pain · you regret that you never gained a thing · relationships · children
what you just named
You came in pain, not joy: that you regret that you never gained 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
Your father did not say it because his father did not say it, and you carried the not-saying forward by default. Seneca writes about why a good thing must be expressed at all: no good thing is pleasant to possess, without friends to share it. The love is a possession of yours; possession of love unshared is not the pleasant kind. Your son has been the friend the love was for and has not been shared with. The saying is short. Three words. The years of not saying are not undone by the saying, but the years remaining can be different from the moment of saying onward. Say it. Today. In your own words if those three don't come out. But say it.
heart
Say it. In whatever form comes out of your mouth. Today.
connection
You stand in the line of every father who at fifty, sixty, seventy finally said the words his own father never said — every man who chose to interrupt the silence rather than transmit it further.
Action
Today, say I love you to your son. In a text, in a voicemail, in person, in a letter. The form is not what matters. The saying is the action.
Reference
No good thing is pleasant to possess, without friends to share it.
Seneca, Letters from a Stoic Ep. 6
practice
Saying the love today; not transmitting the silence further
principle
Love unsaid is the inheritance of silence; saying it is the inheritance of speech
value
Speech over inherited silence