November 2022

If I could give one, just one, piece of parenting advice, it is this:

Give your children music lessons.

Granted, in some ways this advice is very selfish, because I am writing this about the pleasure I get from it.

Piano lessons are the gateway. Both of our children received piano lessons at an early age, teaching them the very basics of music: how to read and listen to music. From that foundation of piano lessons, our children branched out into violin, clarinet, and a host of stringed instruments (various guitars, mandolin, and ukulele). We even have a drumset in our house now.

Now, the sound of music fills our house – and not from the radio, or TV, or Pandora, but from our children sitting in their room. Sometimes they are practicing for band at school, playing scales and exercises and rehearing songs. Sometimes they are just sitting at their computer, watching a show or working on homework, and the lovely sounds of a classical guitar or ukulele or clarinet solo form the background music of our day.

While I don’t expect either of my children to make a career in music, selfishly I am glad that, for a period of our life, the sounds of their instruments fill our home.

Luthen Rael bared his soul in Episode 10 of Andor. And his recitation of his sacrifices, his intentional distancing of himself from morality and even humanity, is in line with my view of the pre-Luke Rebel Alliance: they are amoral and driven by their opposition to, maybe even hatred of, the Empire.

Luthen knows that his sacrifices are necessary to stop the Empire. But he recognizes his lost humanity in doing so.

And what do you sacrifice?

Luthen: Calm. Kindness. Kinship. Love.

I’ve given up all chance at inner peace. I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion, I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost and by the time I looked down there was no longer any ground beneath my feet.

What is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude.

So what do I sacrifice? Everything!