Fully Alive_Discovering What Matters Most

by Timothy Shriver

  While our children and the Yap children were still very young, Loretta came to talk to their classes about what it means to have an intellectual difference, and she delivered her most pointed message: “Names hurt.” She was two decades ahead of the anti-bullying campaigns that have recently spread around the United States and other countries. “You may not realize it,” she told the students, “but when you call someone a ‘retard’ it hurts, and it hurts for a long time. If you hurt my arm or my leg, it heals fast, but when you hurt my heart, it can last forever. So,” she often finished her talks, “I’m asking you all to turn on your head before you open your mouth and remember that there’s a person inside everyone who’s got a special need and don’t make fun of them or bully them and whatever you do, don’t use the word ‘retard’ to make fun of anyone. Sticks and stones may break my bones but names hurt for a lifetime. Thank you.”

  Needless to say, having Maureen in class and spending time with Loretta helped our children sensitize their peers—and often their teachers and other parents, too—to the cruelty of language. Time after time, Timbo (as we called our son) would come home from play dates saying that he’d heard a friend’s mother call someone a “retard” and he’d felt paralyzed, not knowing what to say to a grown-up. By the time he was about eight, he and Rose had learned. “I had to ask Mr. Dyer at gym class not to call students ‘retards’ when they drop the ball in class, Dad,” said Rose. “I don’t think he listened to me but I did speak up.” Similarly, Timbo confronted his friends on the playground so often that they finally dealt him the most irritating of rejoinders: “Okay, Timbo! We get it. We won’t say that word around you.” He knew that was the worst kind of dismissive comeback, and it only made him more frustrated. “It’s not for me that you shouldn’t say the word. It’s because it’s mean.” Some listened, but most were puzzled. Our kids were getting an early education in the deep-rooted and hard to reverse stigma against people who are intellectually different. Most of their friends just didn’t see a problem.

  But nothing can teach a lesson like play, and that’s where their Special Olympics Unified Team came in. In the third year of our basketball team, with Rose now thirteen, Tim twelve, Sam eight, Kathleen seven, and Caroline four, Linda and Anne Yap scheduled a series of games with a new Unified Team from a special school one town away. The opponent was Katherine Thomas School, a small day school for children with learning disabilities and various levels of autism in Rockville, Maryland. KTS, as it’s called, is one of those places that’s hard to find and feels less like a school and more like a multidimensional education and rehabilitation facility when you arrive. It is located in a small office park just off the interstate behind an Adventist hospital. The doors are industrial, the halls narrow, and the environment vaguely clinical. The level of care for students is outstanding and the staff world-class, and the fees are as high as thirty thousand dollars for the high school program. Most of the children who attend KTS are there because the regular school special education program isn’t able to support their needs.

  Beginning in January, our band of eight-to-twelve-year-olds, which included my brother Mark and sister-in-law Jeanne’s children Molly, Tommy, and Emma, would play weekly scrimmages against KTS—one week they’d come down to our local gym at Blessed Sacrament School in Washington, and the next week we’d haul out onto the highway to KTS’s gym. The kids on both teams played through the season with good cheer, but basketball is a difficult game for young children and is even more difficult for those who have challenges. As a result, the scrimmages only faintly resembled basketball. Dribbling was occasionally done properly; repeat shots were allowed on each possession so that each player would have several chances to find the net. The score wasn’t kept and time wasn’t monitored. Both teams substituted regularly, with partners playing more the role of helpers than competitors. One morning after practice ended, Linda took off with the girls to run errands, so Timbo and Sam and I headed for home—just the boys. Three men in a car on a cold weekend morning can easily fall into mindlessness. The pattern in our car was familiar: turn up the radio, zone out, and drive home. But as we coasted along the interstate, something was gnawing at me. I wondered what my kids were really thinking about their Unified mornings. Their friends from school weren’t with them at KTS, and the game wasn’t the kind of competition that would lead to great stories of athletic triumph. I was starting to think that maybe I was unwittingly forcing my kids into guilt-induced duty, the exact thing that I wanted so desperately to avoid. We hadn’t ever talked about their Special Olympics volunteering from the point of view of what they wanted—we’d simply launched into it and brought the kids along. At some level, I wondered if they were wishing this whole Special Olympics thing would go away so they could be relieved of the extra responsibility.

  So I did what most kids can’t stand: I broke the silence and started a conversation.

  “So what did you guys think of the game today?”

  “It was fine, Dad,” Tim answered.

  “No, really. Don’t just say that because you think that’s what I want to hear. I really want to know what you think of the whole experience.” I wanted to probe their thinking without using words that would prompt or suggest answers, but I couldn’t resist. “You’ve got to be thinking at some level that you don’t want to be out at KTS at that small gym, don’t you?”

  Pause. Neither boy answered.

  “Aren’t you?” I persisted.

  “Dad!” Sam blurted. “It was fine. Relax!”

  Another long pause. The car droned on down the cold highway as the radio blared. I looked at both of the boys and they had already zoned out again, staring out the window, listening to music. So I decided to increase the stakes. I turned off the radio.

  “Dad! Why did you do that? Turn the radio back on. What’s the matter with you?”

  “I’m asking you a question, and I don’t think you’re giving me an honest answer. I’m asking you about this whole Unified Sport thing and what you feel about it and if you’re just doing it because you have to or what. So I want to hear what you really think—honestly think—or no radio.”

  There is a pause that seems like minutes but is only seconds, in which these two boys look at me as if I am the most irritating person on earth. Exasperated, Sam pivots in the front seat toward me, raises his hands like an Italian chef, and says, “Look, Dad. Let me explain it this way. If you were to tell me that next weekend we were all going to Disney World, I would say that would be the most fun we could possibly have. We would have a blast and it would be fantastic. But there’s one problem: as soon as we would get home, it would be terrible because the whole thing would be over and everyone would be depressed.”

  I’m puzzled. I have no idea what he is talking about or why Disney World has come up. We’ve never been. He doesn’t draw breath and continues.

  “When we go to Special Olympics and we play with the athletes and cheer for Matt and D.J. and Maureen and Peter and Joelle and give them high fives, it’s fun in a different way. It’s the fun that lasts. It doesn’t go away. Get it?”

  I’m in shock. What did he just say? Did I hear him say, “the fun that lasts?” Where did he come up with that? I don’t say anything. I don’t know what to say. Another long pause.

  “Dad!” Sam almost yells, interrupting the empty space. “Now please turn the radio back on!”

  “Did you just say, ‘the fun that lasts’? Did I hear you right? Did you just say that and come up with that point right here in this car? Do you know what that means? Do you understand what you just said? What does it mean, by the way? What did you mean by ‘the fun that lasts’?” I rambled and mumbled and tried to stop doing both so I could let “fun that lasts” into my mind and heart. I looked out the windshield as the big curve of the Washington beltway approached and my exit was in front of me. Neither boy said anything for a moment. And then Tim complained, “Come on, Dad. That’s not fair. We answered your question. Now turn on the radio!
”

  The boys were onto something bigger than I imagined. In those three words, “fun that lasts,” Sam articulated what thousands of people involved in Special Olympics games had felt, but which I at least had never heard expressed so brilliantly. As I thought about Sam’s expression, I kept trying to unpack it and understand what had led him to say it. What part of his Saturday-morning practice had led him to believe he was in the midst of something “that lasts”? What part of the relationships he had with the athletes had made this whole thing seem fun to him? What experience had led him to see that there can be more than one type of fun? How had he learned that there is a type of fun that is enjoyable but temporary and often frustrating? And how had he come to see that fun could be recast as a state of joyfulness that endures and is never disappointing?

  My sense is that the key to understanding what our children understood lies in the mysterious relationship between helping and being helped. How many times have we all heard the expression, “I got back more than I gave”? Philanthropists announce it at gala dinners; civic organization leaders announce it at community gatherings; religious leaders announce it from the pulpit. Everyone says it as if everyone understands it. But try asking someone to explain what they got back, and the result is usually a lot of blank stares.

  “Like what?” I ask. “What did you get back?”

  The initial answers are frequently the same.

  “Well, the athlete [or the ‘patient’ or the ‘victim’ or the ‘child’ or whoever] had such a wonderful time and she or he seemed so happy [or ‘better’ or ‘appreciative’ or other positive attribute].” The answers are almost always framed in terms of an experience of the person getting helped. I have asked a question to the person who does the helping—and they answer in terms of the beneficiary of their service. But then I persist.

  “I see. But you’ve just told me that the person you helped appeared to be happy or appreciative, but I thought you said that you had received something in return. What did you receive?”

  The next wave of answers typically focuses on participation. People repeat the same message about the person who was helped—that he or she was happy or grateful or appreciative. But then they add something like this: “I was happy to be able to be there when the person I was helping was happy,” or “I was happy because someone else was happy.”

  I push again. “That’s wonderful. But I’m still a little confused. If I told you that I was happy last week, I don’t think you would automatically be happy, would you? In other words, I thought you said that you received something from this encounter that was different from what the other person received. But so far, you’ve only told me about the other person’s happiness and not much about what you received. Was it just that you got to watch? Or did you actually receive something from this experience?”

  At this point, virtually everyone I’ve ever asked—and I’ve asked a lot of people—has the same reaction. They take a deep breath. They sigh, and they go quiet.

  And then what follows is a story about what matters most. One man told me that before going to a local Special Olympics event and volunteering at the check-in table, he had never understood how to face adversity with a strength that comes from within. “I heard them say that oath—how does it go again? ‘Let me win’ and then they say that second part, ‘but if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt.’ I think that about sums it all up,” he said to me. “I mean I just felt that I could live like that, too. I could face whatever comes my way and just focus on being brave and doing my best. Those kids were all out on the field and I looked at them and I realized that they were all facing much bigger challenges than I ever had. But they were being brave. That’s what I got back. I got back what it means to be brave and I can’t put a price on that. I guess you could say I helped them that day by showing up and volunteering for a few hours. But they helped me believe in myself again. They helped me believe that I can be brave.”

  These kinds of experiences flow like rivers when you stop to ask people the meaning of giving and give them enough time to answer. I was at a dinner with a woman in her seventies, and she was describing helping in a different context—she visited cancer patients in the hospital. I went through my questions about what she got back and the usual answers emerged, but when I pushed a third time, her eyes began to well up. “There was one woman I visited for many months before she died. I suppose what I got back was that I mattered to her. You know I’ve been married all these years and my son is grown up and I’ve had so many experiences, but I don’t think I ever mattered to anyone the way I mattered to her. When I would arrive at the hospital, she looked at me in a way no one had ever looked at me. She said to me one time, ‘You are an angel to me,’ and I tried to tell her ‘No,’ that I was just lucky to meet her and I wasn’t anything special, but I cried and cried later that day because I’m embarrassed to say that I had never felt needed like that before.

  “Do I sound pathetic?” she continued. “I hope not. But I guess that’s what I got back, now that you ask. I got back the belief that I mattered to someone. I don’t know what she received from me, but I can never thank her enough for helping me to believe that I mattered.”

  There is clearly a mysterious element to these “helping” encounters, but the mystery is not new. The Greeks had an expression, “give up what thou hast and thou wilt receive.” Jesus suggested that we find our lives in losing them. The woman who saw the eyes of a cancer patient and found her own value and worth, Sam finding a source of fun that he otherwise could not find—these are only recent installments in the universal human quest to capture in words what so often eludes words: how it is that there is a beautiful and fun part of ourselves that we can find only in giving ourselves to others, especially to those in the greatest need.

  We live in a time when individuality and self-advancement and competitive selfishness have been elevated nearly to the status of a religion—where more and more, we’re conditioned to believe that we are alone; solitary beings destined to make sense of the world only by making sense of ourselves. We’re on our own. We feel we have to fight to win at school, and fight to win at work. We’re fighting to be popular, to lose weight, to stay young. We’re even fighting to be happy and to avoid the most dreaded outcomes: loneliness, despair, defeat.

  Viktor Frankl was among the first modern psychologists to suggest that modernity need not be a trap of individuality. He wrote and practiced medicine after the Second World War and with the unique benefit of having known firsthand how people had found “meaning” in their lives despite the terrifying and desperate conditions of Nazi death camps. Frankl survived, but of course, millions did not, and it was in the face of the horrific evil and despair that Frankl discovered that human beings have a “defiant power” to seek and find meaning in one another. In countless lectures and interviews, Frankl discussed his bestselling books, Modern Man in Search of a Soul and Man’s Search for Meaning, but in discussion, he went even further than he went in writing. “Human beings are not primarily and originally concerned about intra psychic problems … they are normally, fundamentally, originally, primarily and basically concerned about something or someone out there in the world … Human beings survive … for the sake of a cause to serve or a person to love.” In another interview, he went still further: “Human beings are motivated by a spark—by the search for meaning … Human beings are fulfilled when they are recognized by another as a subject, not an object to be used but as a subject to be appreciated for his unique gifts. And the highest level of relationship is love when we see in the other person, not just the subjectivity of the person but the unique subjectivity of that person, the beauty of that person … Unconsciously,” Frankl added, “[we] harbor a directedness toward transcendence.”

  Frankl’s message isn’t far from Sam’s. The Hindu master Pandit Rajmani Tigunait frames the paradox of service in interiority: “Compassionate service helps to alleviate the pain of those who are suffering. But its greate
r value lies in purifying the minds and hearts of those who render it.” One could debate the meaning of “purifying” for years, but one thing seems certain: for many of us, it is when we give ourselves to others who are vulnerable that we lessen our fear of being vulnerable ourselves and we open up. In Frankl’s language, when we exercise our human ability to see the unique in one another, we become freed of our loneliness, our despair, our sense of being trapped in our own tensions. For a yoga master and meditation leader such as Tiguanait, when we render compassionate service, we become able to ease the distractions and illusions of separateness that the mind creates, and we can see more clearly and more purely the beauty and unity of ourselves and all beings. In the end, giving really is receiving, and the most important thing we can give away is fear and the most important thing we receive in return is our fearless self, loved by others, fully alive.

  Sam’s insight adds still another element to this picture: the power of games. The philosopher Friedrich von Schiller tried to understand the human experience of the body and the spirit and came close to Sam’s insight: “[Man] is only completely a man when he plays.” Schiller was trying to express the belief that a different type of consciousness emerges in play. What the mind cannot grasp from ideas or thoughts, he theorized, it intuits in imagination and play. I can just imagine Schiller in the gym at Katherine Thomas School, with all his erudition and knowledge of Greeks and Romans and medievals and moderns, trying to find the words to explain the aesthetics of the children running and laughing and bouncing their balls in chaotic and beautiful dances of play. I think he might have given up and agreed that Sam had it right: it’s the kind of fun that lasts.