Father's Day

It's Father's Day and I'm grateful to be a father. It's the most important and fulfilling thing that happened in my life. It taught me no end of lessons and it still teaches me every day. Being a father clarifies life quickly and definitively. It separates the important from the trivial, and while the lessons are, all to often, lost in the moment, they become clear with the slightest reflection.

The most important lesson I am currently learning, and much too late, I need to admit, is that my reactions to situations are almost always wrong and that the best response is most often, no response while I think about the meaning of things. Given time, even I will find the right way to act in response to a problem with one of my children. 

I need to remember that the active raising of my children ended a long time ago, when their size and sensitivity forced me to think and do the right things. What I'm seeing now is usually the lessons of my best self reflected back to me and when I see something disagreeable it is usually me finding my own principles impractical and naive.

More later,