A Question from my Daughter >
Hey Dad … I was thinking. You tell me a lot of things about life and I want to know: What’s your biggest goal for my life?
This is an excellent question, Sweetie.
The short answer is that I wish you to be happy.
In one sense happiness is as unique as an individual snowflake, no two people’s happiness are alike. However, happiness in another sense shows certain patterns for all: the most important human concerns are work and love.
I wish you to find worthy work that demands the best of your capacities to pursue. Do your work the best you can for your sake and for the sake of others; for the sake of what it gets you and for its own sake.
I wish you to love deeply and widely and for the whole of your life. Love is as close to perfection as our all too imperfect world ever gets. Love is a dye which changes the color of the world but less obviously, it imparts color to the dyer’s hand as well. Through all misery, pain and disenchantment, love is what saves us and redeems us and makes our all too accidental lives, holy.
Happiness requires that you make your peace with God. Life has its sacred things. You despise them at your peril.
Happiness requires that you be devoted to family. People are not meant to be alone. Learn to forgive. The people you love are imperfect and so are you. Either you love people as they are or you don’t love anyone, because nobody is going to become what you want them to be and neither are you.
Benevolence is more important than knowledge. Intelligence is a great good but it is unintelligent not to see that there can be more important things than being right.
It is wise to prevent scarcity and want by accumulating wealth. However, beyond a certain point, money is destructive, an invitation people send themselves to make bad choices. There is such a thing as enough.
Happiness requires a sense of proportion. It is enough to have enough, the tragedy of our lives is that often we recognize the proper limits to our conduct only after we have transgressed them and our self-destructive choice is irrevocable.
Be careful of worshipping Golden Calves. It is easy to be dazzled by the lure of impermanent longings. Beauty points in ephemeral gestures to a transcendence which is permanent.
Love,
Daddy