Practical Wisdom: Mastery and Degrees

I have two children receiving master's degrees this year, and I've been thinking a lot about what mastery is.

My youngest, Ryan, graduated last week with a Master of Philosophy from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Nearly twenty-four years old, in a country that isn't their country of birth, accepting a degree in a field that asks the hardest questions humans have thought to ask. They graduated with a calm acceptance that I'm still not entirely sure where they found. I was there in person and cried the kind of tears that don't quite have a name. More than pride. Something older and more complicated. The particular ache of watching someone you love become more fully independent in a life that no longer requires a mom to manage daily details.

Next week, my oldest son Josh receives his MFA from Emerson College in Boston. He's 45. He earned it while raising a three-year-old and a six-month-old, tending a marriage, moving his family closer to ours, and carrying the physical weight of war injuries with an acceptance that still stops me cold when I think about it too directly. He didn't put his life on hold for his education. He wrote through it, around it, inside it. He studied in the margins of infant sleep and the quiet available at 5 a.m. when the house is temporarily, mercifully still. Every day for him has been a negotiation between what needs doing, what can be done, and what wants to be given attention.

Two master's degrees. Twenty-one years apart in age. Both of them earned in full.

So what does it actually mean to master something?

I don't come to this question from the outside. I've been thinking about mastery my entire adult life, in the context of ceremony, of spiritual practice, of the long arc of learning to become someone I can respect. I've walked with people across five continents through some of their most significant passages, led initiations, and sat inside the long, uncomfortable silence that comes before transformation. And still, watching my own children this year, I find that the question of mastery opens again, fresh and a little urgent.

At almost 24, the demands Ryan faces are staggering in ways we tend to forget once we've landed on the other side of our twenties. Ryan mastered the Irish visa system, which is its own graduate curriculum. They found a flat in a city where housing is genuinely scarce, negotiated with roommates, set up a bank account under a foreign address, navigated an unfamiliar healthcare system, figured out what to eat and how to cook it in a kitchen the size of a generously proportioned closet, got a job, and learned the bus routes. They held themselves together through homesickness at 2 a.m. and showed up to classes the next morning and asked good questions. Friendship, grief, intellectual rigor, and the daily logistics of simply existing as an adult, all happening simultaneously, none of it easy to get through.

I know something about facing loneliness, even if the decade was different. I know what it feels like to be building your whole life from scratch while also trying to figure out who, exactly, is doing the building.

At 45, the demands are different but no less real. Josh wrote and studied and created while an infant slept on his chest and his body reminded him, some days more insistently than others, of what it had given in service to this country. He chose to move his family closer to ours, trading a certain ease for the harder, richer currency of connection. Exercising a sustained commitment in the middle of a full and complicated life isn't a little thing. I'm his mother and I'm allowed to say it plainly: what he has done is, in many ways, heroic.

We tend to imagine mastery happening in optimal conditions. Quiet rooms. Uninterrupted time. A life temporarily cleared of its most pressing demands so that the real work can be done. I've never actually seen it work that way. What I've witnessed, in both of my children this year, is something more honest and considerably less tidy.

Mastery, in the deepest sense I've come to understand it, is the ongoing practice of knowing yourself well enough to meet what is in front of you, and then actually meeting it. Not perfectly. Not without cost. But meeting it. It isn't a destination. It's a way of moving through your life, a sustained willingness to keep choosing your own development even when circumstances would give you a perfectly reasonable excuse not to.

Mastery is the practiced art of showing up for yourself, again and again, no matter what the moment asks.

At almost 24, Ryan is doing that. At 45, Josh is doing that. And at my age, which I'll say is wiser than it's ever been, I'm doing it too, though my terrain looks nothing like either of theirs. My children are grown and building lives I'm only invited into, not responsible for. The years of managing other people's daily needs have given way to something wider and quieter and, honestly, a little disorienting in the best possible way. I find myself, again, at the edge of a question I thought I'd answered: what do I want? What am I called to? What kind of woman do I intend to be in this particular passage of my life?

These questions require the same courage it takes to navigate a foreign city alone, or to sit down and write a thesis while the baby finally sleeps. The terrain is different. The practice is the same.

Mastery doesn't graduate. It just keeps asking new questions.

Here are a few things I've found genuinely useful, not just for the young person starting out or the parent in the thick of it, but for anyone in the middle of figuring out who they're becoming next.

Don't compare your inner life to other people's outer life. At any age, but especially in transition, we can’t measure our uncertainty against someone else's apparent confidence. It's a losing equation. Everyone is navigating more than they're showing. The practice is to get honest about your own experience and work from there.

Name what you're actually building. Not what you think you should want. Not what looks impressive from the outside. What you're genuinely, quietly, persistently drawn toward. Mastery begins with honest attention to yourself, and honest attention requires a willingness to stop performing and start listening.

Let yourself not know. The spaces between, where you've left something behind and haven't yet arrived at what comes next, aren't failures of mastery. They're part of it.

Tolerating uncertainty without collapsing is one of the more sophisticated capacities a human being can develop, and it's worth cultivating deliberately.

Stay curious about who you are right now. Not who you were. Not who you hope to be. Who you are today, with all of its contradiction and incompleteness. Self-knowledge isn't a project you complete. It's a living inquiry, and it requires your honest attention for the rest of your life.

Find the thing that asks something real of you, and do it anyway. Mastery grows in the doing, especially when the doing is hard. Ryan didn't master courage and then apply to graduate school in Ireland. They applied, and in the doing of it, discovered they had more in them than they'd known. Josh didn't wait for life to settle before he finished his degree. He wrote through the unsettled parts, and the writing became evidence of exactly who he is.

Two children. Two master's degrees. Twenty-one years between them, a world of different circumstances, and the same essential truth running through both: the willingness to keep going, to keep choosing your own growth even when it costs something, is what mastery is made of.

I couldn't be more proud. (And just to be sure I say it clearly… I am proud of ALL of my boys… Ryan and Josh who we’ve talked about here,  Jerry – who is learning how to navigate dreams and the realities of running a business and raising his famiy, Rannon – who is newly engaged and growing his career, and Dino, who is finishing his first year of college and searching for a kind of freedom many of us take for granted.)

Life is all about mastery. At 24. At 45. At any age. It's the willingness to keep becoming, without arrogance, without apology, and without waiting until you feel ready.

What are you mastering right now?