One long-ago Christmas, a few weeks after my husband’s death, my children and I sat in the family room of new friends in California.
There were two pianos in the room and we sat, on that dark winter afternoon, listening as our host and his 10-year-old son, Karl, played a duet. Midway through the piece, Karl stumbled and began to fall behind a bit. Without pausing, his father called cheerfully over his shoulder, “Karl, keep going! It’s not whether you hit every note right. It’s whether you can recover.”
We saw Karl lean forward as he concentrated on the music, and he did catch up. He and his father finished the piece together, smiles on their faces, laughing and accepting the enthusiastic applause of their small audience.
“It’s not whether you hit every note right. It’s whether you can recover.” Words delivered from a young father to his young son, not carelessly or dismissively but in a spirit of generosity. Of respect and friendship. And the words worked. For the 10-year-old in the moment. And for me in the months to follow as I struggled with the broken pieces of an imperfect life.
Many years later, when my children were grown and I was learning to be a family therapist, I discovered the books and, later in a training workshop, the gentle and wise person of Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy*, the creator of the theory of Contextual Therapy.
What I appreciated most about Nagy’s vision of individual and family therapy was his understanding of the deep need we all have for fairness and justice in our relationships and, equally important, our need for ways to understand and cope with the injustice and perceived unfairness that is inevitable in family relationships.
I was comforted by his putting greater weight on a person’s good intentions and honorable motives than on the “right” outcome or the expected, hoped-for results. That seemed to me both generous and practical, given that we are human beings.
And so I carry with me both in my work and my life – which I find often look like the same thing—the words of the young father and the old teacher.
It’s not whether we hit every note right. It’s more about what we do after we haven’t hit the note right. It’s not about being perfect or trying to be. It’s about why we do what we do. It’s about what we do when we realize we’re not perfect and they’re not and nothing is. It’s about love and imperfection.
*Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy was a Hungarian-American psychiatrist and one of the founders of the field of family therapy. Contextual Therapy is based on the ideas of a person’s indebtedness to his or her family of origin, the influence of one’s biological relations, and concepts such as the consequences of ethical and unethical relating. You can read more about his theory of Contextual Therapy in his books, including Invisible Loyalties and Between Give and Take.