“TWOS AND THREES”
by Scott
William Petersen
A
Presentation to The
April 2, 2007
© 2007 by Scott W. Petersen All rights reserved
SUMMARY
From
the day that life begins, we learn by purposeful education, by trial and error
and by the lessons of serendipity that for better or worse forever shape our
lives and futures.
“TWO’S
AND THREE'S”
by
Scott William Petersen
The
April 2, 2007
How many times
did your mother, father, grandmother or grandfather say to you when you were
growing up “I hope you learned your lesson.”
In my case, it happened hundreds of times. Maybe thousands. Many of these admonitions came when I was
playing with firecrackers. My paper this
evening deals with the foundations of education and the influence of the poignant
lessons that we learn along life’s winding
and sometimes bumpy road. My paper is
also something of a confessional.
Ray Porter, the
noted writer and essayist, once said "The mind is not a furnished flat,
prestocked before occupation. . . but like a home put together piecemeal from .
. . acquisitions picked up bit by bit."
How true it is. We begin life
with a tabula rasa – a blank
slate. From our first moment following
birth, we begin acquiring knowledge
and life experience. We are immediately
beset by a whirlwind of new stimuli, all of which are sifted, filtered, analyzed
and stored in our brand new cerebral memory banks.
According to
researchers, our first two or three years are the most intense for the
acquisition of information and knowledge.
The information highway is operating at warp speed and we absorb faster
and more profoundly than we ever will in our later years. We are virtual sponges. Each of our five senses – sight, hearing, smell,
touch, taste – is working overtime to counsel us in the awful taste of broccoli,
the smell of our mother, a happy face, the chirping of birds, the warmth of a
summer sun or the nasty feeling of a full diaper. Children brought up in bilingual homes adapt
easily and fluidly to rapid-fire changes from English to Japanese or Farsi to
German to address their mother or father.
Those first years of life are truly our grandest years in our
individualized worlds of learning.
But then we get
older, bigger, heavier, hairier and “more mature.” The clock is running. We go to school, play sand lot baseball,
learn the three "R's," we "go steady" and learn about girls
(or boys), we ride bicycles, swim, take piano lessons and play baseball or
dance. We learn about humor, sarcasm,
joy, disappointment and biological urges.
We grow to read newspapers, novels, medical histories, financial
reports, case law or sales charts. And
we maintain much of what we read and hear though given the vagaries of
short-term memory, we soon forget most of the “details.” Each day starts fresh and each day we
hopefully learn and profit by our expanding arsenal of knowledge and by our diarial successes, mistakes, joys and
misfortunes.
As we age, our sensory
receptors enable us to acquire and store knowledge in compartmentalized chunks
which we are able to mentally segregate and call up as we need them. School offers courses in history, poetry,
literature, physics, algebra, French, public speaking, biology, music and
art. We learn social graces, the ways
and wiles of human interaction, the power of reasoning and ratiocination and we
acquire the tempering and sometimes countervailing qualities of love, anger,
prejudice, intolerance, mercy, faith, hope, charity and hatred. And then of course there are the seven deadly
sins. We deal with illness -- our own
and in those we love -- and we learn to adapt and to “roll with the punches.”
Most of us
become "well-rounded" in terms of our knowledge, our appreciation for
academic pursuits and our civil cultivation.
Most of us are inquisitive -- about picking up new bits of
information. We can talk about opera,
converse in French, do long division without
a calculator and scream an emotional “Touchdown” when Rex Grossman finally connects with Muhsin
Muhammad. And then there are the experiential
tips which we come to know and respect. We
learn to let sleeping dogs lie. We don’t
spit into the wind. We come in out of the rain. We don’t always judge a book by its cover.
"Learning"
also comes through a sixth sense –
intuition – the gradual and often age-related sense that tells us whether we
should take our foot off the gas pedal, when an offer sounds too good to be
true, whether the person we are meeting for the first time could be a friend or
whether we will enjoy a presentation on a Monday evening at The Chicago
Literary Club.
Our early
interaction with parents and siblings -- family dynamics --provides us with
values, religious orientation, work ethic and feelings of self worth. We learn social interaction and parenting by
osmosis. Families provide roots and they
give wings.
For most of us,
different emotions lie close to the surface while others lie buried in our
psyche. What are your hot buttons? What turns you on? What are your pet peeves? Our emotions will also play a role in our receptiveness
to education, our response to stimuli and how we respond to given situations.
Our early
education coupled with our developing aptitudes are typically overlayed upon
our individual genetic "hardwiring."
These factors combined with desire, opportunity and serendipity, press
us in different directions to a host of occupations and professions with a
further host of hobbies, interests and intellectual pursuits. But even so, nearly all of us have
intellectual predispositions which play a role in our receptiveness to
different educational disciplines.
Howard Gardner
in his classic book Frames of Mind identifies
seven dimensions of intelligences that all people have in varying degrees. There is the visual/spatial cognizance of a
Frank Lloyd Wright; musical genius like Amadeus Mozart; verbal/linguistic
creativity of an Ernest Hemingway; logical/mathematical skills of Einstein;
interpersonal strengths enjoyed by many politicians; intrapersonal abilities of
a Mother Theresa; and bodily/kinesthetic intelligence of Michael Jordan.
Most of us
accrue a modicum of each of these intelligences though most of us show strength
-- and weakness -- in one or more of these areas. For me, counting to twenty requires the removal
of my socks and shoes. Counting to forty
requires the removal of your socks
and shoes. We learn to act in a manner that ingratiates us to
other people and we try to be pleasing conservationalists.
But the nature
of erudition is more than just school and the accumulation and individualized
processing of facts. It is more than
intuition and the development of a value system. As Confucius wrote in his Analects, education is different from learning. "Education" is the simple storing
of knowledge in one's brain.
"Learning" is that process of "steering clear of
mistakes" in the quest to become perfect, to be in harmony with nature,
one's surroundings and one's colleagues.
As Confucius said, the truly educated man is one who acquires knowledge and learning. The educated man is the one who applies learning
and experience to his life.
Confucius concluded
that the purpose of education is to become a "sage." The owl.
The one who knows that he knows. One
of the chief characteristics of the sage is that by virtue of his learning and experience, he is able to confer
benefits on all the people of the world, assist them in all difficulties and
afford universal relief. One’s knowledge
coupled with life’s experiences will steer man onto the path of greater
good. (Analects). Thus the truly educated man can become a
"savior of the world." In this
way, Confucius as well as Socrates emphasize that there is a distinct moral quality that must attach to
education. Confucius believed that moral
cultivation was the most important aspect of education. Every man is equally endowed with the
potential to become a perfect gentleman even though not a sage. (Analects
6:19). And one's moral cultivation often
arrives in the form of lessons or life experience.
From our day of
birth, life moves on -- without a rewind button. As Omar Khayyam said in The Rubaiyat: “The moving finger writes; and having writ, moves on;
nor all your Piety nor Wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line Nor all
your tears wash out a word of it.” We
are reading, learning, studying, sorting and sifting information. And we are all subject to the tyranny of the
clock.
Ideally, we
learn and thrive by the obligatory march of education, experience and intuition
and family influence rather than by the compelling intervention of life’s
“curve balls.” But our moral compasses
are often influenced by these curve balls that come in the form of lessons.
And they can change our lives forever.
What are the “lessons”
you have learned in life. Are there any
curve balls or change ups that have influenced you to the point of changing an
aspect of your life? Big lessons? Tough lessons? Defining lessons? It’s more then the lesson I
learned from my grandmother “If you don’t
have something nice to say about someone, don’t say anything.”
And its more
than the transient though sometimes epiphenal lesson when we awaken on New
Year’s Day, head pounding thinking “I
have learned my lesson. I will never mix
scotch, wine, beer and Amaretto oh, and rum and pizza . . . again.” But then there are the stronger, more poignant,
occasionally harsh, lessons that can in an instant teach, mold and forever
change. Think back to the pivotal
moments in your life which set you on the path of what and who you are
today.
In Victor
Hugo’s sprawling novel Les Miserables,
Jean Valjean is sentenced to nineteen years in prison for the crime of stealing
bread. While in prison, Valjean devolves
into an angry and hardened criminal. He fights
and he always wins. No one can break his
will. He is finally released but forced
like all convicts to carry an identity card showing that he is a felon. Because of his status, no innkeeper will allow
him to pass the night and for four days he wanders the cold and inhospitable roads
until a kindly bishop shows mercy on him.
The bishop invites him in to an empty room where the bed is overly
comfortable.
Valjean lays in
bed until the bishop and his wife drift off to sleep. He then gets up, steals the couple’s
silverware and creeps off into the darkness.
The next
morning, three policemen knock on the bishop’s door with Valjean in handcuffs. They have caught him with the stolen silver
and are prepared to pitch him into prison for the rest of his life.
The bishop
responds in a way that no one, especially Valjean, had expected. “I’m delighted to see you! Had you forgotten I gave you the candlesticks
as well? They’re silver like the rest
and worth several hundred francs.” The
bishop turned to the police, “This man is
no thief. The silver was my gift to him.” The police look at each other, shake their
heads and depart. With the gendarmes gone,
the bishop gives the candlesticks to Valjean who was now speechless and
trembling. “Do not forget - never forget” whispers the bishop “that you have promised me to use the money
to make yourself an honest man.”
The power of
the bishop’s act, defying every human instinct changes Jean Valjean’s life
forever. A naked encounter with forgiveness melts his granite soul. It was an act of grace which changed a life forever.
Hugo’s novel is
a two edged parable on the lessons of . . . forgiveness. The detective Javert who knows no law but
hard justice stalks Valjean over two decades.
As Valjean is transformed by forgiveness, Javert is consumed by his
anger and a thirst for retribution.
When in a freak
episode Valjean saves Javert’s life - the hunted showing grace to the hunter -
Javert’s world crumbles. Unable to cope
with forgiveness, Javert jumps off a bridge into the
The act of the
bishop was a defining moment in the life of Jean Valjean. It was a lesson
that changed the entire course of his jaded life.
In 1946, a 39
year old Lieutenant Commander mustered out of the United States Navy. For two years he had been traveling the
war-torn South Pacific and in his spare time, he had written a story about his
travels. He thought it could be a story
that someone might buy so he sent out
queries to prospective publishers. He
was told the story was “not that good” but he tried again and again and again
and again and again. By his count, he
had literally hundreds of rejections from would-be publishers until finally one
small press agreed to print the work.
James Michener’s “Tales of the South Pacific” went on to international
acclaim and a Pulitzer Prize. Michener
said he learned the defining lesson of persistence. The more rejections he received, the more
determined he became to succeed. Just
think -- what if he had gotten tired and said “to heck with this” and pitched
the manuscript. Could anyone blame
him. But think how much poorer we would have been without him. How many of us would have quit after fifty
rejections? A hundred? The credo that Michener preached to students was
“write and write and write, no matter how
many rejections you get.”
It is like the defining
lesson that Winston Churchill learned from the Battle of Britain and shared
with the graduating class of the
Life gives us
all our share of lessons. It’s more than
just choices. Or bumps and knocks. Sometimes the lessons we learn creep on
little cat’s feet. Sometimes they are a
quick slap on the forehead. Some lessons
are well-deserved. Some are not and they
just “happen.” Fortuitous little
occurrences that change us. It can be little
bend of the branch life-changing occurrence.
Or it can be a burst of celestial light,
I consider
myself educated and experienced and imbued with a religious and value system inherited
from my family. But I have also had my
share of lessons that I believe have helped define who I am today. I pondered the most meaningful lessons of my
life and I came up with six. I will tell
you about five.
In the summer
of 1959, when I was twelve years old, I attended Boy Scout camp for the first
time. Twenty-three young men from Troop
23 occupied the "Wagon Wheel" camp site at beautiful
Until I went to
Scout camp, I had learned and on occasion used all manner of racial, religious
and ethnic slur and all variety of fiery language. Not because I knew what the words meant or that I intended to be malicious but
simply because it was what twelve year old boys in my neighborhood would do.
Pepper their young man chatter with what they thought were tough guy words.
One hot sunny summer
afternoon after a swim, I loped back into Wagon Wheel and headed for my tent.
At this point, the details blur but I remember seeing a fellow camper named
"Edwards" and I called him a "______." What prompted my
outburst - or the context - I don’t remember. All I know is that young Edwards
was on the receiving end of my sharply-delivered (and what today would be very politically incorrect) epithet. From the moment the words left my lips,
things began moving very quickly -- and with great and lasting clarity.
The Senior
Patrol Leader of our troop, Bill Bischoff (who was two years my senior) had heard my comment. Upon hearing my words, he shouted orders to a
half dozen other Scouts. They all grabbed me and dragged me shouting and
struggling to the wash stand. Bischoff grabbed a well-used cake of Lifebuoy’s
finest, wet it and pushed it into my mouth.
Then, with a
word from Bischoff, I was released and I raced back to my tent, crying,
spitting shards of soap and quite humiliated.
When I emerged from the tent a short time later, the incident had been
forgotten and no one spoke a word of what had transpired.
Bischoff was again my friend and so quite miraculously was Edwards.
From that
moment on, I have watched my mouth – in all manner of speaking. It is not because of the stifling censorship
of political correctness but because I learned a lesson. And if I ever became tempted to say or think
some epithet, I was propelled back to that hot
A second lesson
came about a year later. I was thirteen years old. My mother and father had purchased a small
manufacturing business (we made paper tubes). My father would typically rouse
me on Saturday mornings at 6:00 a.m. during the school year to go to work with
him. I would help clean, shovel coal into the boiler hopper and move boxes from
place to place. The curtain in my room
would be opened. The light would pour in
and my father would greet me with “the
day’s half gone. Time to rise and shine.” Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go.
One Saturday
morning, I was told to go work on an assembly line of gluing little paper caps
on little paper tubes. I worked side-by-side with the employees, mainly
Hispanics who spoke no English. After about an hour of this tedium, I got up
and walked back into the office and sat down. My father, who had been writing
into an account book, looked up at me – over the rims of his glasses. At about
that moment, the company foreman, Bill Pemberton, walked into the office.
"Scott, what are you doing here?"
"I’m
tired," I said.
"You
get back out there right now. People are depending on you."
I looked weakly
at my father who just shrugged and said "Don’t look at me. Bill’s your
boss, son." And so I marched back out to the assembly line where I
worked for the rest of the day. As I had walked out of the office, I had seen
my father give Bill Pemberton a thumb’s up sign. The lesson was that I had to help
paddle my own canoe.
A third lesson
came in the sixth grade. One day,
between classes, I saw
"Tim" – one of my smaller classmates. In a show of 6th
grade bravado, I grabbed Tim and pushed him bodily into the girl’s bathroom. I
held the door closed while girls' screams and Tim’s cries resounded down the
hall. What happened next occurred in a kind of slow motion though I’m sure it
took place in a flash.
I felt a hand
on my shoulder which spun me around. Suddenly a bright light exploded on the
side of my face. My teacher, Mrs. Spearschneider, had slapped me!! And I heard her
hiss "don’t you ever
do that again." Tim escaped and I wobbled back into my classroom. When
I got home at noon for lunch, my mother was standing there, arms akimbo. My teacher had obviously called her. Instead of grabbing me in a hug and spitting
about the mean teacher, my mother simply commented that she hoped I’d “learned
my lesson.” I had. From then on, I wasn’t
exactly a model student but I knew that there were lines of decorum that were
not to be crossed. In today’s world, the
incident might have made the newspapers.
Mrs. Spearschneider and the school system would have been the victim of
some plaintiff’s lawyer and the lesson of obedience and decorum would have been
lost.
A fourth lesson
occurred in my first weeks of college freshman year in September 1964. Doctor
Erickson was teaching a course in political science. I had been slouched in my
chair, probably doodling and paying not a lot of attention to the class.
Suddenly, I heard my name "Mister Petersen." It was Doctor Erickson asking me to answer a
question. With considerable ease, I looked up and offered "I’m not
prepared" and I went back to whatever it was I was doing.
Doctor Erickson
padded over and stood by my seat. "Stand up," he said. I
looked up. "Stand up," he repeated. So I stood up.
"Mister
Petersen, so you’re not prepared. Well, let me tell you – if you’re not
prepared to answer a simple question, you will probably not be prepared to
answer the tough ones. You’re not prepared today so I would bet, Mister
Petersen, that you will not be prepared tomorrow either. And you will probably
not be prepared next week or next year or ever. Because you probably don’t
care. And if that’s the case, I feel very sorry for you."
The sweat began
trickling down my neck. And he went on.
"Mister
Petersen, you have two choices in life. To try and be prepared to do what needs
to be done. Or you may be a washout . . . "
Doctor Erickson
finished with his comments and from that day forward, I was never ever unprepared for his
class. I was always first to raise my hand and I was always ready to answer. Others
in the class too had learned a lesson that day -- at my expense. I ended up getting a "B" in poly
sci and I ended up taking four more courses from Doctor Erickson. The rest of
the courses, I got "A’s." He became my faculty advisor. Political
science was my major. And no, my parents didn’t contact any plaintiff’s lawyers
on that one either.
The final lesson
I will tell you about took place in the summer of 1973. I had finished law
school and had passed the
On leaving a
small town, I remarked to my wife that there were some birds – probably
vultures – feeding on some carrion in the middle of the road – perhaps a mile
away (I could just barely see the small gathering). I said in my best John
Wayne voice "watch this. I’m gonna get ‘em." And I stomped the
accelerator to the floor. My wife, who is considerably smarter than I am,
pleaded with me to slow down. Of course I didn’t listen.
I figure I must
have been approaching 105 mph as I rocketed over by the carrion (the birds had
long since flown away). I guess I showed
them. . .
As I looked in
the rearview mirror to see the road kill quickly disappearing, the mirror was
filled instead with the completely unexpected sight of two men adjusting their
Sam Brown belts. It was police – and
they were immediately behind me. At 105 m.p.h. I knew what was coming. I eased my foot off the gas and allowed the
car to drift to a stop.
Now, there’s
not a lot you can say when you’re woofing along at 105 in a 55 mile per hour zone.
I asked weakly if I could get a "warning ticket." The officer
laughed. I would have to appear in court in two week’s time – on a day that I
was to file a report of any sins and transgressions to the Character and
Fitness Committee of the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary
Commission. The ARDC.
Well you have
to believe that I accepted the fact that I was an idiot of the highest order. I
mean what was I thinking?? You’re all probably nodding to yourselves going
“yep, this guy sounds like a real idiot.”
And now what would I do --
admit to the ARDC that I suddenly was convicted of serious out-of-state traffic
violations? Fifty miles over the limit? We
drove slowly to the next town. Late Sunday afternoon. Everything was closed. The ticket had
scribbled the court date and the name of the judge before whom I was to appear.
"I’m going to call the judge," I said.
I stopped at a
phone booth and went in. The judge’s name was not in the phone book. So I
called the police department of the small town where I was to appear. "Police
Department."
I introduced
myself and said I needed to speak with Judge ____. "I don’t have his
number," I said.
"I
can’t give you the number," was the curt reply.
"Officer,
I’m in a pay phone booth and I was wondering if you could call the Judge and
ask him to call me here."
"It’s
Sunday."
"I know
but it’s important."
"I’ll
see," and he hung up.
We waited by
that phone booth on the empty street on that late Sunday afternoon for perhaps
a half hour. Not speaking. Then the phone rang.
"This
is Scott Petersen," I answered.
I thought this would sound better than "hulloo."
"This
is Judge _____. You wanted me to call." There was no beating around the bush. In the background, I heard the shouts of
children and the splash of a pool.
Sunday barbecue.
And so the
words tumbled out of my mouth. I told him everything. Admitted my guilt and my
unadulterated stupidity. I told him about having just graduated from law school
and passing the Illinois Bar and
about having to report to the ARDC Character and Fitness Committee in two
weeks. I explained. I finished. And then I waited.
The line was
silent for maybe thirty seconds. It was silent for so long that I thought for a
moment that I had been disconnected.
After an
eternity, he spoke. "I’m going to waive your presence. And you know
what I’m going to do? I’m going to find you ‘not guilty.’ But I want you
to promise me something. Right now – on the phone. Swear to me. That you will always . . .
always . . . drive safely from now on. And never speed." He had spoken
the words slowly enough that I could chew on each one.
"I
agree."
"I want you to swear."
"I
swear."
"All right.
Send me your ticket and mark it
‘personal.’ Remember, Mister Petersen. You swore an oath." And the line went dead.
From that
moment through the present, whenever my foot has been too heavy on the gas pedal.
Whenever the needle on the speedometer has strayed too far, I enter the zone of
a simple, subconscious hardwiring of a lesson I received a few decades
ago. And I slow down and I drive the way
I should. Who knows. Maybe that lesson has saved my bacon - or someone
else’s bacon - on an occasion or two. I
try to live up to a promise I made 34 years ago.
Oh sure, the
judge could have denied my Sunday afternoon plea and ordered me to court
complete with a hefty fine for the coffers of the small community. “I’ll show that big city boy.” He probably should have. But he didn’t. He
taught me a lesson that has endured to this day. In looking back, I don’t think he let me
"off the hook" or knighted me with some "professional
courtesy." I was bestowed with an indelible lesson that has lasted a
lifetime. I felt like Jean Valjean at
the moment of his epiphany.
Five
lessons. Five meaningful and positive
instances of, when you think about it, relatively painless behavior
modification. I look at these lessons as
having been pivotal to my personal development. I have always tried to be
temperate in language, diligent in efforts and prepared for what needs to be
done. Some might say that such "lessons" don’t need to be taught to
our children but I would venture to say that "lessons" – or their
absence – can make it or break it for kids -- and for adults.
Lessons. Think about it. You have had them -- some serious, expensive,
embarrassing, some harsh, some very painful and some very easy. Like mine.
We learn lessons -- life’s lessons -- often on a daily basis. They come in pairs, two, threes or
fours. In bunches. Sometimes every day gives a little lesson and
sometimes we learn. Sometimes we
don’t. And sometimes lessons can change
things for eternity.
We learn
lessons from parents, from teachers, from peers, from old people, from children
and from nature. Those who have taught us
lessons deserve some credit for setting the bar higher for us. As Confucius said in his Analects, we can use our education and our life experience to be
instruments of service to our fellow man and to be examples and teachers.
All I can say
is I’m glad I had these simple, relatively painless lessons in my life. I will confess that there was a sixth
lesson but it’s one that I’ve never told anyone about. Suffice to say, I
learned . . .
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