An Open Letter to My Son

Dear brilliant son….and anyone else who is highly gifted,

You may have the privilege of breathing the rarefied air of Google.  You associate with others of like mental capacity.  It is probably easy to think of those with an IQ within 20 points of yours as the norm. 

Think again.

I spent today at the county fair.  Walking past my booth was the complete spectrum of humanity, including those from the opposite end of the Bell curve.  Believe me, those in your circle are not the norm.  I saw folks today who are as many standard deviations to the left of the mean, as you are to the right.  I saw three generations who have been swimming in the shallow end of the gene pool.

It is easy to think of those in our usual circles of friends and acquaintances as typifying humanity.  Once in awhile, we need a wake-up call.

I remember the day when you were about two and a half years old, and you came to the kitchen to talk to me after church.  You announced with some consternation in your toddler voice, “Mom, those other children in the nursery talk funny.”  Uh-huh…other children your age were babbling syllables, and you were already talking in long sentences making observations about the world around you.  I thought, “And so it begins…how do I help him understand that he is different, and that this is a reason not for arrogance, but for compassion?”

So…I am reminding you today, because I was reminded myself, that with privilege comes responsibility; that any one of us could have been born with much less capacity.  We did nothing to earn our gifts…they were, indeed, gifts.  We may be proud of our accomplishments in developing what we were given, but not too proud.  Rather, we should be thankful and caring and giving and humble.

If you don’t need this message today, I do.