27 Aug Get Each Other There
Since Dolly Parton died this week, there have been so many stories about the things she gave away. Books. Scholarships. Money after wildfires. A million dollars that found its way into the research behind a vaccine. Millions more, over a lifetime, finding their way into other people’s hands.
One story takes us back to the early 1990s, when Dolly was worried about the number of students dropping out of high school in Sevier County, Tennessee, where she had grown up. She wanted to find a way to help more of them stay in school, so she came up with a plan. Every seventh- and eighth-grade student would receive $500 if they graduated from high school.
There was one other part of the deal. Each student was paired with a buddy, and together they signed a pledge to do everything they could to make sure they both graduated. And for either of them to receive the $500, both had to make it to graduation.
The dropout rate for those classes fell from 35 percent to 6 percent.
The money was waiting at the end. But Dolly seemed to understand something about all the years in between. It can be easier to keep going when someone else is going with you.
We ask people to carry so much on the strength of their own resolve. To remember what they want, to believe in something they can’t yet see, to keep choosing it over and over again. Another person can’t do it for us. But there is something different about doing a hard thing with someone beside us.
Somewhere in the story of how most of us made it through something difficult, there is another person. Someone who expected us to show up. Someone who remembered what we wanted when we lost sight of it. Someone who stayed close enough that continuing somehow became easier.
Dolly could have simply offered the money. Instead, she made each student part of someone else’s way forward.
Find somebody, she was telling them. Get each other there.
For someone who spent so much of her life helping others, Dolly seemed to understand that some of what helps us endure cannot be handed to us. It has to happen between us.
None of us gets very far without carrying one another for part of the way.