Love and appreciate your parents. We are so often growing up, we forget they are also growing old.
When we are young, we are so excited to get older because getting older comes with so many presumed privileges and abilities that we are happy to count our age progressions in half year increments.
As we grow older, we start realizing that all of those additional privileges are paired with considerable responsibilities and expectations that accompany each increase of age.
When we are young, our parents are the rock of Gibraltar and hold the keys to the proverbial kingdom. Our rights and our opportunities are governed by their logic and logistics, and as a direct result, all of the governing parameters of our lives at that age are calculated through their perceptions of reality, morality, code of conduct and honor.
When we eventually mature and take our own stage as parents, the entire spectrum looks disparate as a direct result from the differences that come with being in the seat of authority and the role of responsibility.
Our greatest triumphs are often times unsung in favor of the quiet, understated position of delicately maintaining authority, where our rule is absolute, and hopefully our decisions are most wise.
By the time we have hit this stage, our parents have aged past their principal role of moral leader of our lives and instead, take the newfound role of companion and collaborator, helping us as we learn to navigate similar pathways to those which they have previously traversed.
In our engagement with them on this new level of equilibrium, we have significant insight into some of the scenarios that we watched them traverse with us when we were younger, resulting in our increased appreciation of how they navigated those uncharted waters.
In that realization and newfound identification with them, we are all the more ready, willing and capable of treasuring them even more than we have in days gone by, for our definitive understanding of, and ultimate appreciation of their ability to have calmly and rationally dealt with whatever turmoil, problems, issues and scenarios that we put them through as we were growing up.
When we get to that stage, extending them the courtesy and love that is due is the very at least that we might be capable of ultimately providing.
Our awareness enables us awaken to this continuing change of life and to fully appreciate them for all of the myriad reasons that accompany loving one’s parent to the fullest.
Happy Monday!
Brian Weiner 