To be content

It might be fanciful. No one who was there was alive when the book was written, but let's just assume that the writer did her homework and wasn't making things up. I don't doubt for a moment that she researched the ritual; it wouldn't have been impossible to find out what, exactly, was said at something as important to the Omaha people as a naming ritual--and this child, after all, was the headman's daughter, Suzette LaFlesche, daughter of Joseph Iron Eye LaFlesche. 

Just before she goes into the tent where she will meet the head-dressed priest of the Omaha's religion, Suzette's mother prays: "I desire for my daughter to walk long upon the earth. I desire her to be content with the light of many days." 

The line sticks with me for some reason, perhaps because it would be difficult for me to imagine any mother I know to bring her son or daughter before the God and ask of him a similar request: "I desire her to be content with the light of many days." 

Her praying for blessing is as universal as the dawn, but what most of us want in and from our children--and grandchildren--is to be exceptional in some way, to win, to succeed, to rise to the top of the ladder by buckling up her bootstraps and taking on the world. We want happiness, sure, but we want it to come by way of success. We'd like action, not passivity. 

We want our children to win, not just get along. It seems a peculiar petition, to ask God to bless our kids with contentedness. Cows are content. I couldn't help thinking that that Native mom's request didn't seem at all natural. We thrive on competition, as does nature itself. 

You don't have to be an evolutionist to know the truth of natural selection. When wolves get hungry, they eat whatever they can bring down, the animal that is slowest or weakest. Only the strong survive, right? 

Two small colleges exist side-by-side out here in the northwest college of Iowa. They are remarkably similar; in fact, only a native knows anything about their differences--and those differences are almost entirely historic, back there somewhere in a history that neither care much about. They both sell themselves and attempt to be "Christian" colleges, and both struggle in the present climate, demographic charts dangerously pointed at a smaller and smaller student base. 

I once told the President of one of them that I thought it would be not only gracious but prudent for the two colleges to think about sharing facilities and faculty when it was possible. He shook his head. "Competition is good for both of us," he said. 

And he's likely right, at least partly right. That's what I was thinking about--how important competition is to our way of life and how odd it would be to hear a loving mother asking God to bless her daughter with being content. 

Case in point?--the world's attention is set in Tokyo right now, the Olympics, where competition is measured in hundredths of seconds, where the difference between taking home the gold and going home a loser is can be shown only on photograph taken at a finish line. 

Stories galore emanate from any Olympic competition. There's the shocking story of Linda Jacoby, a 17-year-old swimmer from Seward, Alaska, hardly a swimmer's haven, to win the gold in the 100 breast-stroke. And there's the incredible story of Simone Biles, the marquee Olympian representing the USA, whose body simply wouldn't do what it supposed to do, what it had practiced for so long and so hard and so competitively for years already, refusing to twist the 2 1/2 times it was supposed to, hampered by a condition gymnasts call "the twisties." 

When it happened, she failed and quit, not because she failed but because she understood that what was in her wasn't going to be enough to bring her to the excellence that's typified her routines for so long. 

Was it a physical problem? She said no. It was a mental problem. Her failure was spectacularly newsworthy because so completely unexpected. She's made of tough stuff, after all. She's practiced her life away. She's accomplished things on the mat that thousands of others could only have dreamed of. Then, she feels "the twisties" and pulls on her sweats? Really. 

There is no question that competitions sharpens us, toughens us, makes some of us champions. But Suzette LaFleshe's mother wasn't letting her daughter down by asking God to help her be content. Being able to live with yourself is no small blessing. 

Consider this too--when Simone Biles didn't finish that 2 1/2, she didn't run into the locker room and bawl. She pulled on her sweats and went right back out to cheer on her teammates. We should be proud of the strength of her contentedness.