One long-ago Christmas, a few weeks after my husband\u2019s death, my children and I sat in the family room of new friends in California.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Midway through the piece, Karl stumbled and began to fall behind a bit.\u00a0 Without pausing, his father called cheerfully over his shoulder, \u201cKarl, keep going! It\u2019s not whether you hit every note right.\u00a0 It\u2019s whether you can recover.\u201d<\/p>\n
We saw Karl lean forward as he concentrated on the music, and he did catch up.\u00a0 He and his father finished the piece together, smiles on their faces, laughing and accepting the enthusiastic applause of their small audience.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not whether you hit every note right. It\u2019s whether you can recover.\u201d\u00a0 Words delivered from a young father to his young son, not carelessly or dismissively but in a spirit of generosity.\u00a0 Of respect and friendship.\u00a0 And the words worked.\u00a0 For the 10-year-old in the moment.\u00a0 And for me in the months to follow as I struggled with the broken pieces of an imperfect life.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
What I appreciated most about Nagy\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
I was comforted by his putting greater weight on a person\u2019s good intentions and honorable motives than on the \u201cright\u201d outcome or the expected, hoped-for results.\u00a0 That seemed to me both generous and practical, given that we are human beings.<\/p>\n
And so I carry with me both in my work and my life \u2013 which I find often look like the same thing\u2014the words of the young father and the old teacher.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not whether we hit every note right.\u00a0 It\u2019s more about what we do after we haven\u2019t hit the note right.\u00a0 It\u2019s not about being perfect or trying to be.\u00a0 It\u2019s about why we do what we do.\u00a0 It\u2019s about what we do when we realize we\u2019re not perfect and they\u2019re not and nothing is.\u00a0 It\u2019s about love and imperfection.<\/p>\n
*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\u2019s indebtedness to his or her family of origin, the influence of one\u2019s 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.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s about what we do when we realize we\u2019re not perfect, and they\u2019re not, and nothing is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1908,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1662","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"hentry","7":"category-news","9":"post-with-thumbnail","10":"post-with-thumbnail-large"},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/samaritanps.org\/sandbox-6-30-2018\/wp-content\/uploads\/holger-link-CSyT2auC69w-unsplash.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9HFgk-qO","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/samaritanps.org\/sandbox-6-30-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/samaritanps.org\/sandbox-6-30-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/samaritanps.org\/sandbox-6-30-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/samaritanps.org\/sandbox-6-30-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/samaritanps.org\/sandbox-6-30-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1662"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/samaritanps.org\/sandbox-6-30-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1662\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1673,"href":"https:\/\/samaritanps.org\/sandbox-6-30-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1662\/revisions\/1673"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/samaritanps.org\/sandbox-6-30-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/samaritanps.org\/sandbox-6-30-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/samaritanps.org\/sandbox-6-30-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/samaritanps.org\/sandbox-6-30-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}