One evening during the past few weeks, while we have all been really together, one of my sons expressed a fear. 

It was a gentle moment. 

It was as if he’d been storing his fear and comments for such a moment. 

“Dad, I am worried that you are going to die and, well, you won’t be at my wedding and all those sorts of things. Is there like a guidebook for what I must do without you?

His care and concern and brewing anxiety moved me. 

I explained that while it is indeed possible that I could die soon and even before his wedding, it was somewhat unlikely. 

We reflected on how very capable he is and how little he requires me to do anything at all for him. I reminded him that our many friends, men and women who had known him from birth and who had witnessed his every growing phase, applauded his every achievement, would rally around him to love and welcome his bride – whomever she is – and combine efforts and resources to make their day spectacular.  

I reminded him that my brother and and their families love him and his brother at least as much as I do.

And then we talked about something else.

I forget what.   

Five mind blowing truths*:

• You are responsible for everything that you say, everything that you do, everything you eat, drink, smoke, or take into your body. Extreme conditions exist where this is not so but they are, well, extreme. Getting hold of this will help you to stop blaming others and foster a radical shift in your perceptions.

• You are the common factor In all of your relationships. You are the central figure in all of your actions. Understanding this will give a meaningful context for everything and help you to understand the people around you – the same is true for others. You are no victim. If you think or feel you are a victim there are steps you can take to move yourself out of victimhood. Are you willing to give up the rewards of victimhood? Yes, even victimhood has some rewards.

• Among your most powerful human tools is the ability to experience, extend, and express forgiveness to all others. Forgiving others is not about others. It’s about you. The rewards will be almost instantaneous but will probably follow a period of clean but necessary pain.

• Offer outlandish grace to everybody you encounter. You will notice it has an amazing boomerang effect.

• Most of us are surrounded by barriers, some self-imposed, some other-imposed. It’s our job as unique individuals to be able to look beyond those barriers and to imagine horizons for ourselves. No one can do this for you. Think of what you could become if you had no fear.

*I am my first reader – all this applies to me as well as it may to you.

High maintenance people require constant attention and approval. They crave to be the center of almost every conversation and will often become symptomatic (moody, resentful, loud, threatening) when not. They review every move, thought, words and actions of others. They tend to read unintended meaning into statements, looks, sighs, and attitudes of others. They are easily hurt, quickly offended, quick to rebuke when lacking the attention they think they deserve. Threats of withdrawal or desertion become a way of life.

High maintenance people are difficult, sometimes impossible, even in relaxed circumstances. They pick fights, find fault, and personalize almost everything. They argue with others, especially with intimates, for no apparent reason. They pick fights with strangers like waiters. They often live in a world of cut-off relationships where most others are idiots.

What can you do if you are in a relationship with a high maintenance person? You can do very little that will not hurt, offend, or get a reaction, but you must make a stand. High maintenance people seldom benefit from pity, patience, or empathy. 

They will only benefit from being constantly challenged to grow up.

• You trip over each other no matter what size your living space. It seems urgently necessary to make a schedule for who can be in the kitchen (bathroom, laundry) at what times and for how long. When it’s vacant and you go in, suddenly everyone wants the space at the same time, dog included.

• Under lockdown your eyes become magnifying glasses, enlarging everything. The way he chews his food; the ways she sips her coffee; the way the children leave things open; how she chews ice; how he breathes when asleep; how the children leave stuff everywhere – everything gets magnified and amplified. You get sizzle eyes.

• Things get very personal. You become experts in hearing something behind everything that is said and not said. Whispers can sound like screams especially if the content can be perceived as criticism.

• The slippery slide – of making everything into a catastrophe – becomes really steep and it’s easy to think the sky really is falling.

Rejoice if any of this is even momentarily true for you and your family. You are on a wonderful journey to loving each other in ways you never heretofore imagined.

A 16 minute chat with my son.

The Mercury / Thursday

Daily parenting challenge which I hope you will adopt…

• Be today the adult you’d want your child to become.

• Negotiate deals, resolve conflicts, compromise, in exactly the manner you hope your child does when he/she is an adult. Powerful learning happens by experience and observing, but it’s more than that. Your personal transformations will shape and “lift” your family beyond the power of role-modeling. How you are sets the path for how your children will (likely) be.

• Use money, save money, leverage resources in the manner you hope your child will one day utilize resources. Attitudes, actions are yeast-like. Your behaviors shape and become the norm.

• Treat your parents in the manner you hope your adult children will treat you in your advancing years and then expect nothing more or less.

• Love, serve your siblings and their families so your children in order to remove ambiguity about how love behaves in an immediate and extended family.

• Be an avid reader if you want your child to be an avid reader. It might not immediately “take” but chances are it will in the future. Valuable habits take time, not nagging.

• If you want your child to be well-mannered, courageous and kind, be that way with lover, friend, foe. There is no other way to teach these values.

Our first podcast: https://m.soundcloud.com/hushall/you-and-me-3-31_my-birthday/s-HwPsrz7WM2P?in=hushall/sets/you-and-me-podcast/s-yW6UYH6Ymqa

On April 1, 1998, I sent a group email announcing I had responded positively to a woman who asked me to adopt her newborn baby. Some recipients thought it was an April Fools’ prank. 

Thulani, 22 today, will graduate in May from a prestigious private university. He earned the bulk of his hefty four-years of fees through scholarships and by maintaining academic excellence. His degree cost me a fraction of the total expense. He is so thoroughly personable the university officials bent over backwards to ensure my son had what he needed.

Thulani made promotional advertisements for the university and its basketball team because he loves to create. That his creations would “go viral” and serve the university was something Thulani would later discover. He did what he loved and the consequences rewarded him.

Life is like that, usually. Good things usually happen to good people. 

Right now everything the world over seems upside down. I wish my son was having a huge birthday and graduation event. He is not. We know this is a minute sacrifice when compared with others who have and will bury loved ones as this viral terror continues. 

We will light candles on a birthday cake and thank God for a boy’s success while we remember those who suffer. 

Life is beautiful. Life is brutal. Stay home. We are. 

The Mercury / Tuesday

It is always time to love.

These unique days offer each of us extraordinary opportunities to learn about it in new and deeper ways.

When I say “us” I mean all of us.

I mean people on every continent, of every faith tradition. I also mean people who claim none and those who have formerly been enemies.

I have been good at love, even unselfish, for rare moments. Mostly, I have loved in selfish ways even though “selfish” and “love” are contradictions.

I want to be better at it.

I want to improve my love skills.

Please join me.

I have witnessed and experienced authentic love and noticed:

• Love seeks the highest good for all concerned.

• Love sacrifices wisely so others may benefit.

• Love is never jealous. Jealousy expels love.

• Love wisely forgives. Wise forgiveness remembers so traps, errors, manipulations, are not repeated. It is possible to forgive and to remember – actually it is rather wise.

• To employ a metaphor, love is a long-haul journey and not a brief walk in the park. It takes thirty or forty years for love to mature.

• Love resists all forms of coercion. It really does make others free.

• Love considers the big picture and not immediate returns.

• Love is not about who the “other” is or is not, it’s about who and what the one doing the loving is.

For a (far) superior definition take a long and enduring study – a month or two – of what the apostle Paul (formerly Saul) had to say about love in 1 Corinthians 13…. the whole chapter, not only the portions traditionally used at weddings.