Rabbi Sandy Sasso:
I think society does a very good job of teaching us how to be consumers, and a very good job of teaching us how to be competitors. The question parents are struggling with is, ‘How do we not just teach our children’s minds, but how do we teach their souls?’ “

Looking back at some of my more substantive posts (hey, there have been some!), I realize that the most difficult struggles in my fatherhood experience are those touching moral or spiritual essence—things that are difficult to measure or medicate. Kids underperforming at school? We know how to handle that. Boy 4 becomes fascinated with and fearful about dying? Boy 8 asks, “Why does anything exist instead of nothing?” (Yes, he literally asked that.) Those things are harder to get at as a parent.

Rabbi Sandy Sasso was the guest on a radio program last spring and discussed the intersection of spirituality and parenting. You can see the site and download the podcast at the link above. It’s a good conversation, and I think it’s important to think about the spiritual lives of our children.

I think any parent who is engaged senses his or her children have spiritual selves, but it’s hard to describe. How do you nurture their spiritual lives? What do those lives look like? How do you know when you’re treading that ground?

For instance, I think a reverence toward beauty is an important spiritual skill. We have no clue from Boy 5 that he has any aesthetic sense whatsoever. Actually, that’s true of Boy 13, too. You should see his room. But Girl 2 has lately become obsessed with flowers. “Flowers,” actually, because just about anything growing in our yard that catches her fancy qualifies. She loves to gather up flowers and bring them in to us to put in water. I recently learned that petals from pansies will last about two days floating in a glass.

I don’t want them to merely obey the rules of our religious tradition. Any dog can be trained to obey. I want them to be kind and compassionate, generous and humble and giving. But how?

Here’s a good place to start: Sasso advises that it’s okay to not have answers to their tough questions. Admitting you don’t know and wondering about things with your kids shows them that doubt and uncertainty and questions are important parts of spiritual growth.

It’s not much, but it’s something. Also check out Rabbi Sasso’s recommended reading list for encouraging spirituality in kids.

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AAAAHAHAHAHAHA

Now, score your test:
If you watched the whole thing and didn’t laugh, you have no SW nerditude.
If you smiled, you might have some SW nerditude.
If you laughed out loud and can identify the scenes of your favorite George Lucas lines, there’s no hope for you. (And I’ll see you at the convention. I’ll be red imperial guard in full dress uniform.)

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That’s the look I get from people when I tell them I’m really busy. Oh, and the other look: “you’re going to blow me off with that excuse?”

And I know it’s true: to live today is to be busy. But there’s a difference between busy and, you know, maxed out. Where normal people get up and go to work, I get up and work before going to work. And then where normal people come home from work and watch football or visit friends, I work on my way home and then work some more when I get there. And amid all that rich variety of life, I try to blog and write the novel and be a dad and a husband.

And there’s the rub. I know that being a dad should be first, but there it is, bringing up the rear on my whinelist. It doesn’t mean I think of that as less important. It’s just that kids are less demanding of my time than deadlines, which is not the way it should be.

Of course I realize I got myself here by saying Yes when I could have said no. Yeah, I could opt out of more work hours. I could dump the blogs, forget the book. Be proactive and all. You know the drill: make time instead of hoping to find time. That kind of thing. But I keep telling myself it’s just for a short time, and it’s necessary to live like this now so that I won’t have to later. I don’t want to live like this forever. Or even for much longer.

Sometimes it sounds like famous last words to me. After all, how many others have told themselves the same thing while missing out on their kids growing up? I’m certainly not the first to put off happiness until later when there’s more time.

Here we go again with the magical dinner hour
The Fathers.com weekly newsletter is the latest to tout family dinner time togetherness as a quasi-magic talisman. As you know, researchers have been saying for a long time that there’s something special about family dinner time, even if you’re eating tuna casserole. They say it helps kids stay away from drugs and alcohol and increases their vocabulary.

But now it turns out that it’s not only good for the kids, but is also Share This

Encouragement is one of the greatest strengths we can bring to our families, because we fathers have the power to instill confidence and hope and life. On the other hand, we can also discourage family members easily by being over-critical or too distant.

I don’t know if this is true. I suppose it is. Being too critical is discouraging to whomever is on the receiving end. But does encouragement or discouragement from Dad carry special weight?

I don’t remember my dad ever encouraging me. Not a judgment, just a statement of fact. He probably did. I remember one discouraging comment, though, and I don’t know how old I was. Probably just out of high school. I somehow let slip that I wanted to be a writer, and he said that writers have to have “the gift of gab. And you don’t.”

He was right about the “you don’t” part. Put me in a room where conversation is expected and I’m marking the exits for a quick retreat. But it’s not his fault that I’m not a rich and famous writer.

None of which matters a whit to the main point of the Fathers.com message: kids need lots of encouragement, and you, dad are uniquely positioned to give it. I’m going to be better about that this week.

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I’m not saying it wasn’t safe. It’s just perhaps not quite as safe as some of the other ones.
Why?
Well some of them are built so the front doesn’t fall off at all.
Well wasn’t this one built so the front doesn’t fall off?
No.
How do you know?
Because the front fell off. And 20,000 tons of crude oil spilled into the sea caught fire, it’s a bit of a giveaway.

Alas, it’s too funny to be true. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a funny politician. (John McCain looks rather like a grimacing corpse when he smiles on cue.) Read the real story of the “interview” at Snopes.com. (Snopes won’t let me copy the explanation.)

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We spent all day Saturday at the Olympic-size swimming pool. Its claim to fame is the three diving platforms, the highest of which is 33 feet. I would have gone off it, you understand, if I hadn’t been forced to stay in the kiddie pool where it’s safer with Boy 4 and Girl 2. No, I didn’t ask random teens to pose for the picture. It is one of the pool’s promo photos, included here to show the death platform in its native habitat.

Standard procedure for people jumping to their deaths is to climb to the platform, walk to the edge, and then back away until they can muster up the courage to step over. As a result, a small, frightened crowd is always standing on the platform looking into the dizzying abyss and needling each other. (That’s another reason I didn’t go up. Didn’t want to stand in line.)

One of those hesitaters was a big guy in his mid to late 50s. Gray hair, gray shorts, a blue Hawaiian print shirt. He looked a bit out of place up there beside the unbreakable teenagers, and many of them passed him by as he’d step up, then move back. Up and back, up and back. For a good 15 minutes.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who noticed him. Because after a few minutes of his yes-I-can-oh crap!-no-I-can’t routine, the people in the pool started to cheer him on. The pool and grass around it held probably 300-350 people on the last holiday weekend of the summer.

Blue Hawaiian Shirt Guy would step up to the edge, and the crowd would start to cheer and whistle. A loud “Go-o-o-o-o-o!” is a pretty compelling argument from that many voices. But he couldn’t yet, and stepped away from the edge. A few minutes later he’s back and the crowd starts cheering again, louder, more voices. “Go-o-o-o-o-o!” Cheers and whistles. He backed away again, waving off the crowd like someone brushing away a fly. This went on for about two more rounds.

And then he stepped up to the edge again and you could see an intensity in his body that wasn’t there before. Something about the way he spaced his feet and squared his shoulders. He had decided. The crowd saw it, too, and wasn’t going to let him back away this time. They sustained the loud cheers and whistles and applause for a good ten seconds, crescendoing in the couple of seconds before Blue Hawaiian Shirt Guy jumped. He stepped off the edge, his stubby legs kicking all the way down, the crowd celebrating. When he surfaced, the crowd cheered him again. (He was the only jumper to get a post-splash cheer.) He raised his fist in triumph.

For a minute there it felt like a community.

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I’m grousing but it really wasn’t bad. Except for the near fatal athletic injury, of course. The kids had a good time and that’s what this trip was all about from the beginning. I knew that going in. And Her Hotness’s family is relatively sane when the parents aren’t around.

Stay tuned for next time when I tell you all about the big guy on the diving platform and the 300 total strangers who all united to cheer for him.

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The art of loving someone while not always liking them.

They’re little pieces of me. I’ll never do better work.

I know it doesn’t matter, but I’m just really tired.

The negotiation between what you want and what is right.

The trick is learning to want that which is right.

You have to change your Self to do it well.

You can’t love someone so much and not be changed.

Imagine herding cats. Whatever you imagined, you’re short by half.

We made them, but could never have divined such love.

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Here they are, then, roughly in some kind of order.

10. The Top 10 List. We have visions of ten witty observations, all united by a common theme. The problem is, not many lists can sustain the wit for ten items. Including this one.

9. The How-To Post. You have to write them if you’re a blogger. It’s a rule. A sure-fire traffic generator is what I’m told. But there are so many How-To posts now that we’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel for original material.

8. The Apology Post. I’m so sorry I haven’t posted for a while, but I’m going to turn over a new leaf and post more often. Psst! Hey, Blogger. A couple of things. First, nobody cares. Second, imagine a person who sits in front of his monitor wondering why you haven’t posted in so long and getting so cheesed off that you think an apology is in order. Is this the kind of reader you want to keep by singing your sad song?

7. The Book Review. Yeah, but I’m going to keep doing them. Good books should be shared, you know?

6. Navel Gazing. Musing over things like forefathers and the moment when as a child you realized you would one day die. You know what I’ve figured out? People prefer it if you keep your lint to yourself. The worst example ever: an essay I read in which the author wrote in excruciating descriptive detail about his penis. No kidding. (A confession: I like reading really well written lint. But not about penises, no matter how good the writing is.)

5. The I-don’t-have-anything-to-say-but-I-feel-oddly-pressured-to-post-so-watch-this-video Post. Scratch up something you like on YouTube and embed it. Ahhh, all better now. The vids I post were usually sent to me in email.

4.

3. Posts About Blogging. I mean, really. It’s like navel gazing about navel gazing. (Exception granted to you lucky sods whose blogs are about blogging.)

2. The 1:00 a.m. Post. In which it’s obligatory to state that you can’t sleep. And then all your readers go, “Ohhh, I see. That explains it then. He normally would be sleeping at that hour, but last night was an exception. I’m glad he cleared that up.”

1. The Meme/Tag. I’ve just posted a Top 10 list and now I’m going to publicly call out 50 other bloggers and they have to post a Top 10 list. (I’ve been tagged by some readers and was happy to play at the time. Was flattered that you picked me. But I’ve started to ignore them. It’s not you, it’s me.) Another sure-fire traffic generator, allegedly, though I’m skeptical. I think it was actually invented by a 6th grader. Bloggers will collectively look back on this trend five years from now and wonder why we thought it was so fun. Kind of like the hula hoop. But they’re so hard to resist! It’s like having someone extend a hand to shake yours and you just leave them hanging. It’s hard to do. Anyway, they’re having-someone-else-put-their-finger-in-your-nose annoying. There, I said it. Now I’ll never be tagged again. But we can still be friends.

You’re guilty! You know who you are. What would you add to the list?

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