Why I'm Smiling This Father's Day 2018
Life starts out one way; you try to your best to stay on your path, and despite curve balls that the universe throws you…you think you know how it’s going to go…where you’re going to end up in the end.
Despite the setbacks or the diversions, you smile and continue forward. you work your whole life for one thing, one plan, one goal.
Maybe at some point your path changes, but you come back to a new one…and you keep moving forward.
You pour your heart and soul into what you do, and you tell yourself that every day on your path towards your career/art/goal/job/life is what you’re living for.
What do you do when the thing you’ve always done becomes the thing you can no longer do. When your path diverges? When your goals change against your will? When waiting for someone to visit you, or watching television, or listening to a book, is all you can do?
Your career accomplishments, college degree, and very definition of what you have lived for up until a certain part no longer reflect the circumstances that once amounted to the things that make you….you.
What do you do?
Who are you then?
What is left?
Something I always respected about my father was how he continued to pivot despite his life circumstances physically changing every few months. His lifelong pursuit / career goals unraveled before his eyes, and he persisted. A man who once defined himself as a career-oriented, goal-driven man, no longer could identify with external circumstances.
I think of my career-focused friends and how our society defines us by our external circumstances. literally and figuratively. We are so hard on ourselves. But why?
He didn’t used to look like this. ALS paralyzes the muscles in your body, including your face, so his “smile” was smaller in the end…and eventually he couldn’t move his mouth at all for a few years.
A friendly reminder that wherever you are today, with your dad, without your dad….smile at something in your life that moves you.
Smile until your face hurts, smile at something that makes you “you”…that you would still smile at no matter what…even if everything changed. #HappyFathersDay
