan did. Because acknowledging that they “let me become who
I am” encompasses all the sacrifice, all the support AND the sweet torture of
letting go that every good parent knows. It is now for me the highest level of
praise from child to parent. And if I ever have any of my own, I will do my
best to earn this one simple sentiment from them.
Yep, all that from an episode of Chef’s Table. LOL
