Mentors and Mentoring

I was reading a post on a network site today about mentors and how important they are for our growth and success. The author pointed out that mentors can be almost anyone in our lives who can help us to see our situation more clearly and discern a direction to go. They encourage us, they support us, they challenge us. They can give us direction when we need it. Then someone else mentioned the idea that maybe mentors could be virtual, and if so maybe they didn’t even have to be living.

So that got me to thinking about the idea of non-living mentors. If a mentor is someone who helps give us direction, then why not someone no longer living, or even someone who has never actually lived. After all, haven’t most of us had the experience of getting a little boost from a quote from the past or even some song lyrics? With this in mind, I thought I would take a look at some lyrics from the song “For Good” from the musical Wicked.

“I've heard it said
That people come into our lives for a reason
Bringing something we must learn
And we are led
To those who help us most to grow
If we let them
And we help them in return
Well, I don't know if I believe that's true
But I know I'm who I am today
Because I knew you”

People do come into our lives all the time, but is it always “for a reason”? Well, I guess that depends on how you look at the word “reason.” (No, this isn’t like the infamous definition of what “is” is.) Now, this is not a tangent, but I’m going to digress a moment from my main topic and look at the ideas of “reason,” “accident,” and “coincidence.” If we think of “reason” as meaning something is done with a “purpose,” then that would make it the opposite of “accident.” For example, if you break someone’s arm by accident, you will be in much less trouble than if you do it on purpose or for a specific reason. But with the word “coincidence” we have a problem in that the word itself is opposite or contradictory. “Say what?”

What do we usually mean by a “coincidence”? Usually it refers to something unplanned (or made to look unplanned if used sarcastically). The site Dictionary.com presents the main definition as “a striking occurrence of two or more events at one time apparently by mere chance.” But the same site gives the definition of the root “coincide” as “to occupy the same place in space, the same point or period in time, or the same relative position.” I have come to understand and believe that coincidences are not accidents. I remember seeing this illustrated logically by the use of angles in mathematics. Angles that “coincide” go together when overlapped – in other words, they match each other, despite apparent dissimilarities.

Now let’s get back to our example. Do people come into our lives “for a reason”? I believe they do, if we are willing to make the effort to learn from them. Herein lies the main point in the song, as far as I’m concerned: “And we are led/To those who help us most to grow/If we let them/And we help them in return.” Our lives coincide with those of people who will help us grow – in other words, our mentors. But here is the rub, as Shakespeare would say – we have to “let them” help us grow. The greatest mentor in the world is useless to someone who refuses to allow him/her to help. On the other hand, sometimes the most ordinary-seeming person can have a great influence on our lives. It all depends on our willingness to allow the “coincidence” to work its magic – on both sides. When we do this, we just may find ourselves saying:

“Who can say if I've been changed for the better?
But because I knew you
I have been changed for good”