So we’ll celebrate. We should celebrate! But I can’t help but thinking about all that there is still to come. His story is just beginning. The challenges. The disapointments. The joy and agony. It’s all part of the curriculum.

I think what I’m most excited for, is for him to discover himself. To push back those thoughts that whisper and sometime yell that you’re an imposter. You won’t amount to much. You’ll never be enough. And for some reason, it seems that much of this type of growth needs to happen far from home. And I’m beginning to think that it has always been this way.

A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

John A. Shedd

We thrive so often in the messiness of life. In the freedom that comes from responsibility. In the constant reframing of assumptions from painful and penetrating experience. We learn that what we thought was so, just ain’t. There’s a grand equality in this opportunity! The scenery changes, but growth is in so many ways the same!

“Only here, in America, were the common folk of the Old World given a chance to show what they could do on their own, without a master to push and order them about. History contrived an earth-shaking joke when it lifted by the nape of the neck lowly peasants, shopkeepers, laborers, paupers, jailbirds, and drunks from the midst of Europe, dumped them on a vast, virgin continent and said: “Go to it; it is yours!”

“And the lowly were not awed by the magnitude of the task. A hunger for action, pent up for centuries, found an outlet. They went into it with ax, pick, shovel, plow, and rifle; on foot, on horse, in wagons, and on flatboats. They went into it praying, howling, singing, brawling, drinking, and fighting. Make way for the people! This is how I read the statement that this country was built by hordes of undesirables from the Old World.

“Small wonder that we in this country have a deeply ingrained faith in human regeneration. We believe that, given a chance, even the degraded and the apparently worthless are capable of constructive work and great deeds. It is a faith founded on experience, not on some idealistic theory. And no matter what some anthropologists, sociologists, and geneticists may tell us, we shall go on believing that man, unlike other forms of life, is not a captive of his past — of his heredity and habits — but is possessed of infinite plasticity, and his potentialities for good and for evil are never wholly exhausted.”

Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change

We are all far from home. Far from ordinary. Far from finished. And can go further than we ever thought possible! The journey that is only beginning for my son, has so much that is so good waiting for him! And for those of us who have gone a little further on our path, let’s all remember to give a hand to those young ones. We once tripped lightly as they!

An old man going a lone highway,
Came, at the evening cold and gray,
To a chasm vast and deep and wide.
Through which was flowing a sullen tide
The old man crossed in the twilight dim,
The sullen stream had no fear for him;
But he turned when safe on the other side
And built a bridge to span the tide.

“Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim near,
“You are wasting your strength with building here;
Your journey will end with the ending day,
You never again will pass this way;
You’ve crossed the chasm, deep and wide,
Why build this bridge at evening tide?”

The builder lifted his old gray head;
“Good friend, in the path I have come,” he said,
“There followed after me to-day
A youth whose feet must pass this way.
This chasm that has been as naught to me
To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be;
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I am building this bridge for him!”

The Bridge Builder – by Will Allen Dromgoole

Bridge builders. Peace makers. Mentors. Hopeful helpers. Long sufferers. We are all part of the solution. People are long crops. You never know the change that can come, especially when confronted with a life piled high with difficulty. Strength and struggle come together. It is a beautiful thing. The contrast is what makes it so.