Excerpts from “Blessings of Failure”
1. [I was performing my violin program at the baccalaureate exam.] "Your rendition of the Bach solo sonata was simply flawless and elegant," the president of the committee complimented me. I looked at Auntie Edith. Her eyes were filled with pride, mine with gratitude. The promise of a brilliant future was in her look - but I knew that it would not be in music. Auntie Edith's Pygmalion carried her dreams as far as she could: she had been the best in her graduating class. But life is not all Bach! She made me avoid playing Paganini or anything that required virtuosity, always choosing pieces that I was able to master. She knew my limits and never tried to talk me out of my sudden shift to medicine. I carry deep gratitude for her, especially for this extraordinary generosity of granting freedom to the student to fail the teacher's dream after having invested her very soul into me.
2. Our school "brainwashed" us against mediocrity, as incompatible with music and arts. In this view, I gained a very different understanding of the parental advice: "Become what you are!" In my building the intended career, the being and becoming did not converge enough. In fact, I became a classical musician by training and degree, but this was not who I was. The state of "the best I can be" seemed like a pseudo-ideal, a self-indulgent relativism, for the best concert violinist I could be would still be mediocre. I needed to find the path where this ideal would really mean my absolute best.
Ambition alone helped me sort it out. I clearly recognized that rising to a worthy level in the arts was not a matter of my decision, nor of hard work. Just because I wanted it, I chose it, and I invested eight years into it, the entitlement of being an artist did not automatically come with the degree. And yet, I did not take this closing of a chapter as a failure but rather as a blessing that would open up new possibilities to a more suitable and promising future. After all, I was merely nineteen years old.
It was then that I discovered how much I valued the uncommitted trajectory of exploration. I now "improved" my earlier motto: We are what we do with what we have.
3. Albert Schweitzer has always been my role model. I could not imagine anything superior to the medical profession, and combining it with music, as he had. I jokingly put that medicine was for those with less than unusual talent in the arts, but with more than usual ambition. ...The medical profession proved to be less challenging with greater rewards, including that of service. This also seemed the closest to my father's ministry. Besides, my choice of medicine had a vicarious aspect, for this profession had eluded both of my parents. Mother had made her attempt; father was too poor to even consider it, so he tiptoed around it with related degrees in psychology, theology, and philosophy. Yet more than making my parents happy, more than my personal ambition, I ultimately chose it because of who I was, at my core.
4. "I know, Zizi, that this job of a village doctor doesn't measure up to your aspirations, and to care for twelve villages with miserable roads and lack of facilities is a gruesome task - but it is also a heroic mission!" my father argued enthusiastically. "You are capable of facing any challenge and end up a winner. If you accept this job offer you could stay with me in the parsonage and save all your salary. We would live together - imagine, together! You are the one whom I love the most in this world - but this should never impose any obligation on you! Love must be liberating."
What else should have been an equally adoring daughter's response but rushing into the arms of the one she loved most?
But I didn't. I was running from entrenchment in the ordinary and familiar, and chasing the lure of the sheer potential, the mystery of chances. And for this, I betrayed my father.
5. Throughout those two years of my professional "exile," I pondered the sentence that the [Communist] Party representative put into my head: "You can work, but don't ever aspire." The glass ceiling would always be there because I was a Hungarian. I had experienced discrimination as a child of a "political criminal," and now my ethnicity was added to my baggage. Not explicitly, of course; they conveniently blamed my political inaptitude on my father, once again. All my perceived opportunities that excellence had guaranteed now seemed to evaporate. I had to find a way out of this prescribed and guaranteed failure. I would not, could not blame "unfortunate, objective" circumstances. I wanted to take my future into my own hands. Leaving the country of the mad dictator was a usual solution for intellectuals of that time. So, I too added my name to the long list of those trying to find a partner for a fake marriage. I would be "successful" but also ambivalent.
