pain · you feel you may never gain a thing · relationships · children
what you just named
You came in pain, not joy: that you feel you may never gain 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 fear assumes there is a fixed father they need and you are forever short of it. Epictetus does not let his student wait on arrival. Immediately then think it right to live as a full-grown man, and one who is making proficiency, and let everything which appears to you to be the best be to you a law which must not be transgressed. You may never be the father they needed at five. You can be the father making proficiency toward what they need at fifteen, twenty-five, forty. Proficiency is the only honest answer to a calling that lasts a lifetime. The lack you fear is fixed only if you stop making proficiency. Don't stop.
heart
Make proficiency. The father they needed is not waiting at an arrival point; he's being made daily.
connection
You stand in the line of every father who never felt he had arrived and kept making proficiency anyway — the man whose fatherhood was a forty-year practice, never a state.
Action
Today, pick one specific thing your child needs from you that you are currently inadequate to. Make a small concrete move toward proficiency. One move. Today.
Reference
Immediately then think it right to live as a full-grown man, and one who is making proficiency, and let everything which appears to you to be the best be to you a law which must not be transgressed.
Epictetus, Enchiridion 50
practice
Making one small concrete move toward proficiency on what your child needs
principle
Fatherhood is proficiency, not arrival; the lack persists only if you stop moving
value
Daily proficiency over imagined adequacy