Baseball and Enlightenment...

I like baseball...and I've managed to indoctrinate my wife in the church of baseball...but I don't want to brainwash my daughters.  Why?  I want them to fall in love with things on their own.  I want to try to inspire, more than influence, and if they end up loving baseball, perfect. If they don't end up loving baseball, okay.

This past week I spent a lot of time training with a man who works for the FBI. That's right, the FBI, amoungst other agencies.  He's a heavy guy...heavy as in impressive, not as in CC Sabathia...and he's done a lot.  He's an expert in Threat and Risk Assessment, specifically as it relates to youth, and maybe more specifically as it relates to schools.  He's seen a lot...Columbine...Tabor...the more recent Amanda Todd tragedy...he consults all over North America, and he's every bit like a CSI show exploded and landed on your lap.  He's mind boggling.  He painstakingly collects data.  He meets and interviews, and talks, and assesses.  He theorizes and hypothesizes.  He's rubbed shoulders with gang members, and the Secret Service, and impressive political turds, and he laughed at my jokes.  He's about as heavy a guy as I've ever been around.  I tell you that to tell you this.  He said something the other day that knocked me over in it's simplicity.

"Your dreams are not your children's dreams. Your Shangri-la is not someone else's Shangri-la.  It's yours. That's it. Yours."

Wow.  There goes the notion of taking a year off when Zo is twelve or thirteen and travelling around the world.  There collapses the idea that spending summers in NY or California, or wherever we can wander to is amazing.  There begins a lot of introspection and evaluation.

Your dreams are not your children's dreams.

I love baseball, but Zoey might not.  Maggie might not.  I want the kids that I work with to have a life, but that's not as important as them wanting to have a life.  It's simple stuff, so simple that we walk right past it...like our health, like having a job, like having people who love you, like friendship...they're easy things to overlook.  My dreams are not Zoey's dreams, or Maggie's, or June's.  My dreams are my dreams.

It took a genius to tell me what I should have already known, but all it takes is an idiot like me to pass it on.