Fathers day aftermath

William Faulkner
Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.


This past weekend I was able to enjoy myself with friends and family.  I got to get away from the harsh reality of life to enjoy time with people that makes me smile.  The thing that I took in most this past weekend was communicating and watching other fathers with their kids and hearing about their stories.  I got a chance to actually have a deep conversation with my father, and the one thing I came away with is "What would I had been like if he actually raised me?" I'm not sure if I would have ended up better or worst, so it helped me realize that we all become the people we are through trials and tribulation.  It's the things that we go through in life that set us apart from everyone else.  We should never forget the things he have been through in life, however adapt to it and make it a point in which you learn from.  The more we learn as people the more educated we become in situations.  When I say educated I'm not just talking about book smart, but I'm speaking the process of learning.  There was a lot of fathers that I heard from this weekend that was upset that they couldn't spend time with their children, while others didn't even care.  My advise to the fathers that couldn't see their children were, "What could you do to better that situation so next time it does not happen"?  And to the fathers that don't care, I can only ask Why?    We need to learn as people that we can't change every situation, but we can change the way we deal with them on a regular basis.  When speaking to my father this past weekend I learned that although we share alot of the same characteristics in our personality, we have a lot of different ones as well.  The more I spoke with him the more I understood the problem with the average black man.  Most of us black men grow up with a certain aggression that isn't easily matched, and could cause more harm than good if not harnessed.  I realized that I grew up with alot of that aggression, but was able to shape it in my own way.  There isn't alot of people that are able to critique themselves from the outside in, but we need to start.  As people we need to be willing to meet our personal issues head on, and recognize that we do have characteristic problems in ourselves.  Until we start to resolve the problems in ourselves, we could never truly grow as people.  Try to find ways to recognize your characteristic flaws and work on them.  Nobody is perfect in the world, but there is no harm in trying to be.