The importance of guidance, mentor, advice from someone who went through, someone who can show and teach a specific technique, receiving unconditional love,
someone who can show the big picture, someone who can show how to solve a math problem, someone just being behind you covering your back; precious and essential.
Of course, the journey itself is ours alone. But without them, we can be lost not knowing exactly what to do.
Looking at myself, people around me and zooming out to the world affairs, it comes back again and again to the importance of the infrastructure of guidance along the way of our lives. Someone who is there to help us and guide us until we earn our confidence in life. Not a blind confidence but confidence earned through much efforts.
Watching the PBS news last night, there were two segments about the importance of guidance, mentor, role model in black community I’ve been reading and watching a lot of those kind of stories for a long time. I understood and wholeheartedly agreed. But I guess it didn’t touch my heart until I realized that that is the theme of my recurring nightmarish dreams. I’m a confident man who found a certain peace but the nightmare lingers. Just to remind myself where I’m coming from, I guess. It could be a long and interesting story but a story you transcend, overcome and quietly go beyond.
Looking at many of the characters in the world stage right now, I can see most of them wake up some nights in cold sweat with nightmares. If they don’t wake up in nightmares, they have been broken by them, already. No transcendence, no overcoming, no earning confidence, no gaining peace. Those boys/girls just grotesquely broken.
Lack of guidance have been the nightmare of black community. The leaders of the community are putting much much efforts trying to build the infrastructure of guidance and networking.
It is a universal, individual, and fundamental human necessity.
We all need guidance but our focus is on our next generation and the generation after that, and surely it continues. The world will continue to get better but human nightmare will try to hop on the journey, also.
글로벌웹진 NEWSROH ‘이명동의 세계인한국인’
