Letters to My Kids

It’s easy to find yourself discouraged in the middle of a long work. Maybe it’s classwork for school, or the effort of getting your life in order. Moving up at a job or finding a special relationship. “Burnout” is the term used in my generation for finding yourself at a point where you’ve invested so much of yourself for so long that you become discouraged with the results and have inclinations to abandon the effort altogether.

A short and sweet tip for today. When you feel “burned out”, ready to quit, ready to give up – take a moment. Move your chair away from the desk, or get to the place you can think best or just get away from the background noise for a second. Look at your effort in light of the Big Picture. Take in how much you’ve accomplished already and how great it will be when you finish. Think about the motivations you had when you began this effort. Think about how you’re growing into a stronger person by enduring this. Visualize the positive results of your effort.

And when you’ve got it firmly fixed in mind, turn back to the task at hand.

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. ~Victor Frankl

One of the most disheartening things in life can be change. Just when you have life arranged the way you want it and the sun is on your shoulders and the wind is at your back, something shifts within the framework and you find your world shifting and warping around you. A lot of times the change is positive; sometimes it doesn’t seem like it is. Sometimes you feel in control; sometimes you don’t. Sometimes it catches up with you before you realize it and it literally feels like the hand of fate is dead set on jerking the rug out from under you whenever you get settled.

The bad news is that change is unavoidable. You can do your best to settle your life, establish rock hard foundations, take care of all the details, etc. And for an amount of time, you feel overwhelmingly in control. But these states are transient. Jobs disappear. Income status changes. Friends move away. Children grow up. Relationships turn sour.

But the good news is that change happens from the positive side as well. Jobs appear. Bills get paid off. New friends are made. Your family relationships grow more mature. Relationships grow deeper. We tend not to root on the positive in the same way we do the negative – that’s human nature. But it’s really just sides of the same coin. Bad things will happen to you in life. So will good things. We all do our best to maximize the good and minimize the bad, but all of us still get a serving of each.

The real key to thriving in this environment is to learn to accept transience. Understand that things are going to swing both ways. Don’t let the bad times bring you to despair, and don’t depend on the good times to always be there. Understand when life is at it’s lowest, things are going to get better; so bide your time and learn what lessons you can about dealing with bad times. And understand when you’re on top that things will come down at some point. Plan ahead, and set aside a financial, emotional or supportive “nest egg” that you can rely on when things come down.

That kind of attitude may seem on the surface to be very defeatist. As if you can never really enjoy yourself for fear that bad things are going to occur. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. Understanding the transience of life puts you in a position to enjoy every aspect of it more fully, because you are not misled into thinking you have another day to rely on.

Probe an older person and you’ll quickly be regaled with stories of how we would have done things differently if we had the opportunity. That’s often because we took the good times for granted and failed to take advantage of them. And occasionally because we got a little too worked up when things were dark.

If you’re living in the moment, understanding that you’re not guaranteed tomorrow will be the same as today, you tend to take action on things that are precious to you.

It takes a while to learn that lesson. But that’s why today I will often sit and play with you when I really want to be taking a nap after a hard day’s work. Why we get out and go see friends when the weather really demands that we should be staying in. Why we knock ourselves out with a big Christmas party for our friends every year, when it takes weeks of preparation and money we should probably put elsewhere.

Learn to accept change. It’s the only constant.

One of the wonderful things about having children are the lessons you learn from them. Whether re-interpreting the world around you through innocent eyes or amplifying a behaviour to the point at which it’s impossible to ignore.

Right now, there are a lot of stresses in your little lives. Someone doesn’t want to take a bath. Someone wants the toy that someone else has. Someone doesn’t want to go here, or eat this, or wear that. And more often than not, all of these situations can bring tears, tantrums or sulkings. It never ceases to amaze me how often you are willing to ruin a great situation for yourself because some little detail didn’t fall exactly the way you planned.

How often have your mother and I tried to help you see the bigger picture. Life goes on even if your sister’s is hoarding the blue Spiderman when all you have left are the other 5 red ones. You really don’t want to kill your day at the playground because we ate at Olive Garden instead of Burger King this time. Our favorite dolly will come back from the washer in a few minutes. And my personal favorite – bathtime is a recurring fact, and no amount of protesting is going to change it.

Grownups need to learn that lesson as well. We see our problems on another level; somehow more important than what you’re undergoing. And so often, we find ourselves protesting the inevitable, bemoaning the unchangeable, straining against the immovable object -> with much of the same futility.

The fact is, things will not go your way all the time. You can meet that challenge with worry, anger and excessive stress, or you can take a deep breath and understand that some things are beyond your ability to change. By all means, learn what you can change and do it. But when you reach the end of your ability to affect the situation, let it go. Worry and stress don’t change the outcome of a situation – they only make it less bearable for you. All the worry in the world won’t change an outcome.

It’s not always that easy, though. When you’re caught up in the conflict, it’s difficult to divert your thoughts.

There’s a great exercise I’ve used before to deal with this kind of situation:

Make yourself a list of the things you absolutely believe and put your stock in. They may be statements along the lines of:

• I have a family that loves me unconditionally
• I believe in a God who loves me
• I am capable of achieving whatever I set out to do
• I am a valuable person with something to contribute to the world

Whenever you run across a situation that is so unnerving that you can’t find peace, look at your list and see exactly how many of your core beliefs it affects. Likely it will affect none of them. Problems may make your life inconvenient at times, but rarely if ever can they affect the things that are genuinely important to you.

Learn to meet stress first with action, then with peace.

There’s a whole subculture in this (and likely every) generation that seems to have an inability to take responsibility for themselves. So many people seem inable to accept their shortcomings and intend to somehow offload responsibility on a third party. These people are not that difficult to spot:

• The ethnic, religious, sexual or economic minority that blames their alienation on bigoted attitudes
• The friendless people who convince themselves their unpopularity is the result of someone’s antagonism
• The emotionally handicapped who are convinced they are driven to their withdrawal by the pressure of society, responsibilities or specific scapegoats they can scrape together

The list is easily extendable, easily recognizable. The man/woman tagging all their failures on their spouse, or their children, or their parents. Or society or government or choices they made or choices made for them.

Certainly there are situations that cause problems for people. Certainly there are those who find themselves handicapped in some manner, or behind whatever curve they are addressing in some manner. And the situation may or may not be their fault.

The greatest shame is when these people decide they’re found their excuse to keep from moving forward in life. That they are lazy enough to determine that they’ve been cut short, can never catch up and will thus be less than they could be for the rest of their lives.

At least in my generation, the most obvious subculture is the “welfare crowd”. These are persons that prefer not to do any work and instead work toward acquiring some sort of situation that will allow them to receive a subsidy of some sort to allow them to avoid getting a job. Either with an injury or handicap that gets them a physical disability subsidy through the government or a private lawsuit, or having multiple children to receive a childcare subsidy, or the like. These are people that have consigned themselves to live on a substandard income, in substandard living conditions, with no hope for advancement outside of charity. It’s obvious to the outsider what has transpired. But querying them, the resounding answer comes back that they “had no choice” or “I didn’t ask for what happened to me”. A classic example of people that just refuse to take responsibility for themselves.

Understand, children, that I’m not referring to the genuinely needy. Certainly “the poor are with us always” and you should, as a responsible person, have compassion for them and seek to provide for their needs wherever you can. And occasionally it’s a bit tricky divulging the needy from the hucksters out there. You have to find the trustworthy out there to trust.

But the thrust of this letter is not about everyone else, but yourself. Take responsibility for your own actions. Everyone makes mistakes. Live up to them, learn from them and move on. Resist the temptation to take the easy way out of situations – you almost always find yourself with something less than what you want and something completely unsatisfying. Understand that you are in control of your destiny; you can achieve whatever you want. You may have a harder or easier path than others who have sought to do the same thing, but very few things in this life can be denied for those who are willing to seek them.

Keep in mind:

• A teacher cannot “keep you” from succeeding in a class. Their bias may be in your imagination. It may be able to be cleared up by approaching them on a friendly level. You may be able to take the class under another teacher, or at another school, or through an alternate education program.
• A supervisor cannot “keep you” from moving up. If the problem is your qualifications, you can improve them. If it is a personality conflict, it can be worked around or you can find another supervisor, or another company, or another revenue opportunity.
• A person with which you have a personality conflict cannot “keep you” from having friends, joining a group, enjoying your life, etc. You can commit yourself to the people you do not conflict with and exclude this person’s influence from your life.

Of course, going about things like this are not always easy. You may very well decide that changing schools, jobs or social circles is a greater handicap than the original problem; that it “just isn’t worth it”. And that’s fine, if you so choose. But understand that this is the limitation you chose, not the one you have to live with.

Doing this helps you in a couple of areas. First, it builds integrity by reassuring you that you control your own destiny. It gives you a feeling of control over your life and situation and often helps you deal with your problems emotionally – because you understand you’ve accepted the situation of your own free will. And most importantly, it means that if it was the wrong decision, you’re free to change it.

One of the greatest gifts we have as human beings is free will. Don’t sell out that priviledge for an easy out. They’re never satisfying.

People are very open-minded about new things – as long as they’re exactly like the old ones.
Charles Kettering

People are creatures of habit. From your earliest stages, you’re prodded along the way to establishing fixed patterns of behaviour, of getting into a routine. Not that the approach isn’t beneficial – it’s not that difficult to see the necessity of routine in toilet training, bedtimes, cleaning your room, etc. Good personal habits will help establish you and provides a familiar base to work from.

One of the problems of getting older is that you rely more and more on those routines. They’re familiar, comforting, trustworthy. As you grow and learn about all the hazards life can throw at you, you yearn for those familiar patterns. Some idolize them. Most will settle firmly into more and more of them as time goes on.

But a lot of times, reliance on those patterns keep us from giving new ideas a fair shot. Sometimes “it’s always been done this way” becomes less of an analytical tool and more of a defense mechanism against anything unfamiliar. You do see it in older people a lot, but it’s far from uniquely a product of age. Talk about religion, politics or any other topic that people feel strongly about and you will very quickly catch wind of people who have their minds made up, despite anything new they may learn.

Certainly the old “tried and true” approaches have value, or they wouldn’t have lasted as long. Certainly there are basic components to your character and goals that are non-negotiable. But learn to have an open mind; to give new ideas a proper evaluation without immediately passing judgement upon them. This is the mental policy that lies behind dogmaticism, fundamentalism, sexism, racism and a whole host of world-blighting emotional ailments.

At your current age, you believe quite wholeheartedly in Santa Claus. I expect at some point you will begin to see the evidence, start asking questions and eventually admit that your benefactor is not who you originally conceived him to be. That’s normal, and part of growing up. The surprising thing you will learn is the number of people who stop using that approach as they grow older. I could detail for you instantly a number of people I know who are suffering from that approach today:

• Friends who doggedly support the political party they’ve always affiliated themselves with despite the fact that its agenda is completely out of line with my friends’ current beliefs
• Friends shackled by a religion that they are unwilling to question, and completely unwilling to see that it doesn’t live up to the standards they hold other religions to
• Friends stuck in low-end jobs because they can’t conceive of themselves finding a better opportunity
• Friends living in deep debt because they assume this manner of living is the accepted norm

Don’t ever stop learning, stop evaluating what you encounter in life. Put things to the test and learn which ones stand up over time. The world changes, your life changes. If you’re not changing, you may be falling behind.

Keep an open mind.

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”
John Lennon

Particularly when you’re young, it’s easy to lose yourself in dreams. Someday you’ll be big enough to… Someday you’ll have enough money to… Someday you’ll have enough time to…

There’s nothing wrong with having dreams. Matter of fact, visualizing your dreams is the first step to a practical plan to bring them about. But it’s very easy to put your life on hold waiting for “someday” to get here. It’s easy to fall into the “I can’t” dogma.

It would be immensely entertaining if life was like media, and we could simply fast-forward to the part we’re ready to be involved in. But it’s not. Time goes by at the same pace for everyone. The only difference to be made is in the way we approach it.

Maybe you’re concerned with making a difference in the world – perhaps helping lower income families. While your goal might be to lead your own non-profit or have a top position with an existing one, that job’s not going to be handed to you as a young adult. But you can work as a volunteer with an organization, or organize your own fund raising or outreach work. It’s not the end result you have pictured, but it’s a head start on those around you, it’s having a tangiable effect right now, and it’s teaching you if that’s really what you want at an early age.

Maybe you’re concerned about being wealthy. Certainly no one’s going to hand you a big salary on a silver platter when you’re still in your teens. But there’s no reason you have to wait for that day (in fact, you’ll find that you’re likely to be waiting for longer than you anticipate). You can save and invest what money you have right now and begin to establish yourself. You can begin to learn about finance and budgeting and enjoy some of the fruits of your labor. Any expert will tell you the magic of compound interest will make your efforts now pay off significantly later. Again, while learning if it’s really what you want.

Maybe you’d like to be an athlete, or musician, or writer. The only way you improve yourself is with practice, practice, practice. No one writes the “great American novel” on their first attempt. No one is better qualified to learn an instrument at a particular age than another. The competition out there is tough, wherever you are – and the sooner you begin preparing for it, the better chance you’ll make the cut out there. Dreaming about running up and down the football field, or playing onstage, or signing your novels in a bookstore is a great first step. But you’ll never realize that dream until you take the next step. And you really can’t start too early. And yet again, you’ll also get a better idea of whether this is really something you want.

You may have noticed a lot of “if it’s really what you want” statements. That’s because your expectations rarely match the idealized version of your goal. A lot of people who thought they wanted something find themselves unsatisfied when they achieve it, because reality is never as nicely bound up as your dreams. You may dream of being wealthy, but your dream probably doesn’t include the self-denial, stress and responsibility that can come along with it. You may dream of being a celebrity, but that dream probably doesn’t include the lack of privacy and security, the company you’ll keep, the concessions you’ll be asked to make. The truth is, you never really know what you’re getting into until you get into it. And sometimes, not then.

So don’t wait for a “someday” to come. Go ahead and start working on your dreams right now. You’re never too young, too poor or too unknown to get a start. And every step puts you that much further ahead. Indulge your daydreams, but don’t let it end there. Life is about “now”, not “someday”.

We’d all like to believe that the world is an idyllic plane, where everyone greets their neighbor with a smile, democracy pays off for all involved and any boy can grow up to be president. The truth is far from it. The sad fact is that in today’s society (as most throughout time), people are looking out for themselves, taking every advantage possible to improve their station. Many are blessed with an innate sense of fair play that regulates that behaviour to support their contemporaries in everything they do. Yes, there are Good Samaritans. There are those who remember their own times in the gutter and are moved to keep those around them from making the same mistakes. There are many more who fall far short of that goal.

My generation saw a revolution in public spectacle of political, spiritual and civic leaders and organizations caught with their pants down. The first generation where the government was completely content to lie, get caught lying, and basically respond – we lied, so what? It would suit itself well to sketch comedy if it weren’t the truth; a truth destroying the lives of thousands.

The greatest problem with this state of affairs is that trust is critical to relationships. While the most fragile keystone and the most difficult to repair, it’s nevertheless necessary to get anything out of your relationships. You find yourself at an extreme disadvantage when you choose not to trust. Your marriage, friendships, relationships with parents, your career advancement, your waning years all depend on trust for a rich relationship. It’s truly a requirement; cradle to grave.

So how do you deal with it?

First of all, put your trust in the trustworthy. People of integrity make trustworthiness a core of their personality – it carries over to everything they involve themselves in. If someone you are considering dating or otherwise getting involved with “cheated” on someone before you, they’re more than capable of doing the same to you. Someone who has stolen from others is capable of stealing from you. Anyone who gossips with you will likely gossip about you. The employer who ignores promises made to you earlier is likely to continue that trend. The government that lied about its exploits in a particular situation will probably find that skill useful again. Give your trust to people who have proven themselves capable of honoring it.

Unfortunately, you’re going to have to have ties with people that fall short in the integrity category. Being a technology related person, my policy has always been to have good backups. Cover yourself. If you have an unfair employer, document your work. If you have to deal with the school gossip, don’t share anything you don’t want everyone to know. Make sure you take care of your own healthcare/retirement/etc. if your providers haven’t been forthcoming.

In doing so, you can give your trust to the people who deserve it. Those who will make you proud for opening your lives to them.

And when you make a mistake (which happens to everyone), be satisfied in the knowledge that you went into it with the best of intentions and modify your gameplan.

It’s a great feeling to know you’re sharing with people who will build you up while protecting yourself from the unscrupulous out there. Trust me.

“A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.” George Santayana

One of the hardest lessons for people to learn is the distinction between happiness and pleasure. Many go their whole lives without making the differentiation. Solomon dedicated the whole book of Ecclesiastes to it. At any point in history there are marked examples in humanity of those who seem to have it all and find no satisfaction in it.

Happiness and pleasure aren’t the same things. If forced to define it, I’d say pleasure is the result of something you do; happiness, the result of something you are.

Pleasure is the joy of a cold lemonade on a hot day. The intense experiences of sexuality. The high of a drug. The adulation of the crowd. It’s something you do, or take, or experience that makes a moment in time a little more joyful.

Happiness is more of a state of contentment. Happiness is understanding your reputation is paramount. Seeing your children and knowing the part you’ve played in their development. It’s taking a snapshot of your life and knowing you want to reproduce it. It’s an earned satisfaction that validates you as a person and your life as worthy and acceptable.

Of course, the two often intertwine. The immediate act of pleasure in performing an act of charity is validated over the long term. It feels good while you’re doing it, it’s something you can be proud of, and it contributes to your being a better person.

On the other hand, a lot of people make the mistake of embracing activities that really aren’t valuable in the long term just for the quick high. Drug/alcohol abuse is an obvious. Abuse of sexuality is another. Pursuing superiority in material possessions, positions of power, popularity and other shallow pursuits often contribute to making yourself something you can’t be proud of; a person you’re not satisfied with.

It seems so cut and dried on paper, but in real life it’s often hard to see the difference. Pursuing wealth definitely satisfies the quick ego fix, but what about long term? Are you doing this to secure a financial future for your loved ones? Whose respect are you attempting to cultivate? Is a solid material foundation a fair trade for the time away from family? The answers aren’t always evident. And no one can answer the question for you definitively. Despite all the advice, you have to make it yourself.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was from Steven Covey, who encourages you in “The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People” to imagine the scene at your funeral. What do you want to be said about you? It’s a bid morbid, but that picture visualized eliminates the pleasure principle from the question -> you can’t really experience pleasure at that point. What kind of person do you want to be remembered as? What kind of life is truly valuable and worthwhile?

Live in a way that you can be happy with the results.

“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
Hamlet
William Shakespeare

I think if there’s one piece of advice I want to pass along it’s this. Maintain your integrity. There are core values you’re going to develop, both those passed along and those you forge yourself, that define you. A lot of things will change as you grow up; your interests and goals will shift, but there are some unchanging principles you will grow into that are non-negotiable, that you will always find peace in.

But life is never black and white. It gets confusing when your goals come into conflict. You may feel the need to go against your principles to gain popularity. Or put off your dreams to support a family. Advice will flow like a river from churches, parents, friends and most anyone you’ll share it with.

Violating your own principles is one of the most crippling mistakes you can make. Once you’ve compromised yourself, there’s a part of you that’s broken and very difficult to repair. It’s hard to have confidence in yourself when you’ve done so and failed in the past.

I have a friend who was determined to escape his middle-lower class background at any cost. To him, that meant money and power. He neglected a family, fought a war he didn’t believe in and put himself permanently in a social structure that he didn’t enjoy, his closest friends people he didn’t believe in. Everyone I know criticizes and berates him behind his back. He got the money, he got the authority. But it’s not fulfilling him now. He traded a life that could have made him very happy for an artificial view he constructed as a child. That’s looking very plastic to him right now.

In my college years, I had some aspirations of being a professional musician, and had a decent enough shot at it. But the more our group spent on the road, the more I considered exactly what I’d have to give up to maintain that lifestyle. Chief among those was a strong family life, which had always been my greatest support in growing up. The pull of the stage was strong, but in the end I decided that what was really important was a group of people that valued me for who I am, not for how I could entertain them. Friends of mine took that route and became very successful, and occasionally there’s a twinge of “what could have been” when I listen to their albums or see them perform. But it only takes a few swapped stories with them these days to understand I made the right choice. Thinking of all the things in your development I’d have missed. Knowing that you’d only see your daddy irregularly and that those visits would always be a somewhat uncomfortable “play day” instead of the nourishing we both needed. The question was hard to answer and it took years to resolve to my satisfaction. But in the end, I knew what was really valuable to me, and I didn’t compromise. It was the right decision.

Nobody is going to make the right decision all of the time. It’s granted that you’ll make mistakes, and it’s part of the learning process of growing up. But you can live with the mistakes if they were made in good conscience. Never go against what you think is right. Never compromise the greater for the lesser. If it means giving up something pleasurable, taking the road less taken or becoming something noone anticipated, go ahead. Selling yourself out is never the right choice.

Make the choices you can live with.

Hi. Thanks for stopping by.

When my own father passed from this life, I spent a lot of time thinking about the things unsaid. All the thoughts and dreams I had that remained private; that I never considered important, weighty or timely enough to share. I wondered if he had the same sort of things to pass on that for some reason or not just “never came up”.

I don’t want that situation with my own children. There’s a lot of experience, lessons learned and painfully pointed advice I want to pass along as a father. And thus this blog. I want to use this to jot down those observations and stories to compile later for them.

I’m doing it in blog format for a couple of reasons. Primarily, because putting it out there for others to read is a gentle prod for me not to neglect the task. And secondly, because the commenting functions allow for other people to chip in their .02. To call me on the carpet when they think I’m wrong and to kudo the positive. Validate or invalidate my advice.

So join me, if you will. Check in regularly and add a comment or two. Be an iGodparent without the pressure for graduation presents or the promise of a job after school.