Dear Reader,
The most underrated leg up in life is having a good mentor. While I have great parents, I also believe it is important to have mentors who are not your parents. Whether they are general life mentors or trade mentors. A lot of times it is easier to hear something from someone who is not your parent even if they say the same thing. It is also nice to get an objective opinion from an outside perspective on an old subject. It’s also easier to discuss a bad grade with someone who is not your parent. And even though your parents may be the most supportive people in the world, their support can only go so far when it comes to learning things in a field that they are not familiar with. And having a mentor sure beats trying to piece together things from YouTube. I have been blessed to have many good mentors in my life, whether they were in my life for a long time or just offered some needed advice in a passing moment.
No matter how many good mentors that you know personally, there will always be people that you have never met a day in your life. They may have even been dead before you were born, yet somehow, you feel that you know them personally. There have been several people who have influenced my life just because of their work. It was almost like I had a whole host of tutors for every subject that I needed to succeed in life.
For politics and current events, I was tutored by Rush Limbough from ages 8-21 at 12-3 PM EST every weekday. What was at first an overstimulating and anxiety inducing 3 hours with my dad in the truck, eventually turned into a 3-hour session of what exactly what was going on in the world. Even if there was nothing to be done, it was nice to have everything mapped out for me, which eventually led to me to be able to interpret current events for myself. Sometimes when I accidentally turn on the AM radio I expect to hear his gruff and slightly tired, “Ladies and Gentlemen” coming through the static.
My logic and reason tutor would be Baxter Black famous for his cowboy poetry and column “On the Edge of Common Sense.” This was one of the first things that I religiously read in a magazine. My dad used to read it to me when it involved a story that he thought I would find particularly interesting. When my reading skills were up to par, I read it on my own. To me it wasn’t anything particularly exceptional about it other than that it was funny and there were inside jokes about ranching. Now I realize that his writing made me feel understood because there are things that ranchers experienced that only other ranchers would really relate to. By writing about what he saw in the ranching world, he bridged the gap between ranchers who are famous for not communicating how they feel. But he did it with wit and humor, the only way ranchers are really comfortable expressing emotion. Eventually, I was able to take what I saw in the world and communicate it logically in a way that people understood the picture that I was trying to paint.
My next mentor can’t really be thought of as a tutor, more like the ranch hand that your dad sends you with to help build fence with when he isn’t really sure what do with you. I don’t know why fencing is the best talk therapy you can get, I guess most people hate fencing enough that they would rather face their deepest thoughts than the boring reality of the job. R.W. Hampton, a cowboy singer, is one of those people. His songs about anything a cowboy may experience have helped me to make sense of my emotions when I wasn’t sure what I was feeling. Much like when a ranch hand who somehow solves your emotional dilemma through seemingly irrelevant stories, after hearing R. W. Hampton sing a song about a horse dying, I feel better about my situation.
For someone who had a hard time learning to process an overwhelming world, I had a lot of good mentors that I never met in person. Just listening to someone who had been there before reminds you that you are not unique in your situation and alone in your despair. It also reminds you that if they can make it, there is hope for you and what you are going through.
