The Seventeenth Tip For Success: View Everything as a Gift

Monday, April 14, 2014


Yesterday I shared sixteen tips for success.  This list was something I came across while a student at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.  And yet the list is useful regardless of whether you are a student in an academic program or not.  Reviewing the list was a good activity for a gloomy Sunday afternoon.

Today I am going to share another piece of wisdom about how to live.  This piece of wisdom was offered by a Holocaust survivor who lived to the age of 110.  Her name was Alice Herz-Sommer.  She died earlier this year.  If you google her name you will find plenty about her life story.  It is an amazing story.  The greatest darkness she lived through was the time of the Nazis in Germany.  She lost family members in World War II.  The following is taken directly from an article written by Maev Kennedy that appeared in The Guardian in February of this year.  If you want to read the full article please look here.

Her talent was recognised when she was only five, and she had lessons with Conrad Ansorge, who had been a pupil of Franz Liszt ("as a pianist, extraordinary, as a teacher, not so good", she told the Guardian).

By her mid-teens she herself was teaching and touring as a pianist. She married her musician husband, Leopold Sommer, a fortnight after meeting him in 1931, and they had one son, Raphael, who became a concert cellist.

In an interview with the Guardian a few years after she reluctantly gave up daily swims at the age of 97, she recalled that the three were allowed to stay on in their flat, with Nazi neighbours on every side, for some time after Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and most of the Jews of Prague were sent to a ghetto. Then in 1943 the inevitable order came: they were sent to Theresienstadt.

"The evening before this we were sitting in our flat. I put off the light because I wanted my child to sleep for the last time in his bed. Now came my Czech friends: they came and they took the remaining pictures, carpets, even furniture. They didn't say anything; we were dead for them, I believe. And at the last moment the Nazi came – his name was Hermann – with his wife. They bought biscuits and he said, 'Mrs Sommer, I hope you come back with your family. I don't know what to say to you. I enjoyed your playing – such wonderful things, I thank you.' The Nazi was the most human of all."

In another interview she recalled asking: "If they have an orchestra in Terezin, how bad can it be?" Despite being run as a show camp to impress visitors including the Red Cross, almost 35,000 prisoners died there, including her mother. Herz-Sommer's music saved her life: she became a member of the camp orchestra, and played in more than 150 concerts, including special performances for the Red Cross inspectors. Her husband died soon after being moved to Auschwitz and then Dachau in 1944, but her son, who also performed in children's operas, was among 130 survivors of 15,000 children sent to the camp.

Though I learned enough details about World War II in high school to create a ghastly picture in my mind's eye of the scale of the suffering unleashed in that time it still feels like a punch to the stomach when I read accounts that describe mere children being sent off to camps.

I think what most amazes me about Alice's life is that she not only survived the War and its manifold forms of suffering but she somehow managed to retain her optimism and not become entrapped in bitterness at the unjust treatment she experienced.  She lived a full life.  She apparently did not ruminate on past transgressions or witnessed acts of cruelty.  Her love of music saved her.  She focused on the good and beauty in life to the exclusion of the dark and wicked.  She did not let her suffering consume her.

I have not let my own suffering consume me necessarily...but it has nonetheless been difficult to move on beyond the pain of last year.  I have never been sent to a concentration camp.  And yet I once lived on a Native American reservation and have thus seen something like what you see in a place specially designed to contain a group of people deemed 'undesirable'.  I was never unjustly beaten by police like some minorities have experienced in my own country.  But I have been affected by police corruption.  Did I go to music camp when I was five?  No.  But I did participate in high school concert and marching band.  In many respects I have had a good life.

I am inclined to believe that Alice's perspective that 'Everything is a gift' is the only real way to live in a world that is full of plenty of disillusioning circumstances.  Rather than concentrate on the lack of what we don't yet have or crave we must instead reorient our very thinking process and focus on what is good in our lives.  Look at the light rather than the darkness.  This does not mean we do not acknowledge the existence of the darkness...but acknowledging something is not the same as succumbing to it.  And so I wish to challenge myself and anyone who reads my blog to consider the wisdom of Alice's perspective.  She lived to 110 years of age and survived one of the most frightening and turbulent periods in European history.  And yet she did more than survive.  Her spirit remained intact.  She relished life.  Do you relish life?


I want to relish my own life.  And yet I am still struggling some days to do so.  My grief is the central issue.  I can't imagine it is realistic to expect anyone to miraculously adapt to a whole new way of seeing the world when the old way is something you have unconsciously adhered to for decades.  Yes, I did not have the same amazing gift of the influence of music throughout my earliest years.  But I did have music to some extent.  And I had love.  And yet because the sadness and grief inside me remained unacknowledged, unexplored and therefore un-exorcised the foul taint of bitterness grew within me...at least somewhat.  I want to find my way completely back.

I have heard it said that 'youth is wasted on the young.'  I believe I understand that better now.  You see part of my grief is connected to my feeling that I have not truly appreciated the vitality and beauty of my youth.  Turning forty and undergoing this tremendous transformation was such a wakeup call.  To those in their twenties being forty may sound old.  But to 110 year old Alice I would have probably appeared to be a boy with man-like features! Ha!

When I lived in Chicago and attended Loyola University Chicago I studied St. Augustine.  The following from Augustine's Confessions has been in my thoughts as of late:

“Too late have I loved you, O Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! Too late I loved you! And behold, you were within, and I abroad, and there I searched for you; I was deformed, plunging amid those fair forms, which you had made. You were with me, but I was not with you. Things held me far from you—things which, if they were not in you, were not at all. You called, and shouted, and burst my deafness. You flashed and shone, and scattered my blindness. You breathed odors and I drew in breath—and I pant for you. I tasted, and I hunger and thirst. You touched me, and I burned for your peace”

Sometimes it seems so late, too late, that I have loved myself, my life and the world around me.  My blindness has been scattered.  I pant for new life now too.  I hunger and thirst for a vivid and luscious and three dimensional life unlike anything I ever lived before.  I have woken up to the beauty of the Cosmos of which I am a part.

View everything as a gift my dear reader for that is the truth of this world.  In exclaiming that everything is a gift I believe Alice somehow saw the core truth of this realm we live in we call reality.

Everything is a gift.