Here Comes Treble: Initiation
...Western society has lost sight of the confusion faced by children as they go through the changes leading to adulthood. Children enter puberty without guidance, discovering ‘facts’ through conversations with friends, peeking through parents’ doors, reading the wrong kind of magazines, or looking at inappropriate sites on the web. Promiscuity, disease and badly managed relationships proliferate...
Isabel Bradley gives some thoughtful guidance for entering into adulthood.
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Some societies, which many in the West think of as ‘primitive’, guide and educate their young girls as they approach womanhood. Older women speak to them about the changes they can expect of their bodies, they are taught about sex and its roll in creating new life, and they are told about the responsibilities of being a woman.
Western society has lost sight of the confusion faced by children as they go through the changes leading to adulthood. Children enter puberty without guidance, discovering ‘facts’ through conversations with friends, peeking through parents’ doors, reading the wrong kind of magazines, or looking at inappropriate sites on the web. Promiscuity, disease and badly managed relationships proliferate.
Our young people need to be guided carefully into adulthood, prepared for the responsibilities signalled by bodily changes.
It was with delight that I was invited to the initiation into womanhood of a young woman who has been my flute student since she was nine. During her lessons, I tried to include broader knowledge, including vocabulary and grammar, history, arithmetic, humour, performance practice, poetry, literature, and taking responsibility for one’s own actions.
The invitation was extended to the women in Sarah’s life, together with a request for appropriate thoughts on becoming a woman. I wrote the following thoughts:
* Know yourself – the good, the not-so-good and the awful. Everyone has things they don’t like about themselves… Encourage the good, improve the not-so-good – and try to diminish the awful!
* Always be honest with yourself. Always be true to yourself. Integrity is the key to living comfortably with yourself.
* Take care of yourself – body, mind and spirit. No-one can do this for you.
* When you have to inflict pain on others and yourself, do it with compassion and honesty; and do it as cleanly and quickly as you can, so that healing can begin for everyone.
* Take risks – allow yourself to feel intensely. Grief teaches joy; anger teaches patience; hate teaches love: learn the lessons offered, let go of the bad and embrace the good.
* Be kind: allow people to be themselves, accept them with their idiosyncrasies.
* Protect yourself from poison relationships: if the behaviour of a person you love hurts you and they cannot or will not change that behaviour, move gently out of their lives.
* Move out of relationships where you cannot give and receive value, they are a waste of energy.
* Be at peace with yourself.
* Becoming a woman is such a huge adventure – and adventures always include the frightening as well as the exciting and the pleasurable. Embrace the entire adventure.
* May your adventure into womanhood be filled with joy, laughter and love, all accompanied by music of the most glorious kind!
All of these points, of course, apply equally to young men, and to young people of any culture. We’re all human beings and have to learn to take responsibility for our own lives and actions.
No one can give all the advice needed, which is why an initiation ceremony should include as many people in the community as possible, each with different experiences to share with the young person who is approaching adulthood.
Perhaps the practice of thoughtful and caring initiation into adulthood will become accepted in all societies, helping our young people to become strong, thinking, caring and responsible adults.
Until next time, ‘here comes Treble!’
Isabel Bradley
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