pain · you feel you may lose a thing · relationships · children
what you just named
You came in pain, not joy: that you feel you may lose a thing, in your relationships — specifically with children — and you reached for the Stoic voice first. That's what you've named. Listen now to what it answers.
- Stoic
Spirit
mind
The world your child is going into has rooms you cannot enter — by age, by era, by the simple fact that they are them and you are you. Epictetus's first sentence is the only sentence here: of things some are in our power, and others are not. The world's reception of them is not in your power. What is in your power is the man you have been to them, the man you remain to them, and what they carry of you into the rooms you cannot follow. That is not nothing. It is the whole of what a father can give. Be that, fully. Let the rooms be the rooms.
heart
What goes in with them is what you gave them. That is the only thing of yours that follows.
connection
You stand in the line of every father who could not follow his child into the world and let what he had given them be enough — the immigrant father whose son went to a country he did not know, every man who raised someone for a future he would not see.
Action
Today, name one thing you have given your child that goes with them into rooms you can't enter. Spend ten minutes being grateful you gave it, then do something specific to deepen it.
Reference
Of things some are in our power, and others are not.
Epictetus, Enchiridion 1
practice
Trusting what you have given them to go in with them
principle
The rooms they enter without you are not in your power; what you gave them is
value
Father-giving over father-following