You Can Give Them This Gift
Daily Dad August 1st
It is easy to doubt others, but even easier to doubt yourself. You sit with yourself all day, all week, all year, all the time. You know the effort that you put into your world and the weaknesses that are rooted deep. You have a hard time letting yourself take a break, opening up to those around you, and exposing yourself to the ridicule and failure that accompanies risk. But to do anything, one must take risks. One must put aside the doubt in one's mind and step forward onto the uneven path.
How much easier to do such things when one feels that the people around them give their full support? That their parent has their back. That someone is waiting for them to accomplish their goal. That at the end of the road when you have succeeded or failed, a person was there rooting you on.
The section of meditations for this month is based around the theme: Always Be A Fan. To encourage your child to go after big dreams, to support them with the belief that they can achieve what their soul points them towards.
It is hard enough to find out what you want to do with your life. Most people I know would say that they don’t know their purpose, that they have no direction in which to pursue. It is so strange to have a north star in one’s life that often the appearance of the divergence from the normal path can bring embarrassment and fear.
Because of this, I would say that a lot of people have received the opposite from their parents. That the goal becomes foolish and folly. That they are wasting their time and that energy would be better spent on what the parent determines as the place where it should be spent.
When someone steps in a different direction, the present parent has no choice but to accompany them down that path. The child and the present parent are intertwined on the most basic and deepest level, belonging to the same core.
So to help your child, Holiday suggests that the best gift you can give them is to be that supportive fan. To encourage and realign them to their north star when they turn away.
The last line on today’s page captures this wholly:
[…] if you don’t belive in them, who will?
I find that with my father the energy of always supporting me and being proud of me is upfront and most common. But there is doubt when it comes to my writing and trying to take on this path of authorship. His fears are that I will ignore my other more proper duties, like being a present father and earning money to support my family. And the thing is, that is justified. I can get so caught up on what I want to be that I’ll ignore what I am. Without discipline I will spend every waking hour trying to make the next step on my path come sooner. Yet, I cannot be a successful writer if my family is struggling and my wife has to work two jobs while I dick around on the computer. My next step will not come sooner if I do not hold my responsibilities as sacred.
He knows and seeks to teach me the power and necessity of the responsibilities that come first. That finding lonely success in writing due to the trashing of my most intimate relationships would be the most damaging thing to who I am. He has never told me to stop writing- in fact, he is one of the people who buys most of my books. I guess what I’m trying to say is that my father is my biggest fan. He looks out for me in a way that others cannot. He wants to see me be successful on all fronts, to rise above the image of the struggling artist who cannot coexist with other people. He knows me well and knows what to say to get me in alignment. It can’t be easy to have that role, with my fickleness and uncertainty of how I will get to my goal. But he sees me working and I think that is enough justification that I am serious about this, and find great value in the creation of the words.
He knows that first I am a father and a husband and that my small family is the bright God-shaped star upon which I exist. Everything else that comes my way is gravy, and to leave that heart for gravy would be a disaster that knows no bounds.