This I Believe

It’s funny how you can keep on losing—having to give things up in life—and yet find you’re really gaining all the time. First half of my life had seemed so rich. Oh, not money. But I had health, youth, people I loved around me, talent, and an absorbing virtuoso’s career intensely sacrificed and worked for from my tenth year. I was fired with enormous joy in my music, intoxicated with the power of emotional utterance, which came with playing and with the of power giving pleasure to others.

Then arthritis struck: no use of my hands for one year followed by ten years of only partial recovery, during which I forced myself to play publicly but with the frustration of severe handicap. With World War II, I stopped this to become a boundary supervisor for the USO servicemen’s lounges at Grand Central and Pennsylvania Stations in New York. There at last, I was happy again because I could give freely, as I was trained to do with my playing. So my own defeats were forcing me to look outward for relief. And already, other people’s happiness and problems had become more important to me than my own.

Last year, facing an emergency operation, I was told I might live only another hour or two. Suddenly I saw how great the feast had been: how much kindness; how much love, great and small, had been showered upon me; the courage, loyalty, and idealism I had met and shared; the wonderful and beautiful people I had known—their human foibles, their great generosity, and their immortal spirits.

A sense of incredible richness overwhelmed me, and I realized that right then I loved everyone so much, I was not a bit concerned for myself—past, present, or future. I’d learned not to care. This was crazy, but it was good medicine, too. Where were the losses born through all those years? There had never really been any, and I was finally richer for being stripped of everything—even the prospect of life, just as the Bible had promised.

All treasure in this world lies in the human heart and spirit. But for many years, I refused to accept happiness or perfection, which could not be related to my heart. Now the pattern created by any single life is more important to me than the greatest art. A twinkle of light in a friendly eye is brighter than the flash of jewels. It can be lost and never replaced. It’s beyond price. So is the beauty of a smile, and every other human thing. And so is the secret thread of happiness upon which each human heart depends.

However poor, we each have something unique within ourselves to give to a particular need, a gift to the human spirit itself, and so a spark of the divine. Perhaps a moment of pleasure, a story, or tune for forgetfulness; or a reminder that someone cares. Whatever it takes to bring happiness to another’s face, that’s what makes me feel like a king. But I’m beggar and king in one. For the supreme, long need of my existence turns out to be not talent or achievement, nor success, nor even health, but simply love, as Jesus meant it. So I believe that we need each other more than anything else in this world, and that the kingdom of heaven is right here, now, inside us.