Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC
MY WRITERS SITE: Letting go
MY WRITERS SITE: Letting go: I grew up in foster care. It sucked. As a young man I was drenched in near hopeless poverty. I suffered. But I eventually let it, the se...
Some days
Some days everything I do is a
mistake and then, at the end of the day, I remember that mistakes are proof
that I’m trying.
and remember to laugh because life is short
Letting go
I grew up in foster care. It
sucked. As a young man I was drenched in
near hopeless poverty. I suffered. But I
eventually let it, the self-induced suffering, go because it’s an oppressive
way of thinking and as the saying goes “The most potent weapon in the hands of
the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” So I taught myself to think positive
because we must let go of the negative but so many don’t. They have a hard time
letting go of their suffering out of a fear of the unknown, out of feat that
nothing will take its place so they prefer suffering that is familiar. Don’t be
one of those guys. Remember that to be able to look back on your life in
satisfaction is the greatest glory to God, to humanity, to your nation and to
yourself.
Badly dressed woman letting go of her suffering
Zen is a liberation from time
Several times a day I stop and
concentrate on the here and now especially when I find myself worrying or
wondering about the future or lamenting the past. By stopping all thoughts about
the past and the future I instantly recognize that there is no other time than
this instant, this very second and that what is past and what is before me are
little more than perceptions, perceptions with any solid reality.
Us and them
I work on having the will to
allow those that I love be who and what they are and not try to twist and turn
them into something that comes close to my own image and likeness. The reason I
work on this aspect of my life is that I have learned that if we try to mold those
we love into mini-versions of our self, reflections of us, we don’t really love
the person rather we love, as Thomas Merton said “Only their potential likeness to ourselves” which
belittles and dehumanizes them and us.
Dance happy and with grace and style because life is short!
Libraries raised me
The truth isn't always beauty,
but the hunger for it is. -Nadine Gordimer, novelist, Nobel laureate
Ray Bradbury wrote “Libraries
raised me” and they raised me as well. Here are some excerpts from my forthcoming
autobiography due out this spring.
#1
“She (A teacher) lit a fire in
me and reading became my passion. I became a familiar figure around the
children’s reading room at the wonderful old Ansonia library. It was built in
1891 as a gift of the fabulously rich Phelps family.
A large building by Ansonia standards, the
library was made of local granite and unglazed red Spanish tiles, with three
towers, natural quartered oak, and stone mosaic floors with representations of
Pegasus and Bellerophon, a Greek hero who specialized in killing monsters. It
had a large fireplace with a chimneypiece of rubbed red Lake Superior
freestone, ribbed barrel-vault ceilings and two tiers of leaded glass windows.
Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and knowledge, rested in the gable end of the
roof above the heavy oak doors of the entrance.
I spent hours in the children’s reading room,
perusing the titles, meticulously making my way through picture books meant for
children five years younger than I. But there in the wonderful quiet security
of the library, this place dedicated to learning and reason and knowledge,
where Walter couldn’t lean over my shoulder and berate me, I could take ten or
fifteen minutes to figure out what a word spelled by breaking it apart,
sounding out the parts and putting it all back together again. It didn’t matter
that I was reading baby books.
When I was done dissecting a difficult word,
I went back to the top of the paragraph and read the story, giving myself a
great sense of victory. I was winning the war of words, and, to my joy and
amazement, words weren’t my enemy. Words liked me and I liked them. They taught
me things, and they were witnesses when I won those tiny victories.”
#2
“The world was mine for the reading. I traveled
with my books. I was there on a tramp steamer in the North Atlantic with the
Hardy Boys, piecing together an unsolvable crime. I rode into the Valley of
Death with the six hundred and I stood at the graves of Uncas and Cora and
listened to the mournful song of the Lenni Linape. Although I braved a frozen
death at Valley Forge and felt the spin of a hundred bullets at Shiloh, I was
never afraid. I was there as much as you are where you are, right this second.
I smelled the gunsmoke and tasted the frost. And it was good to be there. No
one could harm me there. No one could punch me, slap me, call me stupid, or
pretend I wasn’t in the room. The other kids raced through books so they could
get the completion stamp on their library card. I didn’t care about that stupid
completion stamp. I didn’t want to race through books. I wanted books to walk
slowly through me, stop, and touch my brain and my memory. If a book couldn’t
do that, it probably wasn’t a very good book. Besides, it isn’t how much you
read, it’s what you read.
What I
learned from books, from young Ben Franklin’s anger at his brother to Anne
Frank’s longing for the way her life used to be, was that I wasn’t alone in my
pain. All that caused me such anguish affected others, too, and that connected
me to them and that connected me to my books. I loved everything about books. I
loved that odd sensation of turning the final page, realizing the story had
ended, and feeling that I was saying a last goodbye to a new friend.
I read To
Kill a Mockingbird outside the house, because the story concerned race and took a generally
sympathetic view toward blacks, and I knew it wouldn’t go over well.
Walter was an avowed racist and Helen always followed his lead. Neither Helen
nor Walter had lived much beyond their tiny universe, and they had no intention
of broadening their learning. So when I wasn’t reading the book, I tucked it
away in the inside pocket of my Sunday blazer, where, of course, Helen found
it.
And now
Helen was treading carelessly into my private world, and I thought that the bad
guys in the world had it all wrong: You don’t have to burn books to kill off
new ideas and growth. No, all you have to do is to make sure people stop
reading books; it has the same effect.
She was
waiting for me at the door, standing in the vestibule, when I got home from
school, and when I walked in she knocked me a good one over the head with the
book.
“You bring
this crazy Hollywood nigger trash into this house?” she hissed, waving the book
in my face, and then slapped me with it. It was a paperback, it didn’t hurt,
but I blew a fuse anyway.”
#3
“Books and
authors dated eras in my life and threw life-altering concepts at me that
shattered virtually everything I knew to be true, although, on reflection, I
suppose I had only guessed them to be true. I roamed the stacks of the Deep
River library, which didn’t allow St. John’s boys to take out a library card,
so I read what I could between the dimly lit, narrow shelves, always feeling
that I had wasted much of my time by not being there more often. I made great
friends in those books that I found there. I could trust my friends Hemingway
and Fitzgerald and the others who were, and who remain, my most constant
friends. They are always there, offering good counsel and sage advice,
patiently waiting to teach more with every drop of ink.
My purpose
in reading was to learn, so my preference was nonfiction. Books were my
educators, so I tried to read only what I could use later. It was a good
theory, but I scanned everything that interested me, and it seemed that
everything in that library interested me. Discipline and focus leaves me when I enter a library or a
bookstore. It is one of my better bad habits.
Unlike
most teens, I didn’t read to find something to believe in, or to invalidate a
societal truth, or to contradict common knowledge. I read books so I could
weigh and consider what the author was proposing. You learn more that way.”
#4
“I wandered the streets that summer, looking for
something to do when I found the city library, and that was where I escaped
from hell into paradise.
The Silas
Bronson Library was a sleek, modern glass building settled into an expansive
park, a popular cruising area for homosexuals on the prowl and teenage hustlers
willing to help them out for a fee. One afternoon I was sitting on a park
bench, reading, oddly enough, Moby-Dick,
when I was approached by a very respectable-looking man in his late sixties.
“I’m
sixteen, under age,” I snapped. “Go away, or I will call the police.”
He was
outraged, and snapped back, “Then why are you here?”
“To read,”
I said, holding up my copy of Moby-Dick,
although in retrospect that probably wasn’t a good idea.
The
library had a respectable book collection and I spent most of my days haunting
its aisles, scanning the shelves for
titles by the great American novelists. I found most of them, and I usually
devoured them in a day, lying on the bench in the park with my book and one of
my mother’s massive brown-bag lunches.
I
dissolved into the books I found at the library, which could take me places,
answer my questions, and leave me with more questions. I learned the great
truths and common principles from those works, mostly because I had no one else
to teach me those things. Books are great teachers and they teach with ease for
those hungry to learn. And I was learning. I was learning to live with poverty,
the toughest teacher of all because it gives you the test first and the lesson
later. The ancient Greeks called it pathemata mathemata—to learn, eventually, by suffering.”
Defeated
I have been defeated a couple
of hundred times in this life so far, and I suppose I will be defeated a couple
of hundred times more before it’s over for me. And I count those defeats in not
just big things, life altering events, but in tiny and seemingly insignificant
events as well. A defeat is a defeat, the difference is the consequence. But in
all of that I have never been finished off because I have never quit and that’s
when your defeats win, when you quit. The old adage is true “A man is not finished
when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits.”
Invest now and don't pay later
Frederick Douglas said “It is
easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” and if we keep
cutting funds to social services that aid the poor and help to pull them out of
poverty we are going to have a lot of broken, angry men in our nations future.
and remember to laugh because life is so short.............
Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one.
“Nobody ever became a writer
just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel
nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will
find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing
you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as
if they were conceived together.” F.
Scott Fitzgerald, in a letter to his daughter Scottie (1936)
Zola
“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an
artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.” Émile Zola
Logic
“Logic is an organized way to go wrong with confidence. We
should all know by now that a logical course is not always the right one.” Charles F. Kettering
Insouciance
“Insouciance” A
French loanword, insouciance describes a tranquil mind at its most peaceful
state. One is free from concern, worry, or anxiety; nonchalance is the key
emotion displayed at this moment. Indifference and composure are signs of
displaying insouciance, but the word’s most compelling attribute lie in its
aesthetic and phonetic rhythm.. Insouciance is a regal and sophisticated word,
it holds an undetectable attribute and the coolness of nonchalance by
pronouncing it.
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