Tag: Reflection

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Acknowledging My Father’s Efforts

I’ve been in a space of reflection and atonement and forgiveness since Yom Kippur. And over the weekend I had a chance to engage in conversations and reflection related to the wounding and lack of skills that so many men walk around with.

I was so tough on my father during his life. I wanted more connection, more presence, more vulnerability, more ownership. He couldn’t offer me what I wanted so desperately. Hell, the only strong memory I have of him asking how I was feeling, I was 30! 

But now, as I am working on my healing and trying to do better for my kids, as I am looking around at others doing the same, I see just how much effort he put in and did not get the credit for. Or, at least, not from me.

My father never even knew his own father. That man walked out on his family. His mother worked several jobs to keep him afloat. He had to take care of himself from a young age. He did not have a parent to make him dinner every night. When his friends had to go home for dinner, he had to go to a lonely apartment and fend for himself. He did not have a role model of how to be a parent. He did not have enough love. He did not have people to connect with in his pain – his friends thought it was cool that he had so much freedom, and even they didn’t recognize until recent years what that freedom really meant. These are not things that he shared with me, but that I learned or rediscovered after his death.

My father has many faults. But he really tried to do something different for his kids, to give them what he did not have. He did it imperfectly. He created a lot of pain. But he also gave us love and great memories and so many valuable skills and a comfortable life.

Thank you, dad. I would like to acknowledge now all the effort you put in to make things better for your children. I would like to acknowledge that you were criticized for your shortcomings and incapacities by me and by many others. I see now that you were doing your absolute best, and nobody acknowledged that for you.

I wish my father was still alive so that I could offer him that. Alas, I can only offer it to the part of my father that lives on in me.

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Treating Handwriting as a Form of Practice

For most of my life, I have carried an identity of “having bad handwriting.” This is somewhat ironic, as I write by hand on a daily basis and fill multiple notebooks in a month. Having stayed in practice with so much writing, one would think that I would maintain a modicum of legibility. Yet even I struggle to read my own writing.

I was reflecting on why I stick to this identity. Why, exactly, do I need to write so small, so cramped, so quickly? What, exactly, is the value of saving space by cramming in my writing? Why does it have to be done in such a hurry?

Ultimately, I realized that at the root of “I have bad handwriting” is simply yet another form of “rushing.” My handwriting is poor because I “have to” write quickly, to get it all down before it’s too late.

But this is not necessary. It is not founded on any real concern of “losing something” if I slow down. It is simply conditioning.

Writing by hand can be another form of meditation. One can flow, engage fully in the physical act of writing, sit with and marinate in the words being written. My writing could be made beautiful and efficient. Ultimately, all of that would be much better than the cramped rush I have been committed to all these years.

There is no rush. I can just enjoy the act of writing. I can treat it, too, as another way to express art, to be fully present.

I shed this identity of having bad handwriting, and my need to be in such a rush while writing.