to my children’s children

So let me be perfectly clear. I have always believed that my single greatest desire in life is to create a life with a wife and children. Today I am 50 years old – 50-104/365 to be precise, and so far I have not succeeded in creating that life. So something doesn’t square between my desires and my choices, big time. This blog is a device to help me face into that, squarely, and take full responsibility for my choices, past and present.

It is vaguely nauseating to look at these words. And, like every other human being, I will work harder to avoid discomfort than to obtain pleasure. Write it down, nauseate myself…pretty soon making changes will start to look pretty good compared with another dose of nausea.

At least that’s the plan. And hey, writing this blog is change number one, right? :-P Ok, here goes: I can do this, I can do this…

To my children’s children,

I start this blog today, first and foremost, because I want you to be here to read this. And, because I am likely to be gone by the time you are old enough to get to know me directly, I would like you to have some way of knowing something about who I am, and what blessings and challenges and joys life has brought me, and what sort of life I have created out of what I have been given to work with.

I would like this to be a story that you find inspiring to read, a story of triumph over adversity. Today as I write this, I honestly do not know if it will be so. I hope that it will be, and part of that will be the story of converting hope into intention, and intention into action. It will help me as I go to have you along as companions; though you are not yet here, you matter much. If the day comes that you are here to read these words, it would please me if they were of some value to you. The choices I have made and can no longer change have caused me to be gone from your life far sooner than I would have hoped; may these words be a proxy, a shadow, a symbol, a poor substitute for what might have been had I chosen more wisely.