Each Father’s Day weekend I take the opportunity to speak to all my sons about life. We will do it again this weekend. Several years ago, I wrote the passages below, and they are even more appropriate today. Give your kids a big hug and some sage advice this weekend.
To my sons on Father’s Day, June 2011
Once each year Father’s day leaves a philosophical door ajar just long enough and wide enough to push a bit of fatherly advice through. I am taking that opportunity. Here’s what I wrote this morning with the three of you in mind. It applies to everyone in my opinion, but many cannot see. I am proud that all of you will “get it” and that you are productive, intelligent and responsible men. You live in a time of cataclysmic change. This reality produces both great chaos and an excellent opportunity for those with the keen eye to see it with the discipline to pursue it. Happy Father’s Day!
Advice for Prospering in a Strange World
Discover and claim your core values. Make them the central reason for everything you do. Create a life mission based on the values you choose. Develop a vision to apply your life mission in all verticals of life that are important to you. Do this for family, work, charitable activities, and friends. It will bring order where chaos is always a possibility.
The world around you will suggest an increasing flow of enticing attitudes, activities, and actions. If they are not consistent with the values at your center, you will find them unfulfilling.
Expect change to be a constant in every institution that touches your life. Do not resist change as your energy will be wasted. Instead, look for patterns. There will be a place for you in any new order if you perceive what you must learn and what new paths will lead to a productive and satisfying place.
Though it may be natural, do not blame others or factions or movements for blocking your path. Avoid that temptation robustly. Whatever they are doing it is about them not you. They will eventually and unavoidably answer for their actions. You are accountable for your own.
Develop a keen ability to analyze. Sift through the constant stream of data designed, selected and disseminated to pull you toward a single focus. The world is connected at every junction today. Clinging to a narrowly focused viewpoint, opposed to other narrowly concentrated points of view will not serve you. People who seek similarities rather than differences bring value. Those who promote differences waste time.
Finally, find a spiritual center that works for you. While you may resist dogma, tradition and power structure, it is clear that there is an order to life and the universe that is beyond our scope of complete understanding. Seek harmony with that order.
