Background:
I interviewed my piano teacher, an upper middle class white woman from my hometown. She is a single mother to two college-aged daughters, one of whom is very sick. Her main hobby, when she is not teaching music, is mountain climbing. She is also very religious and champions many causes through her church. For every country she climbs mountains in, she also organizes collection drives and donations to give back to those communities. I have always admired her for her strength, determination, and patience as well as her dedication to leaving the world better than she found it. Below is my interview of her, focusing on her values and beliefs.
The interview lasted around 20 minutes. It was originally recorded and later transcribed to its current format.
Interview:
Me: “How have your values changed throughout your life?”
Her: “Ok. Of course when I was little I took the values of my parents. Very strict Catholic. And as time went on I saw that… you have to be more open. I was raised to believe that being homosexual was a sin and it was something that was very bad. But now I think that whoever wants to have a union can have a union if they want to. Even the pope changed his stance! The fact that I know several people who are gay, and they have loving relationships, and have actually adopted children of their own, and they’re doing fine. And I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s none of our business what your sexual preference is. Just accept people. For who they are. That’s one change.”
“And the other one is that being exposed to different people of different cultures and economic backgrounds made me aware that people are, to me, basically very good everywhere. My values completely changed on how you can live. I mean those [the people living in Nepal and Tanzania] are the happiest people on Earth, but they have so little. I saw some of the poorest people, yet I came back so enriched. If you remember Lowundo? [She would encourage us to bring old clothes, blankets, and sheets, and she would donate them to a refugee family which Lowundo was part of] Every week he taught me Swahili. I’d come to his house, and he had a family of 8 kids and then grandchildren and nieces and nephews, and the people from his church. Everybody was congregating there. He was such a good man, and he never asked for anything. But we brought him stuff right? [laughs] lots of stuff. And of course the sherpas from Nepal and from Tanzania. How they opened my mind and heart to the goodness of others with all sorts of religious beliefs. The sherpas were so helpful. I mean, I was sitting on a rock crying because I was so exhausted-”
Me: “What happened?”
Her: “I had altitude sickness and double pneumonia. I was so tired, but they encouraged me, and they told me to get up and take a picture, and I still have it right here [points at picture.] The main guy, it was so… He would kneel on the mountaintop and pray for hours. And he believed he had visions. Lots of them. He actually saw, like, hundreds of snakes running through the ground, and they were evil. I mean he told me stories of this sort, and I didn’t laugh at him. I just thought, this is what he believes, this is what he saw, could be true!”
“I value nature much more. I always did. But after hiking in the Adirondacks many many times, and after hiking the Camino across France and across Spain in the rural areas there, and climbing the mountains in Africa and Asia… leave no trace is an absolute. And the fact that there’s pollution everywhere is very frightening. The fact that there are actually factories now, along the road to Mt. Everest, to use all the plastic that’s left. All those bottles of water. You would think that people could just bring their own purifier and keep using the same bottle.”
“And I love all animals of course. Each little dog I seem to love more than the last one. Not because they’re any better, but because I realize that they are such… they have so much love to give. And we have so much love to give them. Animals, they’re just our friends. And they’re basically very very good. And he [Nico, her dog] lives for the love. [laughs] Okay, those are some values.”
Me: “How do you think your values would be different if you had grown up with my generation instead of your own?”
Her: “I probably would’ve been much more open earlier on. And I would’ve jumped into helping earlier, whatever it would be. Community involvement, global involvement, I mean, what you guys do. We didn’t have that then. We didn’t even have soccer back then.”
Me: “You didn’t have girls’ soccer, or you didn’t have soccer at all?”
Her: “Well, we had girls basketball. We didn’t have soccer.”
Me: “Are there any notable instances you can think of where you have stood up or taken action for your values?”
Her: “Well, even though hardly anybody goes to Church these days, I’m a lector, so I started going back as soon as we were allowed. And last week, the last time I spoke, a couple came up to me and I had to roll down my window because they thanked me so profusely for reading. They said that I read with such expression that it affects the whole congregation. So, piano kind of goes into that [laughs]. Sticking up for my values…. I remember working as a director of marketing at Theater Place downtown, and there was this huge explosion on North Division Street. Hundreds and hundreds of families, very poor families, had their lives wrecked. The houses were, like, either blown up or there were such major cracks that they didn’t have heat, they didn’t have food. So I stood up and did a major collection and called a pastor in that area - he was not Catholic, he was from that area- and we had a caravan and we went house to house delivering what they needed. This pastor told us what every family needed, and we did that.”
Me: “If you had to pick a single belief/value that dictates your decisions the most, what would it be and why?”
Her: “I would take the greatest of all Commandments. That is to love God with all your heart and soul and love your neighbor as yourself. And you live your life that way. Then, you will always be giving to others, you will love yourself, and put nobody else second.”
Me: “Is there anything that you value that you wish you didn’t believe in/think you’d be better off without? If so, what is it and why?”
Her: “Abortion is a really hard one. I wish that I could say it’s just plain wrong and let each person have their child because from conception on there’s life. HOWEVER! There is the dilemma. What about the people who absolutely cannot handle a child. Or if the child is a result of rape. If the child will be born extremely deformed. If the mother has no means to bring up this child. It’s such a heavy one. I am against the abolishing of Roe vs Wade, but I wish I wasn’t. And I am the living proof that adoption isn’t always great. That there is a tremendous stigma on the child who is adopted that sometimes never goes away [she is speaking from her own personal experience with adoption as her children are both adopted]. So, don’t tell me “adopt” because you think you’re doing something really good, but in reality, they don’t want it. A lot of them. And many, many adopted kids are messed up. So, it’s tough.”
Reflection:
My piano teacher's answers shattered many internalized biases that I didn’t realize I had, especially considering the older generation. Before, I believed that people, once they reached a certain age or practiced a certain faith were not liable to educate themselves or change their opinion once it had formed. The culture difference between my generation and the generation before felt so great that conversations about political correctness and the importance of certain social issues would be wasted on people who would never try to understand. Now I realize how extremely unproductive and unfair that belief is. It is unacceptable to give anyone a free pass on their beliefs just because of their age. It is also unacceptable to stereotype an entire generation of people as unchangeable. While my generation may seem to have a completely separate culture and set of values from earlier generations, that is simply because of the natural influence of both parties' experiences on their beliefs. Beliefs that can change and evolve over the course of a lifetime as one is exposed to new perspectives; while my piano teacher was born and raised “a very strict Catholic” and is still very religious, her more liberal stance on abortion and her open-mindedness concerning other religions and LGBTQ+ rights, seem to stem from her direct exposure to the impact of these issues on people's lives. Refusing to discuss your beliefs with someone or educate them on issues important to you for fear of disagreement or because you think they won't care means that you are starving them of exposure to new experiences or ideas that might change their mind. Not only that, but you are also starving yourself of the chance to perhaps understand them a little better too.
As a society, we should be willing to accept ideas that may confuse or scare us with grace and rationality. It is okay if our pride gets hurt, or if we seem like the most ignorant ones in the room, because that is the only pathway to true, value-altering education. My piano teacher must have felt like a fish out of water when she went to Nepal and Tanzania, but she put the people she was there to help first, and she accepted the fact that she might have to be the one that needed to look at things differently as she was introduced to something new. Only with that mindset can society actually progress. While it is imperative that we demand change from people who repeatedly ignore fundamental rights, it is also imperative that we stop taking differing world-views as personal attacks on our pride or beliefs. Life should be less of a practice in finding evidence to support our preconceived notions and more of an exploration into the alternate perspectives that our life experiences introduce us to.
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