For my final interview, I spoke with my father Steve. He owns a landscape maintenance business, because he loves experiencing what nature has to offer day by day. He grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family but began practicing Buddhism after the tragedy of my sister’s stroke. I rarely speak with my dad about life and the lessons we gain knowledge from. Steve has taught me so much over the years. Sharing similarities and values with my father reinforced my value of the importance of family. Talking to him about the challenging experiences we have shared as family made this interview a powerful one.
What are the interviewee’s core values? What does he believe?
Steve believes in empathy, integrity and valuing life’s flaws. He disapproves of cheating people to make more money. He puts his heart into every job even if his customers are oblivious. He loves feeling satisfied with his own work. Integrity helps him continue feeling pleased with himself. Steve covered many jobs like painting houses, bar tending and working at the bank. As a young adult he didn’t know what he wanted for a career. Steve believes experiencing many jobs, having money dilemmas, and raising three children has helped him grow to be empathetic. Now he over tips the waiters at restaurants, even if they’re slow or mess up his order. “I also have empathy for people having troubles in their life, because I have gone through some difficult times in my own life” he told me. These tough events have taught him that “opening up to other people’s vulnerabilities make you stronger.”
What is a story and/or metaphor that the interviewee used to illustrate his values and beliefs?
He believes in being happy regardless of the rough things we experience in life. “If you place too much of an expectation on stuff it will cause you to be unhappy” he told me. I asked him about a sensitive time in my family’s past, when my sister Jasmine was lured into the world of human trafficking. I was twelve years old when a pimp robbed her from herself. She was brainwashed. I remember the day she came home, and the Jasmine I knew growing up just seemed to vanish. It still tears both of us up to talk about this family tragedy. This experience helped shape his views on his attitude toward unbending situations. “You just have to deal with life as it comes” he said. He believes you can gain strength from painful feelings like disappointment and sorrow.
Addie’s stroke was another incident that formed his values. “I feel like she opened up a world for us that we knew nothing about”. He spoke about Addie being such a gift, and that he has learned so much about himself. He hardly ever begins to question what Addie would be like if she were normal. “That’s just the way she is” he said. “Just as she learned to walk she got hit with a stroke. It got a point where I wasn’t really hoping for anything and I wasn’t really afraid of anything. Usually you have either hope or fear in your life, and I was just at a very calm place where I was just living moment to moment” he said. He wanted to learn how to live that way without having to go through a tragedy. This is why Steve began practicing Buddhism.
What are the “hard questions” about the interviewee’s values and beliefs? How would he respond to those questions?
“I was brought up a fundamentalist Christian and for the longest time there just seemed to be something not right about it. I felt like I just didn’t fit.” He described a dream he had when he was little where his brothers and parents were faking their Christianity, and they turned out to be demons. He was terrified that he wasn’t being a good Christian, and he would end up in hell. “I just always felt like I was different from the rest of the family” he said. “I didn’t question my families values as a kid even though I had these dreams and feelings,” but he felt forced to believe instead of choosing to. In college he found himself in a complicated position when he discovered his beliefs were different from his family’s. “I use to wish that I would have the same beliefs as my family, it would have made thing easier and it wouldn’t threaten their world view.”
Fundamentalist Christianity was unnatural to Steve because he was constantly afraid. I wonder if he would have experienced anxiety if his parents didn’t drag him to church every Sunday. I have noticed a pattern in our culture. Authority figures attempt to mold the next generation in our public school system, social settings and our homes. My dad believes that “people like to use religion to control people, so that they can have power over others”. I reflected on this for a while, and it occurred to me that Steve’s parents may have endeavored controlling his religious beliefs because they loved him. I asked if he thought their control may have related to their love for him. “They loved me, but the way they brought me up was because they feared god”. I wonder why we sometimes don’t perceive our own fear. Maybe people are too afraid to even see it. Almost like an alcoholic in denial, humans have a strange ability of counterfeiting reality.
How has your perspective on your own beliefs and values changed as a result of the interview? What was your biggest takeaway that will influence your final credo?
We aren’t always in control of the things that approach us in life, but we are in control of our attitude towards them. I believe the only way one can find happiness is by learning from tragedies and living moment to moment like my dad. I believe that if life were perfect it wouldn’t be as valuable.
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