Last Monday, I found myself standing in the kitchen at 6:30AM drinking a cup of coffee and searing a ring of smoked kielbasa in preparation for a two-day visit with my family, most of which centered around playing cards and shit-talking at the dining room table, chasing after my nine-month-old Great Niece, and simply just being with a couple of people I’ve known and loved for pretty much the entirety of my life.

As I’ve gotten older, experiences like this have taken on a much greater sense of significance. So much of the bullshit has fallen away and left in its wake the necessary space for resting in the ordinary things that nourish the soul and claim their share of my ever-dwindling stockpile of minutes. While none of us can say with any certainty how much time we have left, the simple truth is that there is far less time in front of me than behind, and I intend on spending as much of it as possible on the things that heal and sustain me.

Several days prior to the aforementioned visit, my wife and I went out for dinner and a musical at a local theater to celebrate our thirteenth anniversary. During the show, two of the characters sang about the hardships they’d endured as a result of having tried to live up to the expectations of their fathers. As I sat there listening, it dawned on me that I’d never personally had to confront this issue. My own father came back from WWII with a full-blown case of PTSD that left him in squarely the throes of alcoholism. Combined with that, his emotional instability, and the side-effects of the daily pharmacopeia of prescription drugs, caffeine, and cigarettes he ingested left him barely capable of imposing more than a fraction of his will upon his own life…let alone the life of his only son.

While the other kids I knew had fathers who, for good or ill, seemed at least somewhat capable of teaching them about the requirements of manhood, I was pretty much left to figure that out on my own. The irony is that the deficit of growing up this way also proved to be its singular advantage. I won’t deny that for a great majority of the time I felt a lot like a ship without a rudder. That meant, however, that I had little or no restrictions to keep me from encountering whatever unexplored territory the winds blew me towards. The pain of the unknown is something I’ve come to recognize quite well, but that same unknown has provided me with abundant opportunity for self-discovery.

I’ve also come to understand that I was never truly at the mercy of my life. As I look back, it’s become quite clear that something much larger and far more adept than my human understanding has been there all along. It might not have always kept this ship from entering difficult waters; but it’s taught me how to swim, and was always there to make sure I never drowned…