Chapter 44: Old Man of the Mountain.
My mom gave me a rocking chair when I was pregnant with our first child. It was a rocker that she refinished beautifully after she was done using it. Before then it was the rocker she sat and nursed all three of us girls in. Not only is it a beautiful chair, it also has great sentimental value. On the wooden headpiece of it is a carving of “The Old Man of the Mountain”, a carving that resembles a man’s old face in the wind. I have kept this rocker and treasure it. I treasure more the parents who rocked my sisters and me in this chair.
Having a mentor in life is so helpful to making life easier and better. Utilizing the wisdom of others and learning from their lives makes our lives easier by hopefully not making the same mistakes they did or using their knowledge to make things better. Sometimes your mentor may be someone who you are related to, other times it may be someone you have met professionally or elsewhere in life. I know many people who take it upon themselves to volunteer to be a mentor for others. While this is wonderful and very kind, I believe that it is best when the mentor does it naturally without being “assigned” a person to mentor. It is helpful when you, as an instructor, find someone to whom you would like to be mentored by and approach them in this endeavour.
For me, my parents are my mentors. They are patient and kind yet firm with high expectations. Maybe it comes from hours of rocking us while reading that taught them to be patient and teachers to us, or maybe it is simply ingrained in their nature. Looking back over the years, my parents were always taking in people who needed friends and helping them through a certain situation. I’m not always sure the people they were helping even knew they were being guided by my parents’ patience and love. After a few months or years, the person would acquire the skills necessary to move ahead in life and would go and live that life to the fullest and a new one would come along.
The carving on my rocking chair is full of curves and changes. The chair itself has gone through changes. My mom refinished it beautifully. A friend of Mr. MDMM and mine broke it terribly. We repaired it to the best of our abilities. The chair tells its own story. A mentor in life accepts you the way you are and tries to help guide and nurture your learning process. They do not want to tear you apart and start over, but instead, want to support and build you up. Just as my poor chair was broken apart, it was able to be repaired for use. Just as we as humans are sometimes broken down, we can be repaired by a master craftsman (God) with the help of other humans to become the best we can be with a story to tell others.
Comments