Waiting in the foothills

My stepson turned 21 this week, and I found myself reaching, in the way that wretched parents do, for advice I could give him to help navigate this complex section of life. (I say wretched because that is how I imagine we all feel; desperate to stave off our children’s future suffering by somehow imparting the wisdom we have so painfully earned, yet knowing that we can do no such thing and are instead condemned to watch their all-too-familiar falters and stumbles without being able to do a goddamned thing to help).

Yet in my desperate reaching for wisdom I found some, I believe; which I was bold enough to write down in a letter. But in so doing I gave myself pause. This advice, so earnestly given and so earnestly meant – could I truly say I had taken it myself? If I had taken it once upon a time, was I still taking it now?

(The advice, by the way, was that what seems like stasis at the time comes to seem like progress with hindsight. It is surprisingly easy to confuse rapid development with total stagnation, especially in conditions of great uncertainty.)

I sometimes imagine my stepson sitting by a stream in the foothills of some beautiful mountains. He is mulling over whether to continue up the path into the jagged, less welcoming peaks ahead – where there is snow and possibly there are bears – or whether to hunker down by the nice stream in some rustic but comfortable mountain bothy and wait out another winter in comparative safety. He is not ready to make his decision quite yet; just as I was not at the same age.

For me, I found the courage to continue when some fellow travellers gave me a very useful map which spurred me out of my bothy and up into the peaks. From much greater heights I was able to look back down and see, not only how important that map and those fellow travellers were, but how necessary my time in the bothy had been. In the bothy I was building up the strength and the courage to walk up into the mountains. Without that time, I probably wouldn’t have lasted at altitude.

And so, here we are. My stepson is waiting in the foothills and I’m up in the peaks – or am I? As I dish out guidance to this young man from my lofty position of experience, something begins to niggle at me.

Isn’t it true that I stopped climbing the path quite some time ago, and have settled down in a much bigger bothy on a much more comfortable plateau? What if there are even higher peaks in my future, with longer winters and scarier bears? Have I stretched this metaphor far enough now?

What if, in reaching for wisdom to give to my stepson on his twenty-first birthday, he turns around and gives that same wisdom right back to me?