Your Father’s Day Advice For A World Gone Mad
The Most Important Lessons In Life Are Caught — Not Taught
“I wouldn’t want to bring a kid into this crazy world right now.”
— Miranda Lambert
You have been forced to take a pay cut.
You have been furloughed from your job — or you have lost it altogether.
Perhaps your loved ones are sick.
Those right wingers are ignoring systemic racism again. Or maybe those Left wingers are exploiting and politicizing tragedy again.
Your favorite sports are on hiatus.
The country is in a recession.
You are bracing for another poisonous election cycle.
There is much uncertainty in the world. The stress in your life is at maximum capacity. The future looks bleak — and it seems there is nothing you can do about it.
You want your children to grow up in a better place than this. You want these problems to go away. You want order restored. You want humanity renewed.
Whatever the case, whatever problems you face, whatever philosophical or political worldview you hold, one thing is unquestionable — your children are sponging up every way you are choosing to respond to these moments.
Your challenge as a parental guide is not the fact that the world is on fire. It is cultivating an awareness that there are little creatures around you soaking in the way you are living amidst the fire.
Because the issue is not what is happening “out there.”
The issue is that the most trans-formative lessons in the universe are CAUGHT rather than TAUGHT.