Eight Lessons From Harry Potter (**Possible Spoilers**)

Nice matters. It sounds cliché, I know, but did you ever notice how generally genuinely nice Harry himself was to pretty much everyone to start off with. He didn’t seem to judge anyone by their outward appearance — half-giants, house elves, big-eyed girls with crazy ideas, timid nerdy wizards who’d lost their frogs, and even beautiful witches were given the same level of courtesy. For Harry, it was deeds that made the man -er- being. He didn’t jump to judgment and he often went out of his way to be kind or helpful when it was the right thing to do even when he was slightly annoyed or frustrated. As a reward, those simple acts of nicety from Harry paid off tenfold throughout the books. It wasn’t just the legend of who Harry was supposed to be or what he might do that made people rally around him, it was loyalty for the things he had done, for the kindness and goodness he had shown to those he had encountered that made him the hero to follow.

People change. People change. As time goes on, experiences change people and creatures. People grow up. Life goes on. Neville is perhaps the best example of this in the Harry Potter books. He started off as a stuttering, nerdy, Dudley-do-right, timid little boy in the first boy and grew in seven years into a strong, independent leader of the resistance , willing to face down the very embodiment of evil himself. Kreature is another example; when we first say him, he was nothing but horrid and all but an obstacle and a pain in everyone’s butts, but a special show of kindness from Harry and the gang went a long way to changing him the sweetest house elf you’d ever seen. Harry, Ron, and Hermione grew up in those seven years. Harry’s
feelings for Ginny changed; his view of her changed from annoying sister of his best friend to love of his life. Even Percy and Dudley, Harry’s cousin, had changes of heart and turned out to be alright kinds’ of blokes in the
end — however unlikely. It’s incredibly normal for people to change through life. They can’t stay stagnant. Not only is it impossible but that would be boring.
Not everything is as it appears. I think we had to learn this lesson in every single book. Hermione, Harry and Ron were often jumping to conclusions and assumptions about each other or other characters that had to be unraveled. From the first book when Harry thought Hagrid stole the Sorcerer’s Stone to the last book when Ron assumes Hermione would choose Harry over him as a romantic interest, the lesson had to be learned again and again. Maybe it’s a lesson we continually are learning in life. It’s easy to make assumptions about what’s going on in the world around us, about the people we see everyday, the people we think we know best even, but the truth is that what each of us see and feel and experience is only one point-of-view and any assumptions we make can only be based on our own experiences. It’s easy to assume many things in life, especially the negative — that rumors are true, that someone is ignoring you, that someone is doing something to harm you, etc. Without asking and checking in occasionally, we can’t know the truth about what’s going on with anyone else.
Even White Knights usually have some tarnish on their armor. Except for Lily, all of Harry’s heroes had something in their past or even in their present that perhaps wasn’t so heroic. James Potter had been a typical bully-like teenage boy rather than the angelic hero Harry had been sure he always was. Sirius and Lupin had their dark, tortured, and sorted pasts. Even Dumbledore had darkly stumbled along the way to Head Master. The truth is that what makes a hero, a superb leader, is someone who has fully experienced life and all the mistakes it has to offer and learned his or her lessons and grown from them and continues to do so. Dumbledore was only so wise because he had stumbled and regained his step. He knew his strengths and his limitations. Tarnish adds value and character; it shows that our heroes have been somewhere and done something.
There aren’t always going to be happily-ever-afters. Or perhaps we can say that bad things happen. Starting with the first book, when the bad guy is defeated but still gets away, we are prepared for the fact that life is a series of trials and everything doesn’t always resolve itself in neat little packages at the end of the day where everyone is saved and the hero rides off into the sunset. At the end of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry does not get to go live with an exonerated Sirius, Lupin loses his job, and the bad guy gets away again. In book four, good guys begin dying “on screen” — characters we’ve gotten to know and if not love, like a little, and not only can’t magic bring them back, but the bad guy gets away again and this time with more power and the beginnings of an army. By the ends of books five and six, characters Harry (and we) truly love are dead (I still can’t believe Sirius isn’t coming back somehow) and it’s a true weight bearing down on us. By the end of the series, we’ve lost even more of our favorites to both honorable and senseless, useless deaths — all of them tragic deaths. And other miserable bad things have happened in the world. The truth is that life is littered with reality and unhappiness and unfortunateness. Every ending is another beginning. What we make of life, that we continue the journey — that is what is important.
Life is about choices. Horcruxes or Hallows? In Dumbledore’s youth, he’d had to make choices between family and adventure, power and right. Sirius had chosen between family and friendship. Snape had chosen between love and power. In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Ron had to make a hard choice during the chess game between sacrificing himself and losing the game. Over and over, the characters in the books are given choices — even at the end, J.K. Rowling wanted it to be clear that Voldemort still had a choice between complete Evil and remorse for the dirty deeds he had done. Harry always had a choice; he didn’t have to stand up to Voldemort or create Dumbledore’s Army or journey into the Chamber of Secrets to save Ginny and most certainly, he didn’t have to return to Hogwarts after Dumbledore’s death or walk into the Forbidden Forest when he knew Voldemort was waiting for him. He made his choices, not because they were his destiny but because they were his to make.
Everything takes time. We’ve been conditioned by television, movies and even novels these days to think that the timespan of a story or adventure takes place in 24 hours or a few days. CSI would have us believe, for instance, that DNA for murder-solving can be had in a matter of hours, when in reality, anyone who paid attention knows it took a month to get back the DNA for Anna Nicole’s baby’s real daddy. Each of the first six Harry Potter books takes place over about a school year and the last one was nearly that. It took time to find clues, research them, for the bad guys to lay out their plans and act, for secrets and misunderstandings to fester, for life to happen, for quidditch to be played, for classes to be held, and the plot to thicken and unfold. Ginny Weasley wasn’t seduced by Tom Riddle overnight; he needed time to gain her trust. Harry had to search for the Horcruxes and the clues weren’t as evident as anything in Indiana Jones; Voldemort didn’t want them found and he didn’t leave breadcrumbs to follow. In the end, every book took about a year of Harry’s life, every adventure took time to accomplish. Life is not a series of high speed car or broom chases and explosions. It’s filled with every day stuff like classes or work and family stuff and friends and sometimes there’s excitement and sometimes there isn’t, but it all takes time.
Love ultimately is more powerful than Evil. That is the theme of the Harry Potter books from the beginning when Lily sacrifices herself to save Harry to the end when Harry is willing to sacrifice himself and everywhere in between. Mrs. Weasley’s passionate love of her children empowers her to beat Bellatrix. Snape’s love for Lily saves his soul and makes him trustworthy to Dumbledore. In fact, Lily’s loving sacrifice protects Harry from Voldemort’s evil for 17 years. That’s some powerful magic, love.