In my long life there have been things I have said and done which did not advance the cause of good in the world nor bring joy to myself and others. Life sometimes teaches us in stages, through studies etched in weakness and greed and ego. Those moments of forced learning are balanced, thankfully, by a kind of karmic calculus that offers a secret code for distant answers.
Once, I was given the opportunity to help raise two children, to watch them grow; to see them fall down and stand again, to try and answer their questions when their curiosity outgrew their world; to read a storybook while lying next to them in bed, to take them out into our world to be as amazed as I by the universe and its clockwork ways.
The wheel turns. They are grown now and have left the nest. We still talk and write and share the happenings here and there, living apart yet growing together. They belong to themselves and to the future they make.
There will always be days when the gods conspire against us and tempt us to forget something important; something we should have known. Days when the hot water heater breaks on the coldest night of the year, when the car won’t start, when the paperwork becomes too much to handle. On those dismal days you walk in the front door, bone-weary, and these two kids rush up to you and hug you with shouts of “Daddy!”. And then the burden is lifted and the teacher finally understands the lesson, there in front of him all along.
whoisfenton 