It is said that above all, there is love...

The path that I take defines who I am, of this I am certain.  When I was a child, I lived among the most caring and loving parents, brother, and sisters that anyone could desire.  My path was clearly one guided by strict parenting balanced with overdoses of love that soaked my heart without an end.  If I add to this incredible childhood my grandparents, uncles, aunts, and so many cousins that always felt the need and inclination to pour their caring into my being, the odds of me ever feeling a lack of love were literally zero.  Amazingly, in time I also made amazing friends, people that had nothing to do with my familial lineage, yet at every turn of my path they took their turn giving of themselves just as if they were my brothers or sisters.  How on earth could there ever be a possible outcome to my persona that did not include an individual well versed in the art of giving back the same kind of affection and care that was always given to me throughout my entire life?  This of course is what defined me from the inside out and regardless of any other influences, the mold was casted so far back in time that everything that tries to change it today is pretty much inconsequential.

I’ve had moments in my life that suddenly and out of apparently nowhere nudged me in a different direction.  I made decisions on what to study, where to be educated, where to apply for jobs, basically what kind of life I wanted to live on the outside.  However, out of all of the decisions I have made, the ones that have nudged my path the most have always been those that involved me emotionally, on the inside.  The romantic ones taught me lessons that can never be taught in any other ways.  These relationships made me value strangers, people that I had never met before, but were somehow related to the main character with whom I tangled my heart with day by day.  Again, I have always been what I can only describe as lucky because even in these strangers I found a flood of love pouring my way.  How can an ordinary man be so lucky?  I don’t remember passing roll and testing the waters before throwing me in with these individuals that simply said turned out to be amazing!  Maybe the common denominator is something inside me?  Or maybe the common card is something even greater than any of us put together, like God?  Regardless, the nudging went on, my life took its turns and soon I was somewhere I never expected myself to be.

As a parent, it is simple to explain why I love my children.  They are so much a part of me that I cannot fathom the idea of not caring, loving, or taking risks in the name of daddy’s love.  Granted that not every parent is the same and some are even capable of horrible behavior towards their children.  However, I would not hesitate to guess that there are much more parents being good role models and loving their children to no end than not.  I believe that the amount of love that I unselfishly give to my kids eventually comes back to me in a great deal of blessings.  That is just me, I have no empirical evidence, but my inner gut tells me that this is a safe assumption in my life.  Either way, like I said before, I am already wired this way to protect them, help them, guide them, and more than anything else love them unconditionally.

Recently, life did one of those twists that turned me upside down and on my head.  My wild child did something stupid and life is taking turns at teaching us both lessons that we never thought we would have to learn.  I am not alone, so many of you have gone through this and even worse situations that I am almost embarrassed to feel sorry for either one of us, yet the pain and anguish is real nonetheless. All I can say is that here too, love has paved the way of how I am dealing with this fork in the road, making me realize that everyone makes mistakes and in the end what matters is what I learn from it all. In the midst of it all I have also come to realize that I have no choice in how life keeps nudging me, and regardless of how much I wish for it to all go away, I am bound to my sense of love to see it through regardless of the final outcome.

How do I know as a father, a friend, a brother, a son, a partner, in essence as a man that I am making the right choices in my life?  How do I gauge and measure the proper proportions of love, wisdom, an risks that I should take at the most important steps of my journey?  To me it really is not that complicated at all. I do as everyone else typically does and I ponder on the consequences of my actions, I then add the lessons learned in my life as a "do not ever do this again" filter, and finally I look deep inside myself and figure out how much love I need to pour over the entire situation so that in the end I can live with myself and my final decision.  I might not always get it right, but at least I am able to look at myself in the mirror after the fact without shame.  It also helps to always throw in the "what would mom do" into this entire equation as a baseline to play it safe.

I've walked on this path long enough to know and understand that sometimes I need to simply take one step in front of the other without really knowing what will be the final outcome of my journey.  In fact, this is where I am today, again, realizing that time has a way of changing what was once certain to a great deal of uncertainty. Many have told me that I need to take a leap of faith, to which I am not certain what to reply since I have an abundance of faith, and if I leap any higher, frogs will be jealous.  Instead I choose to take a leap of love because yes, above all there is love. It has served me well in the past, and I am sure it will serve me well again now.

"God, thank you for teaching me how to love, allow myself to be loved, and to love myself.  Amen."

Then, there it was...

Everything was so different before that incredibly beautiful event.  One single glance at the news highlights of any given day was enough to clearly see how disjointed our humanity had become since the beginning of times.  Not only had every single culture on our planet become their own entity, but also every single individual within these cultures found a way to justify in their minds how to excuse themselves from growing into a more united civilization.  Man had become a master over his habitat and a slave to his ignorance all at the same time, creating a sense of arrogance and hopelessness that deeply conflicted with each other with the passage of time.  The very few that had learned to overcome humanity's growth paradox were outnumbered and relegated to the ranks of being unrealistic fools.  Then, there it was, a moment in time which had been predicted by ancient civilizations a long, long time ago.  Evolution in its most basic and predictable nature took over and one by one, the most sophisticated and advanced organism on our planet, the human brain, flipped a switch.  At first, nobody noticed when this happened since the first to experience the most evolutionary event in human history were actually a group of individuals that had themselves been relegated in society as outcasts.  The medical establishment's inability to adequately treat what at the time were considered mental illnesses, apparently triggered a self preservation mechanism in the brain of certain individuals, rewiring neurological pathways and connections in totally unpredictable yet amazingly advanced ways.  These original few could see far much more than the rest of us could see.  Their advanced and beautiful minds had found access to reasoning, enlightenment, and even higher physical dimensions that nobody else had ever before achieved.  One after another of these individuals started to awaken from their disconnected advanced mental states allowing their minds to interact with both sides of their environment, the old visible world and the new higher cognitive world around them.  Once these individuals were recognized for who and what the really were, man's evolved state, they began to take over the mess that we had created in our planet and one by one found solutions to our greatest challenges.  Hunger, poverty, violence, war, and conflicts were all eventually replaced with solutions that allowed our beautiful suspended blue marble to heal itself and become the home of a true and deserving evolved intelligent species.

December 21st came and the world did not end.  In fact, as far as I am able to ascertain nothing out of the ordinary has occurred to justify the incredible hype that Mayan Calendar theorists had promulgated during the last few years.  I'd like to say that I was never influenced by the different proposed outcomes, but admittedly, somewhere in the back of my mind I was actually hoping for something to happen.  Of course, that "something" was never "the end of the world," but at least some kind of global discovery or enlightenment would have been nice.  Something that would somehow steered a unified vision for the betterment of mankind in the right direction would have been my choice.  As mind bending as the paragraph above might sound, I actually think that our biggest asset as human beings is our ability to have larger than life dreams and then set our minds out to make them happen.

When I turned 50 years of age last year, just as probably all of us do at some point in time, I too made an assessment of my life's path and accomplishments.  How many of my dreams did I turn into reality?  How many of my goals had I reached by then?  Where was I and where did I expect myself to be at that point in time many years earlier?  I will honestly say that I strongly discourage anyone to do this unless you are willing to be slapped in the face by your own inadequacies and failures.  On the other hand, doing so also granted me the opportunity to create new goals and apply a new set of rules to my life, this time based on 50 years of life experience and a lot less ignorance.  To me it truly does not matter how many years have gone by, and much less how many years do I have left to live.  Instead, what matters is what I will do with every single day that am living right now.  The retrospective view of my life tells me that I am capable of so much more than I ever thought I could do, especially in the areas of my life that I have influence and surround me daily.  I can be a better father, friend, and companion to those that are in my life.  I can allow life to take its course and find within my everyday the lessons I require to be a better man.  Most of all, I can accept the challenges in my life not as punishment, but instead as rewards.  After all, within each challenge in my life I have become whom I am today, and looking back at it all, I'm very happy with my life.

I have no special abilities or magic ball to predict the future.  I have, however, lived through an incredible journey of love while raising my two sons.  In my path I have found incredibly difficult challenges that I never thought I would be able to overcome, yet somehow God equipped me with the right tools to deal with it all.  I would be lying if I said that I have loved every minute of my life, let's be honest, who wants to walk over broken glass if given the choice of green grass instead?  Still though, that road has brought within it the greatest gift of all, the knowledge that I am truly loved by my children.  With all of my flaws and all of the mistakes I have made as a father, my sons love me.  What else can I ask for?

Dad4Life