The Message That Lingered

22 Jun The Message That Lingered

The little boy reluctantly handed the note to his mother.

“Mom, my teacher gave this paper to me and told me only you are to read it. What does it say?”

Then he saw the tears well in her eyes.

She looked at young Thomas and read the note aloud.

“Your son is a genius. This school is too small for him and doesn’t have good enough teachers to train him. Please teach him yourself.”

Many years later, after his mother had passed away, Thomas visited his childhood home. In a dusty closet filled with her personal treasures he found that wrinkled letter from so long ago.

He carefully unfolded it – and read for the first time the actual words printed there.

“Your son is mentally deficient. We cannot let him attend our school anymore. He is expelled.”

That evening he wrote the following in his diary.

“Thomas A. Edison was a mentally deficient child whose mother turned him into the genius of the century.”

Nancy Edison died when her son was only 24.  She did not live long enough to realize the full scope of the gift she passed along to the world.

Her son did.  And he never failed to acknowledge the miracle her devotion spawned.

In his later years he would say, “My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me, and I felt I had someone to live for, someone I must not disappoint.”

The positive influencers in our life are few – and all too often their voices are drowned out by the naysayers that hope to compromise our potential rather than expand it.

If we’re lucky, those influencers are first our parents.

And more often than not, that begins with a mother’s unconditional love.

As we grow older, finding authentic influencers can be more difficult – but their importance doesn’t wane.

That’s why, for a great many, the MOST significant investment we can make is in sourcing a true coach – a mentor – a sounding board.

That’s because we all live in the center of the tornado we call life.  It swirls – it twists – and it distorts … often leaving us torn and tattered.

There is brilliance in the quiet of affirmation.

Sometimes it shines so brightly that it changes the course of human history.

“When I was a child my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll be the pope. ‘ Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso. “

– Pablo Picasso