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Thursday, March 01, 2007

Good book

Current Mood:
CC is listening to: Piano Concerto No. 2. In A: Allegro Animato--Sviatoslav Richter (Liszt: The Two Piano Concertos / The Piano Sonata )

I was at the bookstore yesterday looking at business books when I picked up "Life's Missing Instruction Manual--the Guidebook You Should Have Been Given at Birth."

I like it :-). It's kind of hard to explain, but reading it feels like I'm being given good advice by a grandfather--someone who's been around the block and has lived life and learned its lessons.

Here's an excerpt. You'll get what I mean :-).

Your Parents Did the Best They Could

I never liked how my father raised me. He was an ex-Marine drill sergeant and a former professional boxer. He treated me like a drafted recruit in World War II. I grew up resenting the beatings, the discipline, and the constant terror.

A friend of mine in college shocked me when he said, "Your father could have tossed you in a garbage can when you were a baby. He didn't. He raised you the best way he knew how."

I've since learned that all parents are winging it. None of them went to parenting school. Few of them read parenting books. Most of them raise their kids either the way they were raised or the opposite of the way they were raised. None of them raised their kids with ill intent. They were doing the best they could.

Your parents did the best they knew how to do, based on their beliefs, upbringing, and best guess about how to handle you.

Forgive them. Understand them. Love them. All they want from you at this point is to know that you understand they did the best they could. Tell them so. Don't withhold the very thing they long to hear.

See? I can almost imagine a grandfather telling me this from a rocking chair on a porch.

{flips through the pages some more} There are many things in this book that I agree with, a few things I don't completely agree with--but if you think about it, that just increases the "human" feel of the book. It's not meant to do your thinking for you. It gives you things that older and wiser people have learned as they lived *their* lives--how you decide to use the information is entirely up to you.

Labels: Reflections, Retail

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