Fully Alive_Discovering What Matters Most

by Timothy Shriver

  Back home, all of us crowded around the television on Saturday afternoon to watch the show. When it was over, my mother rushed to call Arledge to lavish him with gratitude for his gutsy move in devoting airtime to people with intellectual disabilities. Gifford remembers Arledge’s reaction: “He loved it, not only because it was the right thing to do but also because he won the ratings for the time slot. Roone was a genius and he could see that Special Olympics was great television.”

  The movement continued to build. All over the United States, local clubs and church groups and civic organizations signed up to run their own versions of Special Olympics games. Soon, every state in the nation had its own Special Olympics organization, each committed to following the official Special Olympics training and competition protocols, each certified by Special Olympics International. In 1975, the president of the United States, Gerald Ford, added to the growing momentum by agreeing to be the honorary chair of the first-ever Special Olympics Gala. With Barbra Streisand performing at the Kennedy Center, the movement that had begun in my parents’ backyard had suddenly become downright glamorous.

  Little did the president know that moments before he arrived at the Kennedy Center, my mother was in a total panic. She’d shown up in a dress that didn’t fit. In one of her most lovable and spontaneous problem-solving moments, she ducked into the ladies’ room to try to fix it but gave up, and in desperation cornered another woman and asked for her dress.

  Imagine the shock of that woman. Black-tie gala. Kennedy Center. President of the United States. She enters the ladies’ room only to find the hostess, Eunice Kennedy Shriver …

  “You want me to give you my dress?”

  “Yes. I need it right away. The president is waiting and I can’t wear this one.”

  The unknown woman obliged.

  My mother enjoyed every minute of telling the story later—even if she was a little embarrassed that she never found the woman to return her dress.

  * * *

  For all the emerging fame and glitz of Special Olympics, I had yet to see any of it as a pathway to satisfying my own hunger to figure out how to fit into the world. As it turned out, that was the first and most difficult lesson for me to learn. Like most teenagers, I was preoccupied with what others thought of me, and like most teenagers, I was completely focused on trying to impress my peers and shield them from my insecurities. You can’t see from the heart if you’re constantly afraid of being judged by others. Fear obstructs your vision. You look for belonging in all the wrong places. And it’s even worse when you internalize the judgment and obstruct your view of yourself. You see something much less than your true self, so your true self never has a chance to see.

  The person who tried the hardest to get me to stop judging myself, and to stop being afraid of others, was someone I met just a few months after high school: Linda Potter. Just before I set off for college, I fell in love with Linda, who was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen and also the happiest and most generous soul I’d ever met. Her smile rocked my world. She was the first person to love me for who I was and not what I could do. When I was with her, all I felt was happy. I couldn’t believe it.

  But Linda and I had terrible timing—she was graduating from college while I was just starting. She was entering the workforce in New York and had signed up for a job at a foundation dedicated to fighting apartheid in South Africa, while I was entering the social scene of dormitories in New Haven, Connecticut. We started dating and Linda would show up at the occasional rugby party, a beautiful young professional woman from New York City. My friends would swoon while she would beg to leave. I’d show up at professional functions in New York City with scholars and political activists and young bankers, and her friends would look puzzled at the peculiar and immature boyfriend Linda had in tow. And I’d beg to leave. Our long-distance love affair was a challenge in every way, except that each of us was crazy about the other.

  Miraculously, Linda and I survived my four years in college, and then, just as I entered the workforce, Linda set off for law school in Tennessee. Her attention turned to learning the law and volunteering at the local legal aid clinic and bonding with her new “little sister” from Nashville. Meanwhile, my attention turned to the issue that had most captivated me during my college years: serving high-risk teenagers in New Haven’s poor and struggling neighborhoods. While still an undergraduate, I’d volunteered as a big brother to a ten-year-old child from New Haven’s Hill neighborhood, and then entered the teacher certification program so that I could teach at New Haven’s Lee High School. I taught U.S. history classes, tutored students in English and math, and tutored in summer Upward Bound programs for college-bound students, and I loved every minute of it. The kids were tough and gentle, eager and disaffected, restless and discouraged all at once. They were raw and magnetic. If I was searching for what matters most, I could tell they were, too.

  When I graduated, I decided that the best way for me to meet the world’s expectations was by applying myself to elevating the expectations of hundreds of teenagers in New Haven’s toughest neighborhoods. I thought I had a lot to teach them about how to fix injustice and perform and rise. As it turned out, I had much more to learn about how to listen and empower and see. I wouldn’t be able to do anything for them until I learned.

  My first full-time job was as a teacher-counselor in the University of Connecticut’s Upward Bound program, working for a brilliant educator named Bob Brown. Bob was a master at understanding that all learning is a relationship. He could get his students to do almost anything. The kids were so alluring—complicated but also so funny; difficult to reach but also so eager to connect; angry but also so tender. I latched on to Bob to help me navigate my role in changing their lives.

  Bob proved a wise mentor. At the time, he was everything I wasn’t. Bob was tough and smooth and effective; I was coarse and confrontational and ineffective. Bob only had to give a kid a look, and everything would change. I would lecture and whine and nothing would change. Seeing my frustration, he took me aside one evening after dinner in the dorm.

  “The problem isn’t what you say, Tim,” he said. “It’s how you say it.”

  My dignity was wounded. “I’m just trying to let these kids know that they have to follow the rules here, or their chances of being successful will collapse,” I protested.

  Bob must’ve had to hold back a sigh. “You’re giving them good advice, Tim. You don’t have to change the message. But you might want to say it differently, that’s all.”

  “You mean, don’t be so tough on them?”

  “No, not at all. You could even be tougher. It’s just that your tone of voice makes it sound like you’re talking down to the kids. You have to remember, they’re only a couple of years younger than you. Besides, you haven’t experienced their world, and they know it.”

  I wondered what exactly he was getting at. One night, I had a particularly rough run-in with several students in the dorm. I’d caught them sneaking out of their rooms and followed them downstairs.

  “Ernel!” I called. “What’s going on? Who else is in that bathroom? You guys know you’re not supposed to be down here.”

  Ernel rolled his eyes. “Don’t worry about it, man. We’re going.”

  “Who else is there? Turn on the light. I’m going to need all you guys to come see me in Iris’s office tomorrow morning.”

  “Chill out, man,” said Tony. “We’re not going nowhere. We’re just going to our rooms, so why don’t you leave us alone and mind your own damn business?”

  “Don’t lie to me, Tony,” I shot back. “You weren’t going to your rooms. You were going out. You’re violating the rules and I need to report you.”

  “Shriver, why are you such an asshole?” Eugene chimed in. “Just leave us alone and let us go, and nobody won’t know nothing and it will all be cool. Stop being such a jerk, man.”

  “I’m not a jerk, I’m just trying to enforce—wait a minute!” The kids had started goin
g up the staircase, refusing to acknowledge me anymore. “Okay, you guys,” I called after them. “I have to do what I’m going to do. You’d better…”

  The door to the third-floor hallway slammed shut and they were gone.

  I was trying hard, but I was tiresome. I didn’t understand that I needed to learn how to understand the kids before I tried to direct the kids. That would take time.

  * * *

  For four years, I tried as best I could to be successful. My students were facing the toughest of circumstances, growing up in the middle of the crack epidemic in Hartford and New Haven, two of the most violent cities in the nation. Their neighborhoods were poor, and jobs for their parents were scarce and low-paying. The rates of absenteeism, dropouts, and discipline problems in the schools were atrocious. As much as I saw them as young people with potential, I also saw them as kids who needed support and help in order to make it—in effect, kids who needed me. I stayed late after school, visited housing projects in the evenings, and gave everything I had to trying to solve their problems.

  But in retrospect, I can see that I was also attracted to them because so many of them were searchers, seeking something or someone or someplace to belong, and though I couldn’t have said so, I was, too. Lenice Falk was a tender fifteen-year-old who tested well but could never quite focus on her work. I worked with her, hour upon hour, for months until one day she told me that she was pregnant and needed to take a break and drop out of school. Darrell Mickey was a talented basketball player, a hard worker, and a smart kid, but he didn’t want to give himself to the promise of college. Over and over again, I found myself with students who were searching—often in tragically unhealthy ways—for something bigger. And I was ill equipped to help them find what they were looking for. To be honest, I was mostly a failure at helping them because I didn’t yet understand that I needed them to help me.

  After working with hundreds of high school students in Upward Bound, I began to realize that I was missing something. I turned to experts for help and found my way to Dr. Donald Cohen, the director of the renowned Yale Child Study Center, who was making news around the world with his work on post-traumatic stress disorder and theories of mind that were central to understanding autism. He was also training child psychiatrists and suggested that I bring one of my students to the center to explore the challenge of how to engage them in learning. With two dozen psychiatry students looking on, Dr. Cohen interviewed the student, and afterward, met with me to discuss his perspective. “There are enormous challenges facing your students, Tim. So few of them have been given the tools to understand their inner lives. They are surrounded by so much chaos, so much conflict. They need tremendous support to make sense of what they’re feeling.”

  “Inner lives?” I had never heard the term. What in the world was an “inner life”?

  I turned to Dr. James Comer, another internationally prominent expert on child development at the Child Study Center. Comer is an African-American medical doctor who grew up in a large family that today we’d call poor. But he rose through the education system with continual success and, after completing his psychiatry training, decided to devote his life to reforming urban schools, in which he saw children of color failing in massive numbers. “Schools are not set up to understand the developmental needs of these children,” he explained to me. “They need a new focus on how to use the techniques of the mental health world to help students attach to teachers and develop optimally, while teachers need to understand how to interpret behavior and promote positive outcomes.”

  I was mesmerized by the clarity (and stature, too) of men such as Dr. Cohen and Dr. Comer—by how well they reasoned and how crisply they argued their points of view. They were pointing me toward a game-changing insight: Learning is not a mechanical process for distributing knowledge into machines called children in an assembly line of parts. Instead, learning is a relationship within which people cultivate meaning and attachment. Without a relationship of shared meaning and value, there is no learning. But with a strong relationship, learning is the endlessly exciting process of pursuing the questions and dreams that animate teacher and student alike. The science of child development was filled with insights about how to help teachers understand student behavior, shape student motivation, and cultivate student and family commitment to learning.

  But for me, there was still something missing. I left my encounters with these brilliant scholars only to find the puzzles and mysteries of my students all the more frustrating. I looked into the eyes of Stephanie Linker—a bright, young, hardworking student who was careful about every risk in the neighborhood, never venturing into drugs or sex. Stephanie did everything right and got top grades. But she carried her head down, never quite looking me in the eye, a part of her always absent from the conversation, distracted, occupied with other worries. She was getting good grades but not getting inspired. Her lips would tighten when I’d encourage her to be even more relentless so she could go to an even better college. “Sure, Tim,” she’d say. “I’ll go meet Mr. Granite for extra help. But I don’t really need a better college.”

  The promise of college clearly did not resonate with her. “What does she think she does need?” I wondered. I searched for words, language, definitions. Was there something more than success in school that I needed to talk to the kids about? If so, what was it? Did I need to teach them how to be critics of societal injustice while at the same time teaching them how to play by society’s rules? Did I need to bring in more African-American role models and mentors? I took my students on visits to businesses and colleges. We saw submarines being built at Electric Boat in Groton, Connecticut. We visited the big corporations to see how business works. We went to Bryant College in Rhode Island, Emerson College in Boston, Trinity in Hartford, Sacred Heart in Bridgeport, and dozens more. Did I need to take them even more places, so they could see for themselves what they might not have been able to imagine—that real social benefits and economically stable ways of life were accessible?

  I did need to do all those things. And yet, there was still something missing. Dr. Cohen’s words about the “inner life” nagged at me, but I still didn’t know how to interpret them. I had a vague idea that my students had a deeper hunger that neither money nor education could fill, but I didn’t know how to address it. What were their deepest longings? What were their dreams? And what were mine?

  In retrospect, I think what fascinated me most was that for better or for worse, most of the students I taught in those years had come to believe that it was fruitless to try to belong in the mainstream world I represented. They’d given up on the system because they perceived it to have given up on them. They not only thought the system was rejecting them, but they felt it, too. Everywhere they went, they saw stares and rejection. In the media, they saw negative characterizations. In the world of their parents, they saw low-wage jobs and exhaustion and barriers. They felt judged, negatively, unfairly, and even cruelly. And when you feel unfairly judged and marginalized, you don’t feel seen or understood. They rejected the world that was rejecting them, and a part of me wanted to as well. Part of me was just as confused as they were. For better or worse, I didn’t have the guts to walk away. But they did.

  What I missed was that they’d learned to see a different world than I saw. When you decide that the way things are in the “real” world is somehow wrong, you’re forced to find a different way to see. You don’t just reject what you see but learn how to see differently, too, and that’s exactly what I needed to learn. Most of the students I taught in those years had concluded that an economic “promised land” was more of a charade than a real option for them, so most of my exhortations to compete and achieve fell on deaf ears. They had long since lost interest in grades and colleges, because those things seemed to be unreal. So they’d developed an eye for what was real—at least to them. And what was real was the feeling of belonging. They seemed to care much more about finding people who cared than about finding anything else
. The thing that mattered most was feeling seen and understood. Despite all the pain and disappointment in their lives, and also because of it, my students had learned how to see from the heart, because nothing else made much sense. Some say there are only two pathways to the heart of God—love and suffering. For my students, suffering was often it.

  I was jealous of that authenticity, but, more than that, confused. My students dealt with their anger and hunger by expressing it with raw indifference to the consequences. I wondered what I would have been like if I’d been able to tell my high school teacher who humiliated me so many times to go to hell. I wondered what I would have been like if I’d been raised in the Baptist churches that dominated the neighborhoods where I worked and been able to stand up in front of a church full of people and plead with God for a miracle instead of standing, sitting, and kneeling in the orderly Catholic Church fashion. I wondered what I would’ve been like if I’d wandered the streets at night like a blues singer composing chords for a bass guitar, as one of my students did. And I wondered how to listen to those kids in a way that would convince them that I cared about them and not just their grades. And if I did that, would I still be recommending math and English homework as a way to find purpose, or would I instead be teaching them to first find their purpose elsewhere? Everywhere I looked, I saw an elaborate construction of walls that separated the world I had grown up in from the world in which I was now living. And what surprised me more than anything was that I felt more at home in that new world.

  Then Linda graduated from law school and called with a bomb: “I think it’s time we see other people.”