This is the best I can give you

Live a better life than I have.

In a comedy one doesn't expect to find words that can reverberate so deeply with a tenet of one's personal philosophy, yet, these are the words which I think all parents should be required to utter before being allowed the privilege of entering a child's life.

In a Knight's Tale the father of the young knight usurper enters his child into a seven year indenturement in order that the child have the opportunity at a better life. The movie is a mixture of laughter and poignant moments showing the incongruities of nobility and peasantry and how a matter of birth foreordained one's lot in life, if one accepted it as so.

I look around me now and wonder how many of us live the life foreordained and how many of us choose to change the course our lives seem to be headed in. How many of us truly want our children to live a better life than we did and how many of us resent our children's lives (or potential lives) and actually do things to ensure that our children rise no further than we have. How many people are loggers and fishermen because they love it and not because it is what their father's did and it would devestate the family if they went a different route? How many children weren't ever pushed to do more with their education because "no one else in the family has that and we all turned out fine" as another bong was lit, another pull on the beer taken and another shot of tequilla downed.

Live a better life than I have. Travel where I haven't. See what I can't. Hear what I won't. Do what I don't dare. That is what I wish for my children. Be what I am and so very much more.

A friend of ours, Kiyoshi, once told us that children need to cry with the pain of departures because such pain makes the heart grow larger. I want my children to cry with this kind of pain and no too much of any other.

I do not wish for my children bigger toys. If they find a way to fit them into the lives of betterness that I wish on them, so be it. While I do not wish them poverty, I wish them "enough" material wealth to be content and I hope they are easily contented.

I wish my children to live close enough to me that I may see them when I wish yet far enough away that it will be exciting for them to live there and that they don't live here until they are old enough to know better.

I wish my children to find a friend that will be their best friend forever, as I have, knowing an unconditional love that they never knew possible and through which travelling all of the world's of God are made that much more intense to travel because of the companionship.

Hmmmm. I hope that they remember us with fondness and a bit of respect and tell stories about us that make the listener wish they knew us first hand, even if the stories are a bit exaggerated!

I think that the life we gave them, so far, has been the best we have to give. I hope we continue to do so.