Posted with permission from I'll Eat You Up!

Enough time has passed in my life where I can look back and (mostly) understand the things my parents had taught me, or at least tried to teach me, or maybe forgot to teach me as I was growing up. I wish now that I had paid attention and listened to the importance of knowing these things and how they will ultimately shape the person that I have become, or have yet to become. I plan and hope that I will be able to teach these things to my son, so he truly understands the importance of each lesson as he begins his life.

1. Don’t forget to be a kid. - Or better yet, don’t be in such a hurry to grow up. Life moves way to fast. Even when it seems to move slower than usual, it still passes by way to quickly. Kids are always stuck in a push-pull situation where parents and teachers are telling them to be responsible, grow up, act more like an adult, and yet, at the same time they are pushed back. Everyone telling them they can’t do this or that because they are just a kid. Or maybe because they aren’t old enough, or aren’t mature enough to understand. Try and recall a time when you can remember how this made you feel when someone treated you that way. I hope to remind not only Avin, but my self that being young is not something to be taken for granted. Because before we know it, responsibilities stack up and society forces us to give into it’s demands.

2. You can learn something from anything - I think this is something I’ve taught myself throughout the years. And it’s something I’ll never forget throughout my entire life. More importantly it means to never stop learning. Never stop seeking out knowledge. Never stop progressing. There is always something to learn from every experience, person, and situation that happens in your life. A lot of people seem tune out the world around them when it doesn’t involve school or work. I hope that my son understands the importance of learning from his experiences. I hope that I can teach him that you can learn things from anyone, no matter who they are, or what they do. Even if that person may disagree with you, or hold different beliefs and convictions than you do. In fact, you may even learn more from those people than the people you do agree with.

3. There is a time for work, a time for play, and a maybe even a time for both - I’ve come to learn that sometimes work and play have no distinction. Especially in the work that I do, where I actually enjoy it most of the time. It’s sort of my own personal play time that I get paid for. I want to teach my son that work can also be play, and even some play can be work, instead of teaching him the traditional sense of work first, play later. Work and play should walk hand in hand, and not take rank over each other.

4. Never let your school get in the way of your education - This almost goes hand in hand with #2. Never stop learning. Just because you’re not in school, doesn’t mean you can’t further your education, and also doesn’t mean you should stop learning. I want my son to always be seeking knowledge, regardless of how the school system should teach him to learn. In other words, I want his education to be far greater, and reach way further than what the school curriculum does.

5. Don’t be so serious - This one is pretty obvious. Just relax. Everyone takes life, work, and school so seriously that they often forget to stop for a moment and pay attention to their own lives. They forget to appreciate the smaller details, the ones that make life worth living for. The experiences that you share together with the people that are important to you. It’s great to have goals and determination, but not so much that it takes away from the time in your life where you can just let loose, relax, and enjoy those experiences you can share.

6. Be a participant in your own life - In other words, be mindful of yourself. Be aware of everything you do or say. Nothing is as important as this very moment. I hope to teach my son that when you eat, eat. When you clean, clean. When you read, read. Be present in your reading, and participate in your journey. Usually we are all ahead, thinking for the future, planning something we want to do, or thinking about what we are going to say to someone, etc. Or maybe we are thinking about the past, reliving our memories, not wanting to forget about them. Because of this, we become unaware of what’s going on right in front of us. When being mindful of your thoughts and actions, you can take the time to stop and be aware of your own thoughts, and how you may interpret them, instead of being so quick to judge and assume before you even take the chance to see the truth for what it really is.

7. Deal with the consequences of your own actions - People love to point the finger, exaggerate, and even lie to make sure that they save their own face regardless of how it may effect someone else. No matter what happens, or who performs the action, everyone should man up and deal with the consequences of their own actions. Being able to make the right choice depends on being able to deal with the wrong ones.

8. Life changes, with or without you - Planning rarely works the way it’s supposed to, and most of us can agree with that. We never planned on having a child yet, but life decided that it’s going to happen, whether we are ready or not. I want to teach my son how to accept change and progress with it, or else he’s going to be left behind, not knowing what to do next, which causes a lot of people to just give up. And I don’t ever want my son to give up. We also spend so many years in school thinking that it’s going to prepare us for life in the “real world”, only coming to realize that we have no idea what we’re doing. Learning to adapt and accept change, whatever that change may be, seems to be the best way to get by.

9. Your financial status mean very little in the grand scheme of things - “He who dies with the most toys, still dies.” I heard this phrase at church at a young age, and it has stuck with me ever since (Ha, I did learn something at church!). Because the way our society glamourizes the rich and famous, we all grow up to believe that to be truly happy, one must have the most money, and the biggest and best of things. This of course, is untrue. Unfortunately it takes many people many years to realize this, and even then, some never do. I hope that my son comes to realize this at an early age. I hope that he comes to realize that happiness comes from his own experiences and how he interprets them. I hope he never judges someone based on their financial status. And I hope he never compares his life to anyone else by the amount of money or material things he has.

10. Do what you love - This is something that seems to be long forgotten once you start getting older. When you were a kid, you could tell your parents you wanted to be an astronaut and they would say, “That’s wonderful sweetheart! Be an astronaut!”. If I said that to my parents now, they would probably think I’m on drugs. (I know I can’t be an astronaut now, but that’s besides the point). So what happened between those years of having dreams and now? We all stopped doing what we loved. And what makes it worse is that no one cared! What happened to our curiosity? Our creativity? It all seems to dwindle away the more we age, and no one does anything to make it stop. By the time it’s all over we look back and realize we wasted so much time working for someone else, hating our jobs, because we never pursued what we truly loved to do, whatever that may be. I’ll never tell my son he’s crazy for wanting to do something he loves, no matter what age.

If anyone has anything they would add to the list than post it in a comment!

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