the-legacy-letters

Be generous with your life - love deeply, honestly, and without reservation.

Why read? Because books are precious guides to our humanity__ivilization__ backbone__hat tenuous ridgeline that allows us to climb above the jungle and see what the horizon has to offer. Thus they represent the yearning to go beyond, to explore. Yet they are also human-sized. And made of paper and ink, and thus they come from the earth. Their physicality is what makes them immensely human. And they contain the flesh-and-bone thoughts of one person capturing one blink of time, now made immortal in the bound pages carried by your own hands and touched by your own eyes. How can such fragile and thin paper and spidery veins of ink be our most precious treasure, binding together the entire hope and legacy and language of a civilization__f our existence. We touch the book and turn the page, and thus we are bound to our destiny.

Remember, it__ still a mystery to be an adult. If you knew it all before eighteen, you__ have nothing to look forward to. Besides, to be wise and eighteen is as possible as catching lightning in a bottle_

You become a man when, in having children, you not only physically look after and protect them but also protect them with all the love and learning you have to give.

As an adult, be child-like as you learn but not child-ish as you live.

Just because you're breathing, doesn't mean you're alive.

Eat Ice Cream. Read Books. Be Happy.

Sometimes the best way is to get out of your own way.

It's through traveling you make the great journey into yourself, and it's the clarity of extremes in traveling that forces you to meet yourself like you've never met yourself before.

Love your kids and just be there for them. You don__ have to eyeball their every moment or to orchestrate all their comings and goings. They know this. They know that__ too much.

It__ a fool who thinks having a kid is a right, which is the biggest crock of fish heads I__e ever heard.

I want to remember warming your two a.m. bottle, clipping your locks, watching you be baptized, bathing you in the big porcelain sink_ how I often laid you against my chest and felt the cradlesong of your tiny breaths as you fell asleep . . .