And the evolutionary practice of sharing knowledge.
That’s what my mom used to call her three children and then transferred the honour to her four beautiful grandchildren. “My Girls”.
I was texting with one of her girls this morning and the thoughtful wisdom this 25-year-old grace-filled woman offered me stopped me in
my tracks. My ancestral line is on track. My exact thought was, “she has surpassed me.” And that thought made me smile. At 25 she is internalizing the wisdom I found at 40. How exciting! I can‘t wait to see what she will do with all of those extra years.
My sisters and I come from a complicated line of people, on both sides of our lineage, as most families do. War, loss, poverty, mental illness, addiction, abuse, tenacity, persistence, courageousness, intelligence, endless sense of humour, spirituality, strength....and with each generation the hope is that we evolve to live more on the latter side of the continuum than the former. And today I bore witness to the success of this evolution. My family has stood on the shoulders of those who have come before them, and added to the learning, tweaked the learnings and evolved...
Yes, patterns have been repeated, many in fact. Patterns of poverty, abuse, abandonment, mental health crises, and yet for each repeated pattern there has been more enlightenment, more growth, more evolving past our imperfections.
My four girls do not have perfect lives. Far from it. Each has their unique set of weights that they carry. They have not yet learned that often the weights are a choice (no, not always) or that their perceived imperfections, rather than making them less, make them unique. They have not yet all learned that there is nothing to live up to; that no success, job, degree, weight, marriage, child, outfit, completion, award or achievement will make them worthy. They are in fact worthy because they exist. But they are on the path to this awareness much earlier in their lives than my sisters or I ever were, or my ancestors before me.
And this knowledge makes my heart soar.
So today, pass on your experience, your learnings, your wisdom, to someone coming up behind you. It doesn’t have to be a family member. Look at your teams at work, look at your kids’ friends, a young person on the corner. Tap your shoulder and let them climb up…
BSOFO,
