The Hollow Inch

Mary Seat of Wisdom

Keep your psychics and sages, your self-help gurus and psychologists. Set the well-meaning priests, rabbis and imams on the side. Thank your best friend and your sweetheart for their kind words. But the bottom line is that the best advice you can or ever will receive is from your mother.

If you were fortunate enough to have had a good mother, you have a sense of what I mean. If you were doubly blessed to have had a mother educated at the Higher Institute of Hard Knocks, then you know even better what I feel so deeply. Your best adviser is always someone who loves you unconditionally. Although there may be others, nine times out of ten that person is your mother.

Because my brain sometimes works as well as a hair-clogged vacuum cleaner, I often forget just how smart my mother was. She wasn’t highly educated—Class of ‘61 at Bay Ridge High School in Brooklyn—but hot damn, was she street smart. I only ever remember her true brilliance when I’m faced with a thorny problem. And then I tip my gaze skyward and mouth my thanks.

The lessons we learn in childhood seep so deeply into our beings as to become indistinguishable and inseparable from us as our height, eye color or the lilt of our walks. The lessons themselves might fade like a scar or grow deeper like a wrinkle but nevertheless they remain.

There are times in my life that I have almost forgotten my early lessons. But recently I had to make a difficult decision and was reminded once again about Ma’s wisdom. Something about the situation I was facing wasn’t sitting quite right. I knew if I said no I might be disappointing some people. But in my gut I also knew that if I said yes I would be disappointing myself. Hairbrained though I might be, I had enough sense to know that if I disappointed myself, I’d also be disappointing a lot more people. I’m not particularly charming when unhappy and being so would make everyone around me certifiably miserable. So I decided to say no. In doing so, I realized once again that I had strength I often forget that I have.

Some people were surprised by my decision. Others told me I had to do what I felt was best. I still don’t know if that latter group disagreed with me, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. God knows how often I’ve needed the very same benefit.  

All I know is that my decision felt right and still does. I’m proud of my strength in the matter, even though the decision I finally made still doesn’t completely resolve my problems.

What I do know is this personal crisis got me to thinking about where I had found the strength to say no. Depending on one’s beliefs, strength like that either comes from Without or Within—mysterious places that have neither scientifically verifiable explanation of cause nor specific boundaries of existence.

Frankly, what one believes doesn’t matter. We all have a reserve of strength that we can’t completely explain.

For me, I’m sure that strength comes from Without. The most direct source of that strength in my life was my mother. From her, I learned how to stand up for myself even when I felt all shaky inside. She taught me three valuable lessons that hum throughout my being even if I’m not always conscious of them. The lessons are as follows:

• Never give up.

• Never settle.

• Never do something that doesn’t feel right. 

When I think back on Ma’s life, I can see pretty clearly that she followed these rules as well as humanly possible. Not that she was perfect. She could often drive me nuts. But her life and her lessons give me an almost Platonic example of living to follow. With my recent thorny problem, I had to employ those last two lessons in order to follow the first. Once I saw the problem through her eyes, it became easier to make the right call.

Here’s the truest conditional sentence I know: If Grace comes to any of us, it comes through hard knocks and experience and the wisdom that comes thereafter. Because my devout mother had had basketfuls of the former, she had ample amounts of the latter. And although I wish she had had less of a hard life, I’m grateful to have been on the receiving end of her wisdom. Because at the core of her wisdom is a hollow inch that she never compromised.

There is a hollow inch inside of each one of us. And inside that inch lives all of the things that make us exactly who we are. Give that inch away, compromise on what we hold dear, and we would no longer be unique. We would not be extraordinary. We would belong to the crowd and the mob. We would become a commodity, willing to trade what we are for some short-term need. If we give up that hollow inch, in which our souls and selves exist in their most ideal state, we take on the most unbearable thing: being something other than what we have divinely been called to be.

Never give up. Never settle. Never do something that doesn’t feel right. These are the lessons I want to pass down to my kids. I don’t care if they’re rich or successful. I don’t care what the material world offers them. I want them to be themselves in a world ever trying to turn them into something else. I want them to be good people who find work they love and who leave the world a better place for having come into it.

Never give up. Never settle. Never do something that doesn’t feel right. These are the lessons I also want to pass over to you, if you’ve gotten this far in my ramble.

You’ve got a hollow inch inside of you that you should never compromise. It was formed somewhere way back in your past, maybe in your childhood, and you should never let anyone push so hard against the walls of that inch as to crush you out of existence. You might be afraid. You might feel weak. You might feel like you can’t do it. We’ve all been there. But people who have faced much harder things in life than us have held onto their own hollow inches and never let themselves be crushed. And if they can do it, we can too.