Humility

“Take a happy pill, Heather,” said my daughter’s violin teacher. “You’re just going to have to do the work it takes to learn this – you might as well be happy about it. Settle down and do it with humility and attention.” – Something like that.

I was struck by the wisdom of his words, and the fact that humility is, indeed, a crucial component for learning anything. It gives me the willingness to go ahead and work at something even if it’s hard, instead of making excuses for why I don’t know it already. I look back these days on huge swaths of my life in which I didn’t make the effort to learn something that I wanted to and could have. I see that arrogance was a large cause of my inactivity. I felt I should already know something, given my great education and/or experience, so I didn’t want to put myself in the group of those who didn’t know in order to actually learn it. This has been true at different times about my writing, my music, illustration, web design, and probably other things I could have been good at.

Thinking deeper, wondering how I could have not seen this arrogance at all, I realize that it was tied in with my sense of self-worth. My self-worth rested on my concept of myself as a smart, well-educated person. The way I had it set up, to be a person who still needed to learn all those things was in conflict with what made me worthy of existence. I apparently was willing to accept huge blindnesses in order to preserve the illusion (delusion?) that I knew as much as I needed to know to be the person I thought I needed to be.

Going deeper still, I see that I could have, and still can, place my sense of self-worth on something more elemental than an image of myself as a certain kind of person. I can place it on my source, and my place in the universe - on my identity as a child of God. This view of myself maintains my worthiness no matter what, and allows me to admit to ignorance, and to missteps, and to my need to learn and grow.

Isn’t it funny that having my self-worth be placed on a much greater thing would allow me to be more humble? Isn’t it interesting that arrogance is a mark of a deep need to find the elemental source of self-worth that isn’t dependent on a cardboard cut-out self-image?

I got an award two weeks ago. It was for showing up. It was because two years ago I stumbled across an organization that struck me as so good that I needed to give something of myself to it. It’s a self-organizing advocacy and support group for homeless women. I remember thinking about the fact that I didn’t have anything in particular to offer them, but that I could be, perhaps, a body – answering the phone or doing whatever humble labor might help them. It turned out that they set me up to work with a writing group, which spluttered along weakly under my unconfident leadership, such that I felt lucky they were allowing me to be there. This evolved, for a time, into my helping with the production of a bi-weekly newsletter. I felt mostly like a weak catalyst prompting them to keep putting in the energy it took to do it.

Eventually my comfort and confidence evolved, and the writing group started to get stronger. This coincided with my clarity that my best role was to do the very least – to impose no expertise, offer very little advice, and basically encourage them to listen to themselves. So I continued to feel that my role was a very humble one. That’s why I was astonished, at the 13th annual Homeless Women’s Forum, to be this year’s recipient of their “Woman of Light” award, for a woman who, while not homeless, does much to help their cause.

It was an amazing feeling to get the reward. There was the kind of embarrassed astonishment, and the awed sense of the great work the organizers and attendees were doing, and the gratitude for being allowed to work with them.

Later, I found myself thinking about the paradox of humility. Jesus talked about how we have to humble ourselves to be exalted. But being humble doesn’t turn out to be a wretched state, and being arrogant feels anxious, not confident. The strongest basis for humility is having an unassailable understanding of true worth. And humility is the grounding that allows things to be accomplished.