What is truth is real.
What is not truth is not real.
It’s an illusion, but it looks real.
Love is real.
It’s the supreme expression of life.

Through my first thirty-five years or so I rarely questioned my beliefs or motives, and I lived a confused and unhappy life because of that. Now I look back and realize the irony, there is no coincidence between a feckless existence and my disinterest in the process.

The trigger for my thinking over the last six or seven years about values and being alive is still unclear to me, but parenting must somehow be a factor in it. How else could I possibly be an authoritative partner if when he came into my life I didn’t examine who I was? And the effect of that investigation has been profound — it lead me to the most important discoveries of my life that I would have otherwise discounted.

But now I realize a dilemma. As parents, we have no choice but to download our values to our children, which means I must make a conscious effort encouraging him to socialize and interact with a world that I’d mostly rather not know. But how do I also teach him the more subtle side of self-examination that took me decades to discover, and do I even have enough time on earth to help him with it?

Every day this contemplation enlightens me of this project’s purpose. It is obviously more than just my own record of our family’s story, so maybe I should take it a little more seriously.