The Mercury – with the start of school

The outstanding student:

• Reads, performs, completes assignments, beyond minimal expectations – he or she loves the work into being.

• Shows up and speaks up without being disrespectful – he or she knows that courtesy is possible under all circumstances.

• Knows that listening to those appointed to teach is one of several keys to success – he or she knows it is almost always more important to listen than it is to speak.

• Learns to connect a variety of disciplines and sees the whole – he or she respects the interrelatedness or all things.

• Understands that willing, but not blind, obedience is the beginning of leadership development – he or she knows a person learns to lead by learning to follow.

• Takes responsibility for his or her own progress and operates without blaming anyone for anything – he or she knows that hardships can be the fuel of greatness.

• Understands that there is a price to be paid for excellence – he or she knows that the rejection of peers is sometimes the cost of being outstanding.

• Engages, initiates, and is unafraid to ask thoughtful questions – he or she knows the engaged student brings joy and enthusiasm to the dedicated teacher.

• Knows that teachers are a bonus, not an essential – many educated men and women are self-educated.

• Understands that academic pursuits come first – that all else is secondary.

“My husband is very controlling. He monitors my phone (‘it’s a dangerous world’) my dress (‘why would you want to attract unnecessary attention’) and where I am (‘you know how unsafe things are’) and has unreasonable expectations when it comes to intimacy (‘there must be someone else if you don’t want….’). This is suffocating me. I am finding it hard to love him with all the ‘love’ he insists on showing me. The stronger he gets the more I am repelled. I can’t say so because he becomes desperate and then physical. He will restrain me from going anywhere until we have ‘made love’ to ‘seal our relationship’ before I can leave the house.”

The above is not an actual letter. I developed it on behalf three women whom I have known and who have described these binds to me. The women are not clients. They have spoken at public events to illustrate the extent of their cooperation that leads to these degrees of toxicity in some relationships.

If you (male or female) see yourself in any one of these toxic binds, please, get the help you need.

Freedom is the hallmark of love. Jealousy is not; controlling is not.

Get free before you are “loved” to death!

Hoards of us are over-privileged. We are indulged and entitled.

We are demanding, self-centered, often impossible.

We eat too much, spend too much, waste mounds of everything, and get annoyed if things don’t go exactly according to our self-centered plans.

This includes me, of course, which is not for some appearance of humility.

Perhaps like you, I can be quite impossible.

This condition of being over-privileged is most crudely evident when we waste what we already have, and then expect more of whatever it is we’ve already squandered.

It’s seeing life as a bottomless cup – for phones, cars, computers, houses, travel, and even for friends.

How quickly I lose sight that there are billions of people who would readily trade their lives for mine and for all I have, for where I live, for what I do, and for my day to day comforts – and probably do a better job at leveraging it all for the good of all.

At my worst I am drunk on myself – and I see others who are equally hung-over.

At my best I am low-maintenance. I serve. I love. I use all I have for the betterment of all – the very purpose of blessing and wealth.

At my best I am part of the solution to the problems in the world.

At my worst, I am the problem.

The Mercury / Monday

Think yourself into a new way of being and feeling. When people overly focus on their feelings they tend to be trapped in a moment. The feeling keeps you there, keeps you in a moment, and it’s often in a place you don’t want to be.

Thinking frees up possibilities.

A large sheet of paper developed into a blueprint with colored pencils and sketches and symbols of crazy and courageous and wonderful and colorful plans for the next five to ten years will get you into a whole lot of more productive Imagineering than sitting around trying to identify exactly how you feel or how you felt.*

Yes. It’s important to understand feelings. It is important to acknowledge them. But they are not good and leading, guiding, and planning. They are unreliable, they are fickle, often linked to how much coffee you’ve had or how much you did or did not sleep.

If you want a really good new year move from your heart to you head, and plan it. Put your heart in the hands of your head before you follow it!

Before I’m hit with mail telling me it’s important to feel and that I am denying my own feelings by suggesting we focus on thinking more than feeling let me tell you that I am not.

I think a lot about how I feel!

* Yes. I know it’s a long sentence.

Have a great 1/1 everybody-

A week of Mercury columns written to a dad-to-be….

A colleague and his wife are soon to be joined by a son. Earlier this year he informed me that he respected my insights. I published these 5 columns as letters addressed to Zach as he prepares for the arrival of his son. What amused me was the amount of mail I got telling me that mothers are important and that girls too are born. I am going to run this today in the hopes that it will be passed around and that a few new parents will read and be edified. By the way I am fully aware that mothers are important and that girls too are born. My friend and colleague Zach is about to be a DAD to a SON and the letter is to Zach….:

• Day 1

Dear Zach:

I am delighted to hear you will become a dad to a son in January and delighted you respect my insight.

Before the baby is born:

You have probably noticed a shift in some of your thinking since you know you will soon be a dad. Trust this. It’s the “divine download.” It will continue from now on and it won’t ever stop. Any understanding you think you lack will be yours when you need it.

You are the only dad your son will ever need and you are sufficient for this joy, this 20-year active assignment, by which time he’ll be fully prepared and launched.

Relax always. Your capacity to relax will be among your greatest gifts you offer your wife and son. Anxiety is useless. It helps nothing. Babies need relaxed parents more than perfect cribs or the latest new-baby stuff. On that matter buy as little baby stuff as possible. Most of what’s suggested as essential you will never use.

Open a savings account for your son immediately. Contribute to it monthly until he’s ready to manage it himself. No withdrawals at least for 30 years.

Decide now that you will share in every joy and responsibility with the baby. Apart from the obvious (breast feeding) there is NOTHING you cannot do.

• Day 2

The birth

Be there and involved every step of the way. If hospital policy won’t allow the father to be present choose another place for your son to be born. Be present for your wife.

Try to be the first or second non-medical person to touch your infant son.

Remember exactly where and how you first touch and hold him. This will be something to tell him during his toddler years, and, if he’s like my boys, it will be something he holds onto.

With my first-born I was the first non-medical person to touch him.

Within three minutes of his birth I gently placed my two fingers a little left of center upon his chest before holding him.

I met my younger son on his seventh day. I held his sleeping face in my hands to greet him.

These moments are important to me. They are seared with love into my memory; they are touchstones of first encounters.

They make interesting toddler-talk and undergird the narrative of belonging. They are touchstones I need more than the boys appear to need them.

I access these intentional memories it when things are beautiful and when things are tough.

• Day 3

In the first weeks:

As the time approaches for your son to enter this fabulous world you will hear a lot of talk about sleep deprivation. Don’t let it bug you.

The night hours are invaluable: the joy, peace, and communion you will enjoy with your boy is something you will forever remember. I found this (almost) always to be a time of rich communion. Sometimes I was too tired to enjoy it. Many babies sleep through the night from a tender age.

Invite your extended family into your baby’s life early and a lot. They too want to love and bond with your son. The more committed people you can gather around to love him the better. If it takes a village to rear a child (chickens a raised) then the village must be invited to do so as soon as possible.

Babies need space. Give the boy time to be alone. Let him begin to learn he is a separate being who belongs to a very loving community. This is a wonderful rhythm that you and your wife will be in charge of setting.

You and your wife are the experts when it comes to your son – he needs the two of you to enjoy him and each other as much as possible – more than he needs any clinical theory, routine, or rigidity.

• Day 4

Here are some early principles that really helped me when my children were very young:

Don’t start something you can’t continue or that you don’t want to continue. For instance, I came under some heavy criticism because I never gave my sons pacifiers (called “dummies” in some cultures). I’d seen so many battles with parents over these things that I decided my sons would never have them. It seems parents need pacifiers more than the child. If this “deprivation” has lasting negative repercussions we are unaware of them.

The understanding that I was my infant’s home. Home is not our house or his crib. It’s me. This gave me the sense of freedom I needed to explore the world with my sons. While my sons were with me – about 30 countries later – they were home. The pediatrician (Dr. Yancey) who taught me this is worth his weight in gold.

Talk to your son a lot right from the start. Tell him about your day. Tell him what you are thinking, reading, and planning. Engage him in conversation as you would any person in the room with you even though he’s just a few days or weeks old. This is good for both of you. He’s learning he’s more than deeply valued and included, your voice soothes him, and you are learning to share your life with your son.

• Day 5

I trust you – and other dads-to-be have enjoyed the week of columns about babies.

Here’s the last one, perhaps the toughest:

You are not parenting for dependence or for independence but for interdependence. Everything you do is for your son’s greater, highest good. He’s not your trophy or a sign of your success or your means to regaining your unhappy childhood. He deserves complete freedom from delivering you or your wife from any unresolved issues. Parenting is the growing-up machine and it will do its wholesome work on you – if you allow it. Please, welcome it. Resisting will prolong the inevitable.

Your son comes loaded. Like you, he comes jam-packed with latent talents, latent skills, and potential waiting to be unfurled, guided, and trained. It’s your joy to help him identify and welcome all that he is into a context that will welcome and embrace all that he is. There are only really two things that will help you to do this well: first – be sure you are embracing and allowing your skills and talents and dreams to be fulfilled. Second, get out of his way.

I will close with a lines from a poem that have been my guiding light:

“Selfhood begins with walking away; love is proved in the letting go” – Cecil Day Lewis, Walking Away.

May the cumulative joy of a millions happy and fulfilled dads be yours.

Rod

[Readers: your responses, reflections, additions are always appreciated]

The Mercury / Friday

Lower-functioning people, like lower-functioning families, are mind-bogglingly predictable. They invade boundaries, war over roles, suffer and inflict jealousies, wade in unresolved conflicts, wholesale gloom, demand inordinate attention, collect wounds like trophies, and are critical of any who cut loose of their tired patterns and conversations. They are usually rigid, right, and religious.

While I have empathy for such people and families, although it is usually wasted, and while some require intensive help to break their repetitive orbit, until such individuals and families are ready for change, the helper (counselor, therapist, coach) will spin his or her wheels on the client-designed treadmill until the helper becomes part of the client’s low-functioning litany of moans.

Higher-functioning people and families are wildly unpredictable. They care about what works, about what is kind, and how all or most people can benefit from their actions and attitudes. Who is in charge, who is honored is of little interest to them, largely because such concerns are eclipsed by the level of meaning that comes with living.

• I hope you will get ahold of your life before someone else does.

• May you define yourself before someone else does.

• May you escape rigidity, religion, and being right, and find it replaced with ambiguity, faith, flexibility, and fun.

And, may it also be true for me.