We all have our flaws – me as much, if not more than most. But when I was reflecting the other day about some friend’s children who had turned out well ‘despite’ their troubled upbringing, I wondered if ‘because of’ their upbringing might be a better viewpoint.
It’s easy to look back at life and lay blame for things that fell short of our expectations, but if we’re relatively comfortable with the person we’ve become, one has to question whether it’s because of those lacks and disappointments that we turned out this way.
There isn’t one of us that would have done a thousand things differently given our current views, but hindsight is terribly overrated and we’re all just trying to do the best we can given our wisdom today. So blaming another for the things that went wrong in the past surely isn’t the root to inner satisfaction and happiness?
I think the story my Apache Indian friend told me about a son, lamenting with his father about the lack of attention he got from him when growing up, lays it out best:
Father: “Do you know what the job of a father is? To do his best to make sure his children survive.”
Son: “Really? I thought it was so much more.”
Father: “I know, and that’s been the problem all along.”
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