Life, Legacies and Lies

As I age there’s always the question of what legacy I will leave my children. What values and life lessons to pass onto them in hopes of paving the way in some small part. Passing on a legacy and life lessons to children is a profound responsibility that many of us feel. With it we create a bridge from the past to the future and beyond. The stories we tell, both purposefully and accidentally instill values, morals, and knowledge that shape the core of a child's being. These lessons serve as a compass, guiding children through life's challenges and triumphs. By passing on a legacy filled with love, resilience, and empathy, parents ensure that their children are well-equipped to navigate the complexities of the world with grace and integrity. It’s quite a challenge and to be frank, quite intimidating at time.

There are a host of lessons that are easy. And many, many more that are far more difficult and I’m not going to enumerate them because this isn’t a book, and you’d get tired before paragraph fifty six.

However, to speak directly to the point of legacy, what I’m sharing today is, in great part, passed to me by my father. As he aged, our conversations were more honest and more emotional. Sometime, and I don’t quite remember when, my father quit speaking to me like his boy and started speaking to me like a man. At one point in the conversation and half in jest I admitted to my father that I was in my mid 40’s and I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life.

Now I wonder if he knew how impactful that conversation was and how it resonated in my life and how I think about it often. It’s shaped more of the last decade than I imagine he knows. I realized then how he must have struggled with the same things I wrestle with regarding my children. And quite deliberately he gave me one of the biggest clues to how life works and still I pressed on hellbent and headstrong in the belief that I had it figured out and repeating the same mistakes of the past yet again. Until it hit me. Or, to be fair, my mother did by saying something that reminded me of that conversation.

Much of what we believe isn’t even true, at least always. Hard work doesn’t always pay off. The early bird doesn’t always get the worm. Honesty isn’t always the best policy and it isn’t always best to be safe than sorry. It’s the oversimplification of something we just don’t grasp in it’s entirety. Life. If we’re honest (best policy, remember) we’ll admit that we don’t have much more of a clue about how it works now than when we were released upon the world, full of piss and vinegar and ready to make our marks. Much of what we profess to believe is to make us feel more secure in our fabricated belief in security and constructed of conformity and conservation.

I’m not claiming any proprietary knowledge here, nor am I saying that I’m the first to discover this. To be sure it’s not a groundbreaking revelation to some. It wasn’t to my dad, because in that moment I realized, if not all, at least one of the secrets to life. Perhaps the most important one. And that is what I’ll pass to mine.

Find your joy. Find it and grab it with both hands, sweetheart. Find it and chase it to the ends of the earth if need be. Find that thing that makes your heart beat and your soul stir and pursue it with all your being. That is the meaning of life. Your joy is what will sustain you through the longest of nights and the toughest of trials. It will give you wings with which to soar.

That joy is the easiest and most difficult thing in the world to find though, for it’ll come if you let it but it’ll be gone at the mere glimpse of a thousand off ramps that you’ll face in life. Mine has been with me for the better part of three decades and I ignored it, and ignored it often, in the quest for things I now know I didn’t even want or need.

Your joy won’t come to you. It’ll wave and whisper to you as you pass by, but it’ll never chase you. It will sit peacefully and quietly until you decide to pick it up and nurture it and then it’ll blossom into something that becomes more than pastime, it becomes purpose.

It will be there in the quiet at night in the ‘I wishes’ and ‘I wants’ that simultaneously make you tingle with excitement of it happening and become breathless with fear of it passing you by. It will, as it has me, speak to you a thousand times in your life but so timidly at times that you’ll not hear it over the roar of everything happening.

It will run away at the the thoughts of what you believe I or your mother, or anyone else thinks you should be and hide until you give it permission to show itself.

So, what do I pass on? Not much it seems, nor should it be. My job is to protect and shelter, to guide them past life’s obstacles as much as possible and to nurture that seedling within them that speaks to their joy, to let them find their way to it and to support them, without judgement or prejudice, in their pursuit of it. And then my job is to get out of the way.

This is the area where I believe a great many of us fail our children. We stand before them and impress upon them that they can be anything and anyone while our examples are less than, we stress and focus on the wrong things in many cases never having found our own joys or following the path of security and complacency and ignoring it altogether. Our children may listen to our words, but they’ll mimic our actions. And in few cases were we chasing our passions in our younger days of parenthood. And many people will instinctively recoil from this notion most likely because it stings. We live in fear of the next bill or the next life event and they’ll learn to do the same, to push that joy to the side and focus on the alleviation of those pain points that we so diligently chiseled into their being.

That conversation with my dad, well now it’s his legacy. And that’ll be one of the things I do pass along. My father didn’t speak much, he was an introspective man. Acorns and apples not falling far, I’ve become the same. He was a big believer in letting me make my own mistakes and believed that I’d learn from them far better than being forewarned. The bruises and scars and broken hearts prove him right. I’ve learned and in some cases I’ve learned more than once, because I’m stubborn as well.

It didn’t come to me until later what my father truly meant in his reply to me. But he had a way of speaking when he was passing along something important. His voice would change in timbre and rather than staring at me, he’d look off into the distance as if he saw something that I couldn’t quite see just yet and he’d rock a few times in his swing or his chair which added to the dramatic effect of the moment even as undesigned as it was. Four words. That was his reply. No sermon or speech or bullet-pointed lesson. Four words were the answer to me complaining about not knowing what I wanted to do with my life.

“Maybe you aren’t listening.”