Worlds Best Dad Quotes

A best friend is the only one that walks into your life when the world has walked out.

If only I could change the world around me, perhaps my truth won’t one day be the end of me.

The world is so obsessed with defining sexuality for everyone and attaching labels to it. Any time any person openly leaves the sexual norm, their sexuality becomes, more often than not, the absolute defining characteristic of that person. It becomes the first thing people think about and often the first thing they mention. Every other part of that person all but disappears.

You want to see safe hands?' her dad asked. He went to the fruit bowl on the side of the table, took two apples and proceeded to juggle them. 'See? Safe as anything.' 'Are you proposing you juggle our newborn child?' 'Of course not,' he said. 'I'd only be able to juggle her if you'd had twins. Otherwise it would just be throwing.' (...) 'From this moment on, I will be the best father the world has ever seen. Wifey, may I please hold my child?' Valkyrie's mum looked at him suspiciously. 'When you hold a baby, what's the most important thing to remember?' 'Not to drop it,' he said proudly. 'Well, yes, well done dear, but I was thinking more about how you hold the baby.' 'Ah,' he said, 'Of course. The secret to holding a baby is to pick it up by the scruff of its neck.' 'You're thinking of kittens.' 'Pick it up by the ears, then.' 'You're thinking of nothing.' 'Can I please just hold her?' 'I don't think that's wise.' 'A lot of things aren't wise, Melissa. Is crossing the road with your eyes closed wise? No, but I do it anyway.' His wife nodded. 'Stephanie, you are in charge of teaching Alice how to cross the road.

My request today is simple. Today. Tomorrow. Next week. Find somebody, anybody, that’s different than you. Somebody that has made you feel ill-will or even hateful. Somebody whose life decisions have made you uncomfortable. Somebody who practices a different religion than you do. Somebody who has been lost to addiction. Somebody with a criminal past. Somebody who dresses “below” you. Somebody with disabilities. Somebody who lives an alternative lifestyle. Somebody without a home. Somebody that you, until now, would always avoid, always look down on, and always be disgusted by. Reach your arm out and put it around them. And then, tell them they’re all right. Tell them they have a friend. Tell them you love them. If you or I wanna make a change in this world, that’s where we’re gonna be able to do it. That’s where we’ll start. Every. Single. Time.

Don’t judge me for escaping the stresses and cruelty of the world differently than you do.

When my dad died, it was like everything felt really shaky, you know? And trying to be the best I could be, it gave me something to focus on. If I could just do everything right, then I was safe.' I couldn't believe I was saying this, not ere, at a party packed with classates and strangers. In fact, I couldn't imagine saying it anywhere, really, except in my own head where it somehow made sense. 'That sucks, though,' Wes said finally, his voice low. 'You're jsut setting yourself up to fail, because you'll never get everything perfect.' 'Says who?' He just looked at me. 'The world,' he said, gsturing all around us, as if the party, the deck encompassed it all. 'The universe. There's just no way.

If you want to change the world, first change yourself, then tell others how you did it. Never demand that people change. Inspire them to change using your own change as an example instead.

It’s time we stand up and demand more of the fathers of this world. It’s time we stop buying into their rationalizations and their sorry explanations. It’s time we give our kids a fighting chance.

If I could give one message to the bullied, it would be this: You are not alone. You are strong. You have a voice. You are beautiful. You are intelligent. There are many kids who want to speak up for you, but they don’t because they are afraid of becoming bullied themselves. There are many of us in the world who love you. I love you. You have the power to end this now. That power is in your voice. Find it. Once you use your voice, bullies want no part of you. If you feel that you lack the courage, fake it until you do. Finally, I know it’s hard to see a life that exists beyond high school. It is there, and it is beautiful.

Dear Anyone: This is a letter from one anyone to another anyone, no names required, because nobody really knows anyway. Names don't make a hell of a lot of difference. The world is made up entirely of strangers. Millions and millions of them. Everyone is a stranger to everyone else. Sometimes we think we know other people, especially those we supposedly are close to, but if we really knew them, why are we so often surprised by the shit they do? Like, parents are always surprised by what their kids will do. They raise them from the time they are babies, spend each and every day with them, think they're these goddamn fucking angels, and then one day the cops come to the door and say hey, guess what parents? Your kid just bashed some other kid's head in with a baseball bat. Or you're the kid, and you think things are pretty fucking OK, and then one day this guy who's supposed to be your dad says so long, have a nice life. And you think, what the fuck is this? So years later, your mom ends up living with another guy, and he seems OK, but you think, when's it coming? That's what life is. Life is always asking yourself, when's it coming? Because if it hasn't come for a long time, you know you're fucking due. All the best, Anyone.

Make life easier for those around you, not harder. Every person you know is fighting their own great battle. Few of us ever know what those battles entail, and so often we say and do things that push others deeper and harder into the front lines of those battles. I know such has been the relentless lifelong reality for me. Love a person for the person that they are. Or dislike them for the person that they are. But don’t love or dislike them for the sole reason that they see people differently than you do. Don’t love or dislike them because they experience the world differently than you do. And please don’t eternally and wholly define them with sexual labels just because they were among those who finally found the courage to acknowledge their truth.

The peculiar predicament of the present-day self surely came to pass as a consequence of the disappointment of the high expectations of the self as it entered the age of science and technology. Dazzled by the overwhelming credentials of science, the beauty and elegance of the scientific method, the triumph of modern medicine over physical ailments, and the technological transformation of the very world itself, the self finds itself in the end disappointed by the failure of science and technique in those very sectors of life which had been its main source of ordinary satisfaction in past ages. As John Cheever said, the main emotion of the adult Northeastern American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment. Work is disappointing. In spite of all the talk about making work more creative and self-fulfilling, most people hate their jobs, and with good reason. Most work in modern technological societies is intolerably dull and repetitive. Marriage and family life are disappointing. Even among defenders of traditional family values, e.g., Christians and Jews, a certain dreariness must be inferred, if only from the average time of TV viewing. Dreary as TV is, it is evidently not as dreary as Mom talking to Dad or the kids talking to either. School is disappointing. If science is exciting and art is exhilarating, the schools and universities have achieved the not inconsiderable feat of rendering both dull. As every scientist and poet knows, one discovers both vocations in spite of, not because of, school. It takes years to recover from the stupor of being taught Shakespeare in English Lit and Wheatstone's bridge in Physics. Politics is disappointing. Most young people turn their backs on politics, not because of the lack of excitement of politics as it is practiced, but because of the shallowness, venality, and image-making as these are perceived through the media--one of the technology's greatest achievements. The churches are disappointing, even for most believers. If Christ brings us new life, it is all the more remarkable that the church, the bearer of this good news, should be among the most dispirited institutions of the age. The alternatives to the institutional churches are even more grossly disappointing, from TV evangelists with their blown-dry hairdos to California cults led by prosperous gurus ignored in India but embraced in La Jolla. Social life is disappointing. The very franticness of attempts to reestablish community and festival, by partying, by groups, by club, by touristy Mardi Gras, is the best evidence of the loss of true community and festival and of the loneliness of self, stranded as it is as an unspeakable consciousness in a world from which it perceives itself as somehow estranged, stranded even within its own body, with which it sees no clear connection. But there remains the one unquestioned benefit of science: the longer and healthier life made possible by modern medicine, the shorter work-hours made possible by technology, hence what is perceived as the one certain reward of dreary life of home and the marketplace: recreation. Recreation and good physical health appear to be the only ambivalent benefits of the technological revolution.

I am not where I am because of luck. I am where I am because I took risks others weren’t willing to take. The world rewards the risk takers. It always has. It always will.

The more you put your arm around those that you might naturally look down on, the more you will love yourself. And the more you love yourself, the less need you’ll ever have to find fault or be better than others. And the less we all find fault or have a need to be better than others, the quicker this world becomes a far better place to live.

Most moms and dads think they are either the best or the worst parents in the world. Both are wrong.

I have known a lot of people in my life, and I can tell you this… Some of the ones who understood love better than anyone else were those who the rest of the world had long before measured as lost or gone. Some of the people who were able to look at the dirtiest, the poorest, the gays, the straights, the drug users, those in recovery, the basest of sinners, and those who were just… plain… different. They were able to look at them all and only see strength. Beauty. Potential. Hope. And if we boil it down, isn’t that what love actually is?

I am just a guy, doing my best to be the best person I can be. And, every once in a while, I fuck up the moment I’m in. Please. Get over it. Get over yourselves. Get over this weird need to be morally superior to me and to the other people in this world. And let me be imperfect. I assure you, my imperfections drive me to improve. Let me love myself. I assure you, loving myself despite my faults will only make me a better person. Let me be my own judge. I assure you, I’ll be more fair and just than you ever will. Let me be the owner of my own intentions. I assure you, there isn’t another soul on earth who knows what my real intentions are but me. Love and acceptance despite ongoing and glaring imperfection is all I’ve ever tried to attain with this blog. For me. For you. For everyone. And I’ll never stop.

it’s a terrible feeling when you first fall in love. your mind gets completely taken over, you can’t function properly anymore. the world turns into a dream place, nothing seems real. you forget your keys, no one seems to be talking English and even if they are you don’t care as you can’t hear what they’re saying anyway, and it doesn’t matter since your not really there. things you cared about before don’t seem to matter anymore and things you didn’t think you cared about suddenly do. I must become a brilliant cook, I don’t want to waste time seeing my friends when I could be with him, I feel no sympathy for all those people in India killed by an earthquake last night; what is the matter with me? It’s a kind of hell, but you feel like your in heaven. even your body goes out of control, you can’t eat, you don’t sleep properly, your legs turn to jelly as your not sure where the floor is anymore. you have butterflies permanently, not only in your tummy but all over your body - your hands, your shoulders, your chest, your eyes everything’s just a jangling mess of nerve endings tingling with fire. it makes you feel so alive. and yet its like being suffocated, you don’t seem to be able to see or hear anything real anymore, its like people are speaking to you through treacle, and so you stay in your cosy place with him, the place that only you two understand. occasionally your forced to come up for air by your biggest enemy, Real Life, so you do the minimum then head back down under your love blanket for more, knowing it’s uncomfortable but compulsory. and then, once you think you’ve got him, the panic sets in. what if he goes off me? what if I blow it, say the wrong thing? what if he meets someone better than me? Prettier, thinner, funnier, more like him? who doesn’t bite there nails? perhaps he doesn’t feel the same, maybe this is all in my head and this is just a quick fling for him. why did I tell him that stupid story about not owning up that I knew who spilt the ink on the teachers bag and so everyone was punished for it? does he think I'm a liar? what if I'm not very good at that blow job thing and he’s just being patient with me? he says he loves me; yes, well, we can all say words, can’t we? perhaps he’s just being polite. of course you do your best to keep all this to yourself, you don’t want him to think you're a neurotic nutcase, but now when he’s away doing Real Life it’s agony, your mind won’t leave you alone, it tortures you and examines your every moment spent together, pointing out how stupid you’ve been to allow yourself to get this carried away, how insane you are to imagine someone would feel like that about you. dad did his best to reassure me, but nothing he said made a difference - it was like I wanted to see Simon, but didn’t want him to see me.

Shhh. I'm seducing the world with my weirdness.

Because I hated myself so much for my fatness, I always looked for other fat people, and especially for fatter people, to judge as harshly as the world seemed to be judging me. And you know what? There was always someone fatter who was more disgusting than I was, more not with it, and more lazy. It helped me validate myself as mis-seen, misunderstood, and misevaluated. It also helped me find some sort of weird self-esteem that I never could find when looking at myself in the mirror.

It is all about the individual. And we can all become a better world if we become better, more loving individuals ourselves. There is no other way that will ever work better than love.

The thing I like best about Max is that he is brave.” “What did he do that was brave?” “It’s not one thing,” I say. “It’s everything. Max is not like any other person in the whole world. Kids make fun of him because he is different. His mom tries to change him into a different boy and his dad tries to treat him like he is someone else. Even his teachers treat him differently, and not always nicely. Even Mrs. Gosk. She is perfect but she still treats Max differently. No one treats him like a regular boy, but everyone wants him to be regular instead of himself. With all that, Max still gets out of bed every morning and goes to school and the park and the bus stop and even the kitchen table.

Every poem is a love poem, my dad had said. I'd always thought he meant romantic love...but there were so many kinds of great love: mother and daughter love. Father love. Best friend love. Aunt love. Mother's best friend love. Friendish friendesque love. Love for the living and love for the dead. Love for who you really are, for those weird parts of yourself that only a few people understand. Love for things you yearn to do, for putting words in a page. Love for traveling, for people and seeing new ways to live. Love for the world...

PRAYER IS WHERE I do my best work as a husband, dad, worker, and friend.

Maya’s story could easily have ended the same way as Ruth’s story. The things that took everything in a completely different direction were so small. A mom who fought, a dad who loved, a brother who was there, a best friend who took on the whole damn world. An old witch who owned a pub, who went into a meeting at the hockey club and spoke in Maya’s defense. And, last of all, a witness who had seen everything and eventually dared to say so out loud. That was all. No more than that.

But as I stood across from Archer, I couldn't forget that I was completely, stupidly in love with the one person I could never have. The laughter died on my lips, and I dashed at my eyes with the back of my hand. "I need to get back," I said. "Right," he replied. He was still holding his sword in his right hand, and he twirled the hilt, the point sratching the wooden floor. "So this is it. We're done." "Yeah," I said, my voice cracking. I cleared my throat. "And I have to say, the world's first and last Eye-demon reconnaissance mission went pretty well." It was a struggle to meet his eyes, but I managed it. "Thank you." He shrugged, his dark gaze full of something I couldn't quite read. "We were a good team." "We were." In more ways than one, I thought. Which is why this sucked so bad. I stepped back. "Anyway, I should go. See ya,Cross." Then I laughed, only it sounded suspiciously like another sob. "Except I won't, will I So I guess I should say goodbye." I felt like I was about to shatter into a million tiny shards, like the mirrors I'd broken with Dad. "okay, well, best of luck with the whole Eye thing, then. Try not to kill anyone I know." I turned away, but he reached out and caught my wrist. I could feel my pulse hammering under his fingers. "Mercer, that day in the cellar..." He searched my face, and I could sense him struggling for what he wanted to say. Then finally, "I didn't kiss you back because I had to. I kissed you because I wanted to." His eyes dropped to my lips,and it was like the whole world had shrunk to just me and him and the shaft of light between us. "I still want to," he said hoarsely. He tugged my wrist and pulled me into his arms. My brain registered the sound of his sword clattering to he ground as his other hand came up to grab the back of my neck, but once his lips were on mine, everything else faded away. I clutched at his shoulders, raising up on my tiptoes, and kissed him with everything I had in me. As the kiss deepened, we held each other tighter, so I didn't know if the pounding heartbeat I felt was mine or his. How stupid,I thought dreamily, to have ever thought I could give this up. Not just the kissing, although, as Archer's hands cupped my face, I had to admit that part was pretty awesome. But all of it: joking with him and working beside him. Being with a guy who was my friend and could still make me feel like this.

Just because you were born into something doesn't mean that it's right and it doesn't mean that it's true. The world's greatest men and women have always been those who questioned everything that ever was presented to them as truth.

What the Motorcycle Said Br-r-r-am-m-m, rackerty-am-m, OM, AM: All-r-r-room, r-r-ram, ala-bas-ter- Am, the world’s my oyster. I hate plastic, wear it black and slick, hate hardhats, wear one on my head, That’s what the motorcycle said. Passed phonies in Fords, knockede down billboards, landed On the other side of The Gap, and Whee, bypassed history. When I was born (The Past), baby knew best. They shook when I bawled, took Freud’s path, threw away their wrath. R-r-rackety-am-m. Am. War, rhyme, soap, meat, marriage, the Phantom Jet are sh*t, and like that. Hate pompousness, punishment, patience, am into Love, hate middle-class moneymakers, live on Dad, that’s what the motorcycle said. Br-r-r-am-m-m. It’s Nowsville, man. Passed Oldies, Uglies, Straighties, Honkies. I’ll never be mean, tired, or unsexy. Passed cigarette suckers, souses, mother-fuckers, losers, went back to Nature and found how to get VD, stoned. Passed a cow, too fast to hear her moo, “I rolled our leaves of grass into one ball. I am the grassy All.” Br-r-r-am-m-m, rackety-am-m, OM, Am: All-gr-r-rin, oooohgah, gl-l-utton- Am, the world’s my smilebutton.

My dad, the man I loved most in the world, a man who refused to compromise himself for anyone, the man who had showed me by example what it was like to be a true artist, was gone. We had become a loving father and son after a rocky thirty-year start. John Fante’s gift to me was his ambition, his brilliance, and his pure writer’s heart. He had begun life with a drunken, self-hating father, backing out of the hell of poverty and prejudice. Now he was ending it as the best example of courage and humility I had ever known. John Fante was my hero.

Because here, in this moment when nothing was happening and we’d finally run out of things to say, I knew how much I liked Gus Everett, how much he was starting to mean to me. We’d let so much out into the open over the last three days, and I knew more would bubble up over time, but for the first time in a year, I didn’t feel overstuffed with trapped emotions and bitten-back words. I felt a little empty, a little light. Happy. Not giddy or overjoyed, but that low, steady level of happiness that, in the best periods of life, rides underneath everything else, a buffer between you and the world you are walking over. I was happy to be here, doing nothing with Gus, and even if it was temporary, it was enough for me to believe that someday I’d be okay again. Maybe not the exact same brand of it I’d been before Dad died—probably not—but a new kind, nearly as solid and safe.

I wondered what getting an A would feel like. The best feeling in the world, probably. Like going to a Yankees game with your dad and eating three hot dogs with extra everything.

Does the world hate me? No. No it doesn’t. It gave you the best online dad. It gave you the best friends you could ask for. It doesn’t hat you, it just wants you to think that.

I find the thought of my children telling their friends their father is an accomplished author appealing. I used to think that I needed to be famous and write a bestseller to be considered accomplished and I very well may think that again at some later point, but for now in this moment, I sit with a smile on my face, holding tears of joy back, knowing that I am already an accomplished individual and that if I never create a best-selling book, I can still die a happy man.

The world population is nearing seven billion. John Travolta and Farrah Fawcett didn’t procreate and produce all seven thousand million of us. Audrey Hepburn and Burt Lancaster didn’t personally populate the world. Almost every child that was ever born is the byproduct of two everyday people who found each other attractive enough to go jump in the sack together. Almost every child that was ever born came about because two everyday people thought the other was attractive enough to warrant a second glance. If you want proof that attraction belongs to the individual, go sit on a bench at the mall and look at all the different couples walking by. You will believe that there literally is someone for everyone.

You’re perfect.” “I’m not. No one is, thank God. Otherwise what a boring world this would be. There are so many things I wish I’d done differently at the time, including with your dad. But we can only pay attention, hope we learn something, try not to fuck up again – at least not in the same exact way – and keep going forward, knowing that we’re absolutely going to fuck up. A lot. Sorry. The important thing is to do your best, always, to not be too hard on yourself when you don’t, and let go of regrets.

I don't know what happens, what line gets crossed that transitions a girl from seeing her dad as the entirety of her world to viewing him as an embarrassment. For years, we were best friends. Fishing, the movies he slept through, cooking on the grill outside when he was home in the summers. I was his little girl, and he was everything. And then, he wasn't. I woke one day to realize that to be liked, I had to give up the one person who loved me. That's a pretty shitty way to introduce a girl to growing up.

He nodded and lifted his head to meet my gaze. “Yep. A bit.” Then he stared up at the building. “My best friend lives here, actually. It’s a small world.” I shrugged. There were hundreds of units in this complex. “Well, next time you’re here visiting him, come by.

The farmers, who rent out their house so they can stay afloat, and sleep all together in a studio, but spend their days off outside on a picnic blanket, living the lives they want to live. Drew and Melanie, with their two homes and their horses and their love story. And Rene, traveling across the world, painting temporary masterpieces. Even my uncle Pete has something good worked out with Melinda and his day trips and his best friend, my dad, who has a small nice house in San Francisco and a dozen neighborhood vendors who know him by name. All of these different ways of living. Even Sophie, with her baby in that apartment, with her record store job and her record collection. I imagine her twirling with her baby across her red carpet with Diana Ross crooning, the baby laughing, the two of them getting older in that apartment, eating meals on red vinyl chairs. Walt, too, as pathetic as his situation is, seems happy in his basement, providing entertainment to Fort Bragg's inner circle. All of them, in their own ways, manage to make their lives work.

Dad." I felt a sob bubble up in my throat, like a bird wanting to be set free, and then I gave a wail and buried my face into my best friend's shoulder, on the curb of an empty street, while the world spun on, and on, and on, without my dad in it. And the Wind did not sing.

It happened to me. And I'll never forget it. Back when I was in the sixth grade, my whole family went out to go watch a baseball game at the stadium. I didn't really care about baseball, but I was surprised by what I saw when we got there. Everywhere I looked, I saw people. On the other side of the stadium, the people looked so small, like little moving grains of rice. It was so crowded. I thought that everyone in Japan had to be packed in there. So I turned to my dad and asked him, "Do you know how many people are here right now"? He said since the stadium was full, probably fifty thousand. After the game, the street was filled with people and I was really shocked to see that, too. To me, it seemed like there was a ton of people there. But then, I realized it could only be a tiny fraction of all the people in Japan. When I got home, I pulled out my calculator. In social studies, I'd learned that the population of Japan was a hundred some odd million. So I divided that by fifty thousand. The answer was one two-thousandth. That shocked me even more. I was only one little person in that big crowded stadium filled with people, and believe me, there were so many people there, but it was just a handful of the entire population. Up till then, I always thought that I was, I don't know, kind of a special person. It was fun to be with my family. I had fun with my classmates. And the school that I was going to, it had just about the most interesting people anywhere. But that night, I realized it wasn't true. All the stuff we did during class that I thought was so fun and cool, was probably happening just like that in classes in other schools all over Japan. There was nothing special about my school at all. When I realized that, it suddenly felt like the whole world around me started to fade into a dull gray void. Brushing my teeth and going to sleep at night, waking up and eating breakfast in the morning, that stuff happened all over the place. They were everyday things that everybody was doing. When I thought about it like that, everything became boring. If there's really that many people in the world, then there had to be someone who wasn't ordinary. There had to be someone who was living an interesting life. There just had to be. But why wasn't I that person? So, that's how I felt till I finished elementary school. And then I had another realization. I realized fun things wouldn't come my way just by waiting for them. I thought when I got into junior high, it was time for me to make a change. I'd let the world know I wasn't a girl who was happy sitting around waiting. And I've done my best to become that person. But in the end, nothing happened. More time went by and before I knew it, I was in high school. I thought that something would change.

We always make the best decision we can based upon what we believe in that moment. When I was growing up, my father and I experienced a lot of tension with each other for many years. He had bipolar disorder and it was very difficult for him. As I got older and went through my transformation of consciousness and really forgave him—and forgave myself and forgave the world—my father started showing up in my awareness as an angel. He got happier and happier and our relationship began to improve. People would say, “Your dad has really changed a lot,” and I would say, “My mind has really changed.” My father was just reflecting that back. In fact, he came to me one day and said, “David, I’m sorry. I was not a very good father. I didn’t do the things that a good father should do.” I replied, “Nonsense! I don’t believe that for one instant. You did the best you could and I did the best I could. You didn’t let me down and I didn’t let you down. We’re not going to buy into that guilt trip anymore.” He lit up when I said this. His whole demeanor changed and he instantly reflected love back to me. That simple exchange completely rearranged our view of everything that had taken place during those early years. None of it mattered anymore. We had been mistaken about many things because we couldn’t perceive truly while we were going through our time together.

He concluded that Trump as president was no different than he was as a candidate. The buffoonery was not just an act. “Trump might be one of the world’s best bullshitters ever,” he says. “Like my dad. Bullshitting can sometimes baffle the brain. If you just think of Trump as sort of a con-man performance, then his behavior sort of makes sense.

Girls aside, the other thing I found in the last few years of being at school, was a quiet, but strong Christian faith – and this touched me profoundly, setting up a relationship or faith that has followed me ever since. I am so grateful for this. It has provided me with a real anchor to my life and has been the secret strength to so many great adventures since. But it came to me very simply one day at school, aged only sixteen. As a young kid, I had always found that a faith in God was so natural. It was a simple comfort to me: unquestioning and personal. But once I went to school and was forced to sit through somewhere in the region of nine hundred dry, Latin-liturgical, chapel services, listening to stereotypical churchy people droning on, I just thought that I had got the whole faith deal wrong. Maybe God wasn’t intimate and personal but was much more like chapel was … tedious, judgemental, boring and irrelevant. The irony was that if chapel was all of those things, a real faith is the opposite. But somehow, and without much thought, I had thrown the beautiful out with the boring. If church stinks, then faith must do, too. The precious, natural, instinctive faith I had known when I was younger was tossed out with this newly found delusion that because I was growing up, it was time to ‘believe’ like a grown-up. I mean, what does a child know about faith? It took a low point at school, when my godfather, Stephen, died, to shake me into searching a bit harder to re-find this faith I had once known. Life is like that. Sometimes it takes a jolt to make us sit and remember who and what we are really about. Stephen had been my father’s best friend in the world. And he was like a second father to me. He came on all our family holidays, and spent almost every weekend down with us in the Isle of Wight in the summer, sailing with Dad and me. He died very suddenly and without warning, of a heart attack in Johannesburg. I was devastated. I remember sitting up a tree one night at school on my own, and praying the simplest, most heartfelt prayer of my life. ‘Please, God, comfort me.’ Blow me down … He did. My journey ever since has been trying to make sure I don’t let life or vicars or church over-complicate that simple faith I had found. And the more of the Christian faith I discover, the more I realize that, at heart, it is simple. (What a relief it has been in later life to find that there are some great church communities out there, with honest, loving friendships that help me with all of this stuff.) To me, my Christian faith is all about being held, comforted, forgiven, strengthened and loved – yet somehow that message gets lost on most of us, and we tend only to remember the religious nutters or the God of endless school assemblies. This is no one’s fault, it is just life. Our job is to stay open and gentle, so we can hear the knocking on the door of our heart when it comes. The irony is that I never meet anyone who doesn’t want to be loved or held or forgiven. Yet I meet a lot of folk who hate religion. And I so sympathize. But so did Jesus. In fact, He didn’t just sympathize, He went much further. It seems more like this Jesus came to destroy religion and to bring life. This really is the heart of what I found as a young teenager: Christ comes to make us free, to bring us life in all its fullness. He is there to forgive us where we have messed up (and who hasn’t), and to be the backbone in our being. Faith in Christ has been the great empowering presence in my life, helping me walk strong when so often I feel so weak. It is no wonder I felt I had stumbled on something remarkable that night up that tree. I had found a calling for my life.

As she does, she speculates about all the aspects of the mortal world she’s going to have to explain to Dad. “Like cell phones,” she says. “Or self-checkout in the grocery store. Oh, this is going to be amazing. Seriously, his exile is the best present you ever got me.” “You know that he’s going to be so bored that he’s going to try to micromanage your life,” Taryn says. “Or plan your invasion of a neighboring apartment building

Probably you were not quite well, my little dove, when you wrote to me, for a note of real melancholy pervaded your letter. I recognized in it a nature closely akin to my own. I know the feeling only too well. In my life, too, there are days, hours, weeks, aye, and months, in which everything looks black, when I am tormented by the thought that I am forsaken, that no one cares for me. Indeed, my life is of little worth to anyone. Were I to vanish from the face of the earth to-day, it would be no great loss to Russian music, and would certainly cause no one great unhappiness. In short, I live a selfish bachelor’s life. I work for myself alone, and care only for myself. This is certainly very comfortable, although dull, narrow, and lifeless. But that you, who are indispensable to so many whose happiness you make, that you can give way to depression, is more than I can believe. How can you doubt for a moment the love and esteem of those who surround you? How could it be possible not to love you? No, there is no one in the world more dearly loved than you are. As for me, it would be absurd to speak of my love for you. If I care for anyone, it is for you, for your family, for my brothers and our old Dad. I love you all, not because you are my relations, but because you are the best people in the world.

The world is filled with talented poor people. All too often, they’re poor or struggle financially or earn less than they are capable of, not because of what they know, but because of what they do not know. They focus on perfecting their skills at building a better hamburger rather than the skills of selling and delivering the hamburger. Maybe McDonald’s does not make the best hamburger, but they are the best at selling and delivering a basic average burger.

After that, the two of them seemed more in love than ever. There was more dancing. More hand - holding. More romantic weekend getaways. More of Dad saying things like, "Your mother has been a lot of people in the twenty years I've known her, and I've had a chance to fall in love with every single one of them, Janie. That's the key to marriage. You have to keep falling in love with every new version of each other, and it's the best feeling in the whole world.

My dad could go to work, he could get raises, he could be thanked for his contributions, he got a pay-check for his labor, but that didn't happen for moms. The best they could hope for would be a crayon valentine or a squashed, limp dandelion flower offered up from the damp hand of their wide-eyed and innocent child. Which wasn't nothing. In all my days I'd never considered anything to be more important than home. In a chaotic world, it was sanctuary; it was where love grew.

...she speculates about all the aspects of the mortal world she's going to have to explain to Dad. 'Like cell phones,' she says. 'Or self-checkout in the grocery store. Oh, this is going to be amazing. Seriously, his exile is the best present you ever got me.' 'You know that he's going to be so bored that he's going to try to micromanage your life,' Taryn says. 'Or plan your invasion of a neighbouring apartment building.' At that, Vivi stops smiling. It makes Oak giggle, though.

[Musk] concluded that Trump as president was no different than he was as a candidate. The buffoonery was not just an act. "Trump might be one of the world’s best bullshitters ever," he says. "Like my dad. Bullshitting can sometimes baffle the brain. If you just think of Trump as sort of a con-man performance, then his behavior sort of makes sense." When the president pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Accord, an international agreement to fight climate change, Musk resigned from the presidential councils.

Sam: There's no collisions out there, Hally. Nobody trips or stumbles or bumps into anybody else. That's what that moment is all about. To be one of those finalists on that dance floor is like... like being in a dream about a world in which accidents don't happen. Hally: [Genuinely moved by Sam's image.] Jesus, Sam! That's beautiful! Willie: [Can endure waiting no longer.] I'm starting! [Willie dances while Sam talks.] Sam: Of course it is. That's what I've been trying to say to you all afternoon. And it's beautiful because that is what we want life to be like. But instead, like you said, Hally, we're bumping into each other all the time. Look at the three of us this afternoon. I've bumped into Willie, the two of us have bumped into you, you've bumped into your mother, she bumping into your Dad... None of us knows the steps and there's no music playing. And it doesn't stop with us. The whole world is doing it all the time. Open a newspaper and what do you read? America has bumped into Russia, England is bumping into India, rich man bumps into poor man. Those are big collisions, Hally. They make for a lot of bruises. People get hurt in all that bumping, and we're sick and tired of it now. It's been going on for too long. Are we never going to get it right? ... Learn to dance life like champions instead of always being just a bunch of beginners at it? Hally: [Deep and sincere admiration of the man.] You've got a vision, Sam! Sam: Not just me. What I'm saying to you is that everybody's got it. That's why there's only standing room left for the Centenery Hall in two weeks' time. For as long as the music lasts, we are going to see six couples get it right, the way we want life to be. Hally: But is that the best we can do, Sam... watch six finalists dreaming about the way it should be? Sam: I don't know. But it starts with that. Without the dream we won't know what we're going for. And anyway I reckon there are a few people who have got past just dreaming about it and are trying for something real.

Ella?” Cinder asked when things got quiet. “Are you there?” He sounded hesitant. “Welcome to my life,” I said with a sigh of defeat. “Sorry about that.” “It’s okay.” It was definitely not okay. I was so humiliated. It was a miracle I wasn’t crying. I think that was only because I was still in so much shock. “Look, thanks for giving me your phone number, but maybe this is a bad time.” My dad scrambled to his feet, waving his hands at me. “No! You don’t have to end your call. We’ll give you some privacy.” He glanced at both Jennifer and Juliette. “Won’t we, ladies?” His blatant desperation for me to talk to someone—even a stranger from the Internet—was as embarrassing as Anastasia’s outburst. Even worse, Jennifer was just as bad. “Of course! You go ahead and talk to your boyfriend, Ella,” she squealed. “We can keep an eye on you from the kitchen. I have to get dinner started anyway.” While I was busy dying from her use of the word boyfriend, she hopped off the elliptical. She hurried to catch up to my dad, seeming more than happy to finish her workout early. As they started up the steps, they both turned back to Juliette, who had sprawled out on the couch instead of getting up. “I was here first,” Juliette said in response to their expectant looks. “There’s no way I’m going anywhere near the upstairs with Ana in the mood she’s in, and I really don’t care about Ella’s love life. Besides, she’s not supposed to be alone, anyway. What if she tries to throw herself off the balcony or something?” Was there anyone in the world that didn’t feel the need to humiliate me? I glared at Juliette, and she just waved a pair of earbuds at me and shoved them in her ears. “I’ll turn the volume up.” My dad and Jennifer both gave me such hopeful looks that I couldn’t argue anymore. I rolled my eyes and made my way over to the armchair my father had been lounging in. Once Dad and Jennifer were gone, I glanced over at the couch. Juliette was already doing what she did best—ignoring me. She was bobbing her head along with her music as she read out of a textbook. I doubted she could hear me, but I spoke softly anyway, just in case. “Cinder? Are you still there?” “I didn’t realize upping our relationship to phone buddies would come with a boyfriend title. Does that mean if we ever meet in person, we’ll have to get married?” Surprised, I burst into laughter. Juliette glanced at me with one raised eyebrow, but went back to her textbook without saying anything.

Jobs also decided to bring his son Reed, then a high school senior, back with him from Hawaii. “I’m going to be in meetings 24/7 for probably two days and I want you to be in every single one because you’ll learn more in those two days than you would in two years at business school,” he told him. “You’re going to be in the room with the best people in the world making really tough decisions and get to see how the sausage is made.” Jobs got a little misty-eyed when he recalled the experience. “I would go through that all again just for that opportunity to have him see me at work,” he said. “He got to see what his dad does.

It’s time to take some risks. It’s time to shake off the dull sloth of what this world gives us and dare to master the stuff in our control. If you’re a mother, then be one that breaks the mold. If you’re a teacher, then be one that truly inspires. If you’re a preacher, then be the best damn preacher you can be. And if you fail, who cares? At least you went down swinging. Besides, your salvation does not hang in the balance; your eternity is not fashioned by your hands. Only the blood of the Lamb decided that. You are saved by grace alone: so you are free to work, free to fail, and free to get up again and again. So get out the toolbox, roll up your sleeves, and do the work our Lord has given you to do. Rev. Paul Koch

I think I have done you a disservice,” my father finally said, looking me in the eye. “I told you from such a young age that you could be the very best. But I never explained to you that it’s about aiming for excellence, not about stats.” “What?” “I am just saying that when you were a child, I spoke in…grandiosities. But, Carrie, there is no actual unequivocal greatest in the world. Tennis doesn’t work like that. The world doesn’t work like that.” “I’m not going to sit here and be insulted.” “How am I insulting you? I am telling you there is no one way to define the greatest of all time. You’re focusing right now on rankings. But what about the person who gets the most titles over the span of their career? Are they the greatest? How about the person with the fastest recorded serve? Or the highest paid? I’m asking you to take a minute and recalibrate your expectations.” “Excuse me?” I said, standing up. “Recalibrate my expectations?” “Carrie,” my father said. “Please listen to me.” “No,” I said, putting my hands up. “Don’t use your calm voice and act like you’re being nice. Because you’re not. Having someone on this planet who is as good as me—or better—means I have not achieved my goal. If you would like to coach someone who is fine being second, go coach someone else.” I threw my napkin down and walked out of the restaurant. I made my way through the lobby to the parking lot. I was still furious by the time my father caught up to me by my car. “Carolina, stop, you’re making a scene,” he said. “Do you have any idea how hard it is?” I shouted. It felt shocking to me, to hear my own voice that loud. “To give everything you have to something and still not be able to grasp it! To fail to reach the top day after day and be expected to do it with a smile on your face? Maybe I’m not allowed to make a scene on the court, but I will make a scene here, Dad. It is the very least you can give me. Just for once in my life, let me scream about something!” There were people gathering in the parking lot, and each one of them, I could tell, knew my name. Knew my father’s name. Knew exactly what they were witnessing. “WHAT ARE YOU ALL LOOKING AT? GO ON ABOUT YOUR SAD LITTLE DAYS!” I got in my convertible and drove away. —

I suspect, Austin, that the Americans you’ve met in the banking world aren’t the high-school drop-outs from Nebraska whose best friend got shot by a smiley Iraqi teenager holding bug of apples. A teenager whose dad shredded by a gunner on a passing Humvee last week while he fixed the TV aerial. A gunner whose best friend took a dum dum bullet through the neck from a sniper on the roof only yesterday. A sniper whose sister was in a car that stalled at an intersection as a military attaché’ convoy drove up, prompting the bodyguards to pepper the vehicle with automatic fire, knowing they’d save the convoy from a suicide bomber if they were right , but that the Iraqi law wouldn’t apply to them if they were wrong. Ultimately , wars escalate by eating their own shit...

I knew this was the best therapy for him. Surfing at Boulders was downright dangerous, but Steve reveled in the challenge. He surfed with Wes, his best mate in the world. I sat on a rocky point with my eye glued to the camera so I wouldn’t miss a single wave. While Bindi gathered shells and played on the beach under her nanny’s watchful eye, I admired Steve with his long arms and broad shoulders, powerfully paddling onto wave after wave. Not even the Pacific Ocean with its most powerful sets could slow him down. He caught the most amazing barrels I have ever seen, and carved up the waves with such ferocity that I didn’t want the camera to miss a single moment. On the beach in Samoa, while Bindi helped her dad wax his board, I caught a glimpse of joy in eyes that had been so sad.

You, like every other daughter in the world, are bonded to your dad. Darwin points out that bonding happens in all species. Your bond with your dad was perfectly normal and necessary. However, I think you’ve mistaken bonding for love. Bonding is not a choice; it’s a biological imperative, necessary for survival. Love is a choice. When you meet an incompetent man who needs you to care for him, you immediately feel warm toward him because you’re bonded to that behaviour. You’ve honed your role of taking care of a man, and have been loved for doing it. But love is where you mutually care for one another. You want to admire your lover’s characteristics, not protect him from the ravages of the real world. Your dad loved you, as best as he could, for taking care of him. But some man will love you for all your characteristics, not just the ones that will cover for his mistakes.

You, like every other daughter in the world, are bonded to your dad. Darwin points out that bonding happens in all species. Your bond with your dad was perfectly normal and necessary. However, I think you've mistaken bonding for love. Bonding is not a choice; it's a biological imperative, necessary for survival. Love is a choice. When you meet an incompetent man who needs you to care for him, you immediately feel warm toward him because you're bonded to that behaviour. You've honed your role of taking care of a man, and have been loved for doing it. But love is where you mutually care for one another. You want to admire your lover's characteristics, not protect him from the ravages of the real world. Your dad loved you, as best as he could, for taking care of him. But some man will love you for all your characteristics, not just the ones that will cover for his mistakes.

I wonder if Jack and Diane ever made it After the drums and the guitars all faded Was the best they could do good enough Or did the heartland just swallow 'em up How did my mom and my dad ever do it If there were troubles then we never knew it I guess they had each other and that was enough You know you can't keep the ground from shaking, no matter how hard you try, You can't keep the sunsets from fading, you gotta treat you love like You're jumping off a rope swing maybe 'cause the whole thing is really just a shot in the dark You gotta love like there's no such thing as a broken heart You gotta love like there's no such thing as a broken heart What am I gonna tell my kids when they see All of this bull that goes down on TV When the whole world is down on its luck I gotta make sure they keep that chin up Cry when it hurts, laugh when it's funny Chase after the dream, don't chase after the money And know we got each other, that's what's up 'Cause you can't keep the ground from shaking, no matter how hard you try You can't keep the sunsets from fading, you gotta treat you love like You're jumping off a rope swing maybe cause the whole thing is really just a shot in the dark You gotta love like there's no such thing as a broken heart You gotta love like there's no such thing as a broken heart You gotta love like there's no such thing as a broken heart 'Cause you can't keep the ground from shaking, no matter how hard you try You can't keep the sunsets from fading, you gotta treat you love like You're jumping off a rope swing maybe 'cause the whole thing is really just a shot in the dark You gotta love like there's no such thing as a broken heart You gotta love, love, love, love You gotta love, love, love, love You gotta love like there's no such thing as a broken heart

We’ve lost our way” is how another manifesto author, Andrew Hunt, put it in a 2015 essay titled “The Failure of Agile.” Hunt tells me the word agile has become “meaningless at best,” having been hijacked by “scads of vocal agile zealots” who had no idea what they were talking about. Agile has split into various camps and methodologies, with names like Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) and Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). The worst flavor, Hunt tells me, is Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe, which he and some other original manifesto authors jokingly call Shitty Agile for Enterprise. “It’s a disaster,” Hunt tells me. “I have a few consultant friends who are making big bucks cleaning up failed SAFe implementations.” SAFe is the hellspawn brainchild of a company called Scaled Agile Inc., a bunch of mad scientists whose approach consists of a nightmare world of rules and charts and configurations. SAFe itself comes in multiple configurations, which you can find on the Scaled Agile website. Each one is an abomination of corporate complexity and Rube Goldberg-esque interdependencies.

The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard. I always pose it this way. I say: ‘Lookit. Would you rather be the world’s greatest lover, but have everyone think you’re the world’s worst lover? Or would you rather be the world’s worst lover but have everyone think you’re the world’s greatest lover?’ Now, that’s an interesting question. “Here’s another one. If the world couldn’t see your results, would you rather be thought of as the world’s greatest investor but in reality have the world’s worst record? Or be thought of as the world’s worst investor when you were actually the best? “In teaching your kids, I think the lesson they’re learning at a very, very early age is what their parents put the emphasis on. If all the emphasis is on what the world’s going to think about you, forgetting about how you really behave, you’ll wind up with an Outer Scorecard. Now, my dad: He was a hundred percent Inner Scorecard guy. “He was really a maverick. But he wasn’t a maverick for the sake of being a maverick. He just didn’t care what other people thought. My dad taught me how life should be lived. I’ve never seen anybody quite like him.

The next morning I showed up at dad’s house at eight, with a hangover. All my brothers’ trucks were parked in front. What are they all doing here? When I opened the front door, Dad, Alan, Jase, and Willie looked at me. They were sitting around the living room, waiting. No one smiled, and the air felt really heavy. I looked to my left, where Mom was usually working in the kitchen, but this time she was still, leaning over the counter and looking at me too. Dad spoke first. “Son, are you ready to change?” Everything else seemed to go silent and fade away, and all I heard was my dad’s voice. “I just want you to know we’ve come to a decision as a family. You’ve got two choices. You keep doing what you’re doing--maybe you’ll live through it--but we don’t want nothin’ to do with you. Somebody can drop you off at the highway, and then you’ll be on your own. You can go live your life; we’ll pray for you and hope that you come back one day. And good luck to you in this world.” He paused for a second then went on, a little quieter. “Your other choice is that you can join this family and follow God. You know what we stand for. We’re not going to let you visit our home while you’re carrying on like this. You give it all up, give up all those friends, and those drugs, and come home. Those are your two choices.” I struggled to breathe, my head down and my chest tight. No matter what happened, I knew I would never forget this moment. My breath left me in a rush, and I fell to my knees in front of them all and started crying. “Dad, what took y’all so long?” I burst out. I felt broken, and I began to tell them about the sorry and dangerous road I’d been traveling down. I could see my brothers’ eyes starting to fill with tears too. I didn’t dare look at my mom’s face although I could feel her presence behind me. I knew she’d already been through the hell of addiction with her own mother, with my dad, with her brother-in-law Si, and with my oldest brother, Alan. And now me, her baby. I remembered the letters she’d been writing to me over the last few months, reaching out with words of love from her heart and from the heart of the Lord. Suddenly, I felt guilty. “Dad, I don’t deserve to come back. I’ve been horrible. Let me tell you some more.” “No, son,” he answered. “You’ve told me enough.” I’ve seen my dad cry maybe three times, and that was one of them. To see my dad that upset hit me right in the gut. He took me by my shoulders and said, “I want you to know that God loves you, and we love you, but you just can’t live like that anymore.” “I know. I want to come back home,” I said. I realized my dad understood. He’d been down this road before and come back home. He, too, had been lost and then found. By this time my brothers were crying, and they got around me, and we were on our knees, crying. I prayed out loud to God, “Thank You for getting me out of this because I am done living the way I’ve been living.” “My prodigal son has returned,” Dad said, with tears of joy streaming down his face. It was the best day of my life. I could finally look over at my mom, and she was hanging on to the counter for dear life, crying, and shaking with happiness. A little later I felt I had to go use the bathroom. My stomach was a mess from the stress and the emotions. But when I was in the bathroom with the door shut, my dad thought I might be in there doing one last hit of something or drinking one last drop, so he got up, came over, and started banging on the bathroom door. Before I could do anything, he kicked in the door. All he saw was me sitting on the pot and looking up at him while I about had a heart attack. It was not our finest moment. That afternoon after my brothers had left, we went into town and packed up and moved my stuff out of my apartment. “Hey bro,” I said to my roommate. “I’m changing my life. I’ll see ya later.” I meant it.

The same song was playing the second I met my ex–best friend and the moment I realized I’d lost her. I met my best friend at a neighborhood cookout the year we would both turn twelve. It was one of those hot Brooklyn afternoons that always made me feel like I'd stepped out of my life and onto a movie set because the hydrants were open, splashing water all over the hot asphalt. There wasn't a cloud in the flawless blue sky. And pretty black and brown people were everywhere. I was crying. ‘What a Wonderful World’ was playing through a speaker someone had brought with them to the park, and it reminded me too much of my Granny Georgina. I was cupping the last snow globe she’d ever given me in my small, sweaty hands and despite the heat, I couldn’t help imagining myself inside the tiny, perfect, snow-filled world. I was telling myself a story about what it might be like to live in London, a place that was unimaginably far and sitting in the palm of my hands all at once. But it wasn't working. When Gigi had told me stories, they'd felt like miracles. But she was gone and I didn't know if I'd ever be okay again. I heard a small voice behind me, asking if I was okay. I had noticed a girl watching me, but it took her a long time to come over, and even longer to say anything. She asked the question quietly. I had never met anyone who…spoke the way that she did, and I thought that her speech might have been why she waited so long to speak to me. While I expected her to say ‘What’s wrong?’—a question I didn’t want to have to answer—she asked ‘What are you doing?’ instead, and I was glad. “I was kind of a weird kid, so when I answered, I said ‘Spinning stories,’ calling it what Gigi had always called it when I got lost in my own head, but my voice cracked on the phrase and another tear slipped down my cheek. To this day I don’t know why I picked that moment to be so honest. Usually when kids I didn't know came up to me, I clamped my mouth shut like the heavy cover of an old book falling closed. Because time and taught me that kids weren't kind to girls like me: Girls who were dreamy and moony-eyed and a little too nice. Girls who wore rose-tonted glasses. And actual, really thick glasses. Girls who thought the world was beautiful, and who read too many books, and who never saw cruelty coming. But something about this girl felt safe. Something about the way she was smiling as she stuttered out the question helped me know I needn't bother with being shy, because she was being so brave. I thought that maybe kids weren't nice to girls like her either. The cookout was crowded, and none of the other kids were talking to me because, like I said, I was the neighborhood weirdo. I carried around snow globesbecause I was in love with every place I’d never been. I often recited Shakespeare from memory because of my dad, who is a librarian. I lost myself in books because they were friends who never letme down, and I didn’t hide enough of myself the way everyone else did, so people didn’t ‘get’ me. I was lonely a lot. Unless I was with my Gigi. The girl, she asked me if it was making me feel better, spinning the stories. And I shook my head. Before I could say what I was thinking—a line from Hamlet about sorrow coming in battalions that would have surely killed any potential I had of making friends with her. The girl tossed her wavy black hair over her shoulder and grinned. She closed her eyes and said 'Music helps me. And I love this song.' When she started singing, her voice was so unexpected—so bright and clear—that I stopped crying and stared at her. She told me her name and hooked her arm through mine like we’d known each other forever, and when the next song started, she pulled me up and we spun in a slow circle together until we were both dizzy and giggling.

We had planned to spend Christmas morning with my family, and then head over to Phil and Kay’s for Christmas night. The whole family was there, including all the grandkids. Bella, Willie and Korie’s daughter, was the youngest and still an infant. We opened presents, ate dinner, and the whole evening felt surreal. Tomorrow morning I’ll have a baby in this world, I thought. When Jep and I left that night, I said, “I’m gonna go have a baby. See you all later!” For all the worry and concern and tears and prayers we’d spent on our unborn baby, when it came to her birth, she was no trouble at all. I went to the hospital, got prepped for the C-section, and within thirty minutes she was out. Lily was beautiful and healthy. I was overwhelmed with happiness and joy. I felt God had blessed me. He’d created life inside of me--a real, beautiful, breathing little human being--and brought her into this world through me. It was an unbelievable miracle. And the best part? Jep was in the delivery room. Unlike his dad, he wanted to be there, and he shared it all with me. I’ll never forget the sight of Jep decked out in blue scrubs, with the blue head cover, holding his baby girl for the first time. I’ll never forget how she nestled down in the crook of his arm, his hand wrapped up and around, gently holding her. He stared down at her, and I could see a smile behind his white surgical mask. He was already in love--I knew that look. After we admired the baby together, I fell asleep, and Jep took his newborn daughter out to meet the family. He told me later he bawled like a baby. Later, when she went to the hospital nursery, Jep kept going over there to stare at her. I think he was in shock and overwhelmed and excited. Lily had a light creamy complexion and little pink rosebud lips, and she was born December 26, 2002. Despite the rough pregnancy, she was perfect. God answered our prayers, and now we were a family of three. We’d been married just a little over a year.

If I'd known you were available, Dee, and looking for work,I'd've hired you." Burke Logan, settled back in his chair and winked at his wife's cousin. "We like to keep the best on at Royal Meadows." Adelia twinkled at him across the table in the track's dining room. He was as handsome and as dangerous to look at as he'd been nearly twenty years before when she'd first met him. "Oh,I don't know." Bruke trailed a hand over his wife's shoudler. "We have the best bookkeeper around at Three Acres." "In that case,I want a raise." Erin picked up her wine and sent Burke a challenging look. "A big one. Trevor?" Her voice was smooth, shimmering with Ireland as she addressed her son. "Do you have in mind to eat that pork chop or just use it for decoration?" "I'm reading the Racing Form, Ma." "His father's son," Erin muttered and snagged the paper from him. "Eat your dinner." He heaved a sigh as only a twelve-year-old boy could. "I think Topeka in the third, with Lonesome in the fifth and Hennessy in the sixth for the trifecta. Dad says Topeka's generous and a cinch tip." At his wife's long stare, Burke cleared his throat. "Stuff that pork chop in your mouth, Trev.Where's Jean?" "She's fussing with her hair," Mo announced, and snatched a french fry from Travis's plate. "As usual," she added with the worldly air only an older sister could achieve, "the minute she turned fourteen she decided her hair was the bane of her existence. Huh. Like having long, thick, straight-as-a-pin black hair is a problem. This-" she tugged on one of the hundreds of wild red curls that spiraled acround her face. "-is a problem. If you're going to worry about something as stupid as hair, which I don't.Anyway, you guys have to come over and see this weanling I have my eye on.He's going to be amazing.And if Dad lets me train him..." She trailed off, slanting a look at her father across the table. "You'll be in college this time next year," Burke reminded her. "Not if I can help it," Mo said under her breath.

Bindi the Jungle Girl aired on July 18, 2007, on ABC (Channel 2) in Australia, and we were so proud. Bindi’s determination to carry on her father’s legacy was a testament to everything Steve believed in. He had perfectly combined his love for his family with his love for conservation and leaving the world a better place. Now this love was perfectly passed down to his kids. The official beginning of Bindi’s career was a fantastic day. All the time and effort, and joy and sorrow of the past year culminated in this wonderful series. Now everyone was invited to see Bindi’s journey, first filming with her dad, and then stepping up and filming with Robert and me. It was also a chance to experience one more time why Steve was so special and unique, to embrace him, to appreciate him, and to celebrate his life. Bindi, Robert, and I would do our best to make sure that Steve’s light wasn’t hidden under a bushel. It would continue to sine as we worked together to protect all wildlife and all wild places. After Bindi’s show launched, it seemed so appropriate that another project we had been working on for many months came to fruition. We found an area of 320,000 acres in Cape York Peninsula, bordered on one side by the Dulcie River and on the other side by the Wenlock River--some of the best crocodile country in the world. It was one of the top spots in Australia, and the most critically important habitat in the state of Queensland. Prime Minister John Howard, along with the Queensland government, dedicated $6.3 million to obtaining this land, in memory of Steve. On July 22, 2007, the Steve Irwin Wildlife Reserve became official. This piece of land means so much to the Irwin family, and I know what it would have meant to Steve. Ultimately, it meant the protection of his crocodiles, the animals he loved so much. What does the future hold for the Irwin family? Each and every day is filled with incredible triumphs and moments of terrible grief. And in between, life goes on. We are determined to continue to honor and appreciate Steve’s wonderful spirit. It lives on with all of us. Steve lived every day of his life doing what he loved, and he always said he would die defending wildlife. I reckon Bindi, Robert, and I will all do the same. God bless you, Stevo. I love you, mate.

MY PROCESS I got bullied quite a bit as a kid, so I learned how to take a punch and how to put up a good fight. God used that. I am not afraid of spiritual “violence” or of facing spiritual fights. My Dad was drafted during Vietnam and I grew up an Army brat, moving around frequently. God used that. I am very spiritually mobile, adaptable, and flexible. My parents used to hand me a Bible and make me go look up what I did wrong. God used that, as well. I knew the Word before I knew the Lord, so studying Scripture is not intimidating to me. I was admitted into a learning enrichment program in junior high. They taught me critical thinking skills, logic, and Greek Mythology. God used that, too. In seventh grade I was in school band and choir. God used that. At 14, before I even got saved, a youth pastor at my parents’ church taught me to play guitar. God used that. My best buddies in school were a druggie, a Jewish kid, and an Irish soccer player. God used that. I broke my back my senior year and had to take theatre instead of wrestling. God used that. I used to sleep on the couch outside of the Dean’s office between classes. God used that. My parents sent me to a Christian college for a semester in hopes of getting me saved. God used that. I majored in art, advertising, astronomy, pre-med, and finally English. God used all of that. I made a woman I loved get an abortion. God used (and redeemed) that. I got my teaching certification. I got plugged into a group of sincere Christian young adults. I took courses for ministry credentials. I worked as an autism therapist. I taught emotionally disabled kids. And God used each of those things. I married a pastor’s daughter. God really used that. Are you getting the picture? San Antonio led me to Houston, Houston led me to El Paso, El Paso led me to Fort Leonard Wood, Fort Leonard Wood led me back to San Antonio, which led me to Austin, then to Kentucky, then to Belton, then to Maryland, to Pennsylvania, to Dallas, to Alabama, which led me to Fort Worth. With thousands of smaller journeys in between. The reason that I am able to do the things that I do today is because of the process that God walked me through yesterday. Our lives are cumulative. No day stands alone. Each builds upon the foundation of the last—just like a stairway, each layer bringing us closer to Him. God uses each experience, each lesson, each relationship, even our traumas and tragedies as steps in the process of becoming the people He made us to be. They are steps in the process of achieving the destinies that He has encoded into the weave of each of our lives. We are journeymen, finding the way home. What is the value of the journey? If the journey makes us who we are, then the journey is priceless.

Olive,’ Mum said, stroking my fringe. ‘I need you to listen to me, and I need you to be brave.’ Opening my eyes again, I swallowed nervously. ‘What’s happened?’ ‘Your sister didn’t arrive at work today.’ Sukie was a typist for an insurance company in Clerkenwell. She said it was the dullest job ever. ‘Isn’t today Saturday, though?’ I asked. ‘She was due in to do overtime. No one’s seen her since she was with you and Cliff last night. She’s missing.’ ‘Missing?’ I didn’t understand. Mum nodded. The nurse added rather unhelpfully: ‘We’ve had casualties from all over London. It’s been chaos. All you can do is keep hoping for the best.’ It was obvious what she meant. I glanced at Mum, who always took the opposite view in any argument. But she stayed silent. Her hands, though, were trembling. ‘Missing isn’t the same as dead,’ I pointed out. Mum grimaced. ‘That’s true, and I’ve spoken to the War Office: Sukie’s name isn’t on their list of dead or injured but-’ ‘So she’s alive, then. She must be. I saw her in the street talking to a man,’ I said. ‘When she realised I’d followed her she was really furious about it.’ Mum looked at me, at the nurse, at the bump on my head. ‘Darling, you’re concussed. Don’t get overexcited now.’ ‘But you can’t think she’s dead.’ I insisted. ‘There’s no proof, is ther?’ ‘Sometimes it’s difficult to identify someone after…’ Mum faltered. I knew what she couldn’t say: sometimes if a body got blown apart there’d be nothing left to tie a name tag to. It was why we’d never buried Dad. Perhaps if there’d been a coffin and a headstone and a vicar saying nice things, it would’ve seemed more real. This felt different, though. After a big air raid the telephones were often down, letters got delayed, roads blocked. It might be a day or two before we heard from Sukie, and worried though I was, I knew she could look after herself. I wondered if it was part of Mum being ill, this painting the world black when it was grey. My head was hurting again so I lay back against the pillows. I was fed up with this stupid, horrid war. Eighteen months ago when it started, everyone said it’d be over before Christmas, but they were wrong. It was still going on, tearing great holes in people’s lives. We’d already lost Dad, and half the time these days it felt like Mum wasn’t quite here. And now Sukie – who knew where she was? I didn’t realise I was crying again until Mum touched my cheek. ‘It’s not fair,’ I said weakly. ‘War isn’t fair, I’m afraid,’ Mum replied. ‘You only have to walk through this hospital to see we’re not the only ones suffering. Though that’s just the top of the iceberg, believe me. There’s plenty worse going on in Europe.’ I remembered Sukie mentioning this too. She’d got really upset when she told me about the awful things happening to people Hitler didn’t like. She was in the kitchen chopping onions at the time so I wasn’t aware she was crying properly. ‘What sort of awful things?’ I’d asked her. ‘Food shortages, people being driven from their homes.’ Sukie took a deep breath, as if the list was really long. ‘People being attacked for no reason or sent no one knows where – Jewish people in particular. They’re made to wear yellow stars so everyone knows they’re Jews, and then barred from shops and schools and even parts of the towns where they live. It’s heartbreaking to think we can’t do anything about it.’ People threatened by soldiers. People queuing for food with stars on their coats. It was what I’d seen on last night’s newsreel at the cinema. My murky brain could just about remember those dismal scenes, and it made me even more angry. How I hated this lousy war. I didn’t know what I could do about it, a thirteen-year-old girl with a bump on her head. Yet thinking there might be something made me feel a tiny bit better.

Chapter One: The world is flat. I know it is, because for the last five hours the view has been exactly the same. Only the sun has done any traveling, working its long shadows through straight lines of harvested cotton. A few crows shop the furrowed rows for worms, weevils, and grasshoppers. One hops over to inspect the truck I'm lying under, cocks a beady black eye, probably attracted to the shiny metal police-issued handcuffs, my hand in one of the cuffs, dangling from wrist to arm, and finally down to me, Lalla Bains, aero-ag pilot, sometime busybody, meddling where I shouldn't—again. I'm dirt smeared and sweaty, thinking if I get out of this alive, if the killer doesn't return to finish me off, I'll foreswear all future sleuthing. My dad, Caleb my fiancé, my best friend Roxanne, and half of Stanislaus County will be pleased to bear witness to that promise.

It’s getting-up time,” Alessandro declares. “Today is the day.” “What day?” “The release date.” “What are we talking about?” “Daa-add. The new XBOX game. Hunting Old Sammie.” Armand opens his eyes. He looks at his son looking at him. The boy’s eyes are only inches away. “You’re kidding.” “It’s the newest best game. You hunt down terrorists and kill them.” Lifting his voice, “‘Deploy teams of Black Berets into the ancient mountains of Tora Bora. Track implacable terrorists to their cavernous lairs. Rain withering fire down on the homicidal masterminds who planned the horror of September eleven, two-thousand-and-one.’” The kid’s memory is canny. Armand lifts Alex off his chest and sits up. “Who invented it?” “I’m telling you, dad. It’s an XBOX game.” “We can get it today?” “No,” Leah says. “Absolutely not. The last thing he needs is another violent video game.” “Mahhuum!” “How bad can it be?” says Armand. “How would you know? A minute ago you hadn’t heard of it.” “And you had?” “I saw a promo. Helicopter gunships with giant machine guns. Soldiers with flamethrowers, turning bearded men into candles.” “Sounds great.” “Armand, really. How old are you?” “I don’t see what my age has to do with it.” “Dad, it’s totally cool. ‘Uncover mountain strongholds with thermal imaging technology. Call in air-strikes by F-16s. Destroy terrorist cells with laser weaponry. Wage pitched battles against mujahideen. Capture bin Laden alive or kill him on the spot. March down Fifth Avenue with jihadists’ heads on pikes. Make the world safe for democracy.’” Safe for Dick Cheney’s profits, Armand thinks, knowing all about it from his former life, but says nothing. It’s pretty much impossible to explain the complexity of how things work within the greater systemic dysfunction. Instead, he asks the one question that matters. “How much does it cost?” Alessandro’s mouth minces sideways. He holds up fingers, then realizes he needs more than two hands. Armand can see the kid doesn’t want to say. “C’mon. ’Fess up.” Alex sighs. “A one with two zeros.” “One hundred dollars.” Alex’s eyes slide away. Rapid nods, face averted. “Yeah.” “For a video game, Alex.” “Yhep.” “No way.” “Daa-add! It’s the greatest game ever!” The boy is beginning to whine. “Don’t whine,” Armand tells him. “On TV it’s awesome. The army guys are flaming a cave and when the terror guys try to escape, they shoot them.” “Neat.” “Their turbans are on fire.” “Even better.” “Armand,” Leah says. “Dad,” says Alessandro. He will not admit it but Armand is hooked. It would be deeply satisfying in the second-most intimate way imaginable to kill al Qaida terrorists holed up along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border—something the actual U.S. military cannot or will not completely do. But a hundred bucks. It isn’t really the money, although living on interest income Armand has become more frugal. He can boost the C-note but what message would it send? Hunting virtual terrorists in cyberspace is all well and good. But plunking down $100 for a toy seems irresponsible and possibly wrong in a country where tens of thousands are homeless and millions have no health insurance and children continue, incredibly, to go hungry. Fifty million Americans live in poverty and he’s looking to play games.

Sorry, Brandon, for bankrupting the family, so that Dad couldn’t help out his brilliant, best son, who’d had to start his career sunk in debt. It was pointless trying to find the words. No message from him could ever put things right. There wasn’t enough sorry in the world. Like

As negotiations seemed to be grinding to a halt, we were all feeling frustrated. Steve looked around at John, Judi, and the others. He could see that everybody had gotten a bit stretched on all our various projects. He decided we needed a break. He didn’t lead us into the bush this time. Instead, Steve said a magic word. “Samoa.” “Sea snakes?” I asked. “Surfing,” he said. He planned a ten-day shoot for a surfing documentary. Steve loved surfing almost as much as he loved wildlife. The pounding his body had taken playing rugby, wrestling crocs, and doing heavy construction at the zoo had left him with problem knees and a bad shoulder. He felt his time tackling some of the biggest surf might be nearing an end. In Samoa, Steve didn’t spend just a few hours out in the waves. He would be out there twelve to fourteen hours a day. I didn’t surf, but I was awestruck at Steve’s ability to stare down the face of a wave that was as high as a building. He had endurance beyond any surfer I had ever seen. Steve had a support boat nearby, so he could swim over, get hydrated, or grab a protein bar. But that was it. He didn’t stop for lunch. He would eat breakfast, surf all day, and then eat a big dinner. I knew this was the best therapy for him. Surfing at Boulders was downright dangerous, but Steve reveled in the challenge. He surfed with Wes, his best mate in the world. I sat on a rocky point with my eye glued to the camera so I wouldn’t miss a single wave. While Bindi gathered shells and played on the beach under her nanny’s watchful eye, I admired Steve with his long arms and broad shoulders, powerfully paddling onto wave after wave. Not even the Pacific Ocean with its most powerful sets could slow him down. He caught the most amazing barrels I have ever seen, and carved up the waves with such ferocity that I didn’t want the camera to miss a single moment. On the beach in Samoa, while Bindi helped her dad wax his board, I caught a glimpse of joy in eyes that had been so sad.

Later in life, it would occur to me that despite his actions, my father really did want what was best for his family. As to how he would accomplish that? He had no idea. Later in life, it would occur to me that this was the ultimate dichotomy: for a person to want what's best but draw from their worst. Dad did just that...His methods weren't just ineffective, they were insane. Such were the fates of good men once succumbed to the madness of the world.

This was a media beat-up at its very worst. All those officials reacting to what the media labeled “The Baby Bob Incident” failed to understand the Irwin family. This is what we did--teach our children about wildlife, from a very early age. It wasn’t unnatural and it wasn’t a stunt. It was, on the contrary, an old and valued family tradition, and one that I embraced wholeheartedly. It was who we were. To have the press fasten on the practice as irresponsible made us feel that our very ability as parents was being attacked. It didn’t make any sense. This is why Steve never publicly apologized. For him to say “I’m sorry” would mean that he was sorry that Bob and Lyn raised him the way they did, and that was simply impossible. The best he could do was to sincerely apologize if he had worried anyone. The reality was that he would have been remiss as a parent if he didn’t teach his kids how to coexist with wildlife. After all, his kids didn’t just have busy roads and hot stoves to contend with. They literally had to learn how to live with crocodiles and venomous snakes in their backyard. Through it all, the plight of the Tibetan nuns was completely and totally ignored. The world media had not a word to spare about a dry well that hundreds of people depended on. For months, any time Steve encountered the press, Tibetan nuns were about the furthest thing from the reporter’s mind. The questions would always be the same: “Hey, Stevo, what about the Baby Bob Incident?” “If I could relive Friday, mate, I’d go surfing,” Steve said on a hugely publicized national television appearance in the United States. “I can’t go back to Friday, but you know what, mate? Don’t think for one second I would ever endanger my children, mate, because they’re the most important thing in my life, just like I was with my mum and dad.” Steve and I struggled to get back to a point where we felt normal again. Sponsors spoke about terminating contracts. Members of our own documentary crew sought to distance themselves from us, and our relationship with Discovery was on shaky ground. But gradually we were able to tune out the static and hear what people were saying. Not the press, but the people. We read the e-mails that had been pouring in, as well as faxes, letters, and phone messages. Real people helped to get us back on track. Their kids were growing up with them on cattle ranches and could already drive tractors, or lived on horse farms and helped handle skittish stallions. Other children were learning to be gymnasts, a sport which was physically rigorous and held out the chance of injury. The parents had sent us messages of support. “Don’t feel bad, Steve,” wrote one eleven-year-old from Sydney. “It’s not the wildlife that’s dangerous.” A mother wrote us, “I have a new little baby, and if you want to take him in on the croc show it is okay with me.” So many parents employed the same phrase: “I’d trust my kids with Steve any day.

Cain complained to God, “My punishment is more than I can bear” (Gen. 4:13). Resolved to overcome his fate, he tried to build a comfortable life for himself. He started a family and began to build a city (Gen. 4:17). I must surrender my fascination with myself to a more worthy preoccupation with the character and purposes of God. I am not the point. He is. I exist for him. He does not exist for me. Without repenting, Cain set out to overcome the consequences of his sin and to provide comfortable circumstances for himself. In effect, Cain was saying, “Okay, I’m out of the Garden. Ever since you expelled Mom and Dad from Eden and placed that angelic bouncer at the gate to keep everyone out, I realized that I must come to terms with living in a world filled with weeds and thornbushes. But even though I am out of the Garden, I will not lead the miserable life of a nomad. I will do everything I can to recapture as much of the Garden experience as possible. I will build a city, plant a few flowers, and put in a recreation park for my children. I will not keep on wandering about without trying to settle down. I have no higher priority than arranging for my own comfort.” Because Cain passed on this attitude to his descendants, we are now able to contrast two ways of approaching life: Lamech’s (reflecting the ungodly influence of Cain) and Enoch’s (consistent with the godly line of Seth). Lamech declared: “I will build my city! I want my pleasures now.” Enoch said: “I will build God’s kingdom! And trust God to one day build a city for me to enjoy.” Because God cares deeply about his children, many times he chooses to relieve our suffering and solve our problems. But because his love is an intelligent love rooted in what he knows is best for us, he provides us with something more interesting to live for than ourselves. He catches us up in the supernatural reality of living for an eternal kingdom. The question we need to ask is this: Are we merely living, or are we walking with God? As we explore our own lives, we must never get so immersed in ourselves that we fail to remember that there is something far more wonderful to ponder. If I am to reject Lamech’s approach and come to God as Enoch came, I must surrender my fascination with myself to a more worthy preoccupation with the character and purposes of God. I am not the point. He is. I exist for him. He does not exist for me. The question we need to ask is this: Are we merely living, or are we walking with God?Are we merely committed to feeding our own souls, to arranging our lives around getting our needs met, to building our cities? Or are we committed to knowing God, to cooperating with him as loved participants in a plan larger than ourselves, to becoming like the Son whom the Father adores, and to waiting for the city that Christ is building right now? We must learn what it means to come to God, believing that he is good when life doesn’t show it, knowing that he graciously rewards honest seekers even when their souls ache relentlessly. But can we put the lessons of Hebrew 11 more practically? What would our lives look like if we were coming to God as Enoch did?

Why did the invisible man turn down the job offer? He couldn’t see himself doing it.

Regardless of how a parent treats a child, it’s almost impossible for that child to believe that parent means them any harm. It was easier for Freddy to think that his father had his son’s best interests at heart and that he, Freddy, was the problem. In other words, protecting his love for his father was more important than protecting himself from his father’s abuse. Donald would have taken his father’s treatment of his brother at face value: “Dad’s not trying to hurt Freddy. He’s only trying to teach us how to be real men. And Freddy’s failing.

There is no delusion in trusting a power more capable than us. We do this in our daily lives, be it trusting in our jobs to bring us a paycheck, or in our government to protect us. We must always trust in a God that knows what is best for us and enables and prompts us to make the best possible decisions always. From the time we are born, we rely on powers of being that are higher than us. We come into this world naked and completely vulnerable. Through this vulnerability, we find strength. It is our duty to share this strength with the world. It is our duty to enable others to live a unique life by design.

only way I could live with it was to have certain times all by myself. I still find great comfort in privacy. I spend a lot of time inside myself, in a private world.” After their fathers died, most of the women in our study got the message that feelings were best reserved for private times. The extended hiding of emotions came to create a feeling of separateness from other family members, and continues,

But before you lose confidence remember this: You are part of a continuous chain of successful parents stretching back to the beginning of time! You and your baby have survived because you’re descended from the best moms, most protective dads, and strongest children the world has ever seen. You may not know everything, but that’s okay…billions of parents have done it before you, and they weren’t all rocket scientists.

The Call of the Lord By Sue Buchanan, Tennessee Grits My young daughter Dana often visited her grandparents in a small Southern town where every day a siren blew to mark the noon hour. It was so loud that it terrified the poor girl and left her screaming. In order to soothe her and held her understand, her preacher grandpa (my daddy) told her the horn was to let the children know it was time to go home for lunch. He even suggested that Dana say the words “Go home and get your lunch” each time the whistle blew, which she would do at the top of her little lungs, albeit with the fear of god written all over her face. One Sunday, our entire family was packed into the second row of the church, listening to Dad deliver his sermon. He was pretty wound up that day, if I remember correctly. It was breezy and all the church windows were open. Well, right in the middle of his railing, and before we realized what was happening, darn it if that noon whistle didn’t blow. Dana stood up in the pew, turned toward the three hundred people in the congregation, and shouted, “Go home and get your lunch!” Do I have to tell you what happened? Church was over at that very moment. No benediction and no sevenfold amen! Later my preacher daddy, who had the world’s best sense of humor, admitted: “It wouldn’t have been so bad if half the congregation hadn’t shouted amen!

As Regina McGowan pulled her silver Volvo SUV into the driveway in front of the huge, farmhouse-style home, all Megan could see was boys. Boys everywhere. All seven of them plus their dad, running and laughing and shoving each other around on the front lawn, engaged in what appeared to be a full-contact, tackle version of ultimate Frisbee. They were playing shirts and skins. Shirts and mighty-fine-lookin’ skins. Megan’s pulse pounded in her ears. Forget evil, laughing little monsters. These guys had been touched by the Abercrombie gods. They were a blur of toned, suntanned perfection. For a few seconds, Megan had trouble focusing on any one of them, but then one of the skins scored a goal and jumped up, arms thrust in the air, whooping in triumph as he clutched the Frisbee in one hand. His six-pack abs were dotted with sweat and a couple of stray pieces of torn grass. His smile sent shivers right through Megan’s core. He had shaggy blond hair, a square chin, and the most perfect shoulder muscles Megan had ever seen. One of his brothers slapped him on the back and pointed toward the Volvo. He turned around and looked right at Megan. The rest of the world ceased to exist. “Well, here we are,” Regina said, killing the engine. “Megan?” He smiled slowly--a perfect, open, happy smile. “Megan?” Something touched Megan’s arm. “Oh! Uh…yeah?” Megan whipped her eyes away from Mr. Perfection and blushed. Regina’s brown eyes twinkled with amusement and sympathy. “You can live in the car if you want to, but they’ll find a way to get to you anyway.” “Oh…uh…” God, did she just catch me drooling all over one of her kids? Gross! “Don’t worry. They promised me they would be on their best behavior,” Regina said, unbuckling her seat belt. She swung her long dark hair over her shoulder as she got out of the car and leaned down to look at Megan. “My advice? Just be yourself. I’m sure you’ll be fine.” Megan managed to smile and Regina slammed the car door. Be myself. Yeah. Right. Because that’s gotten me so far in the past.

The Director’s Chair is with Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, etc.), and Robert refers later to this quote from Francis: “Failure is not necessarily durable. Remember that the things that they fire you for when you are young are the same things that they give lifetime achievement awards for when you’re old.” ROBERT: “Even if I didn’t sell Mariachi, I would have learned so much by doing that project. That was the idea—I’m there to learn. I’m not there to win; I’m there to learn, because then I’ll win, eventually. . . . “You’ve got to be able to look at your failures and know that there’s a key to success in every failure. If you look through the ashes long enough, you’ll find something. I’ll give you one. Quentin [Tarantino] asked me, ‘Do you want to do one of these short films called Four Rooms [where each director can create the film of their choosing, but it has to be limited to a single hotel room, and include New Year’s Eve and a bellhop]?’ and my hand went up right away, instinctively. . . . “The movie bombed. In the ashes of that failure, I can find at least two keys of success. On the set when I was doing it, I had cast Antonio Banderas as the dad and had this cool little Mexican as his son. They looked really close together. Then I found the best actress I could find, this little half-Asian girl. She was amazing. I needed an Asian mom. I really wanted them to look like a family. It’s New Year’s Eve, because [it] was dictated by the script, so they’re all dressed in tuxedos. I was looking at Antonio and his Asian wife and thinking, ‘Wow, they look like this really cool, international spy couple. What if they were spies, and these two little kids, who can barely tie their shoes, didn’t know they were spies?’ I thought of that on the set of Four Rooms. There are four of those [Spy Kids movies] now and a TV series coming. “So that’s one. The other one was, after [Four Rooms] failed, I thought, ‘I still love short films.’ Anthologies never work. We shouldn’t have had four stories; it should have been three stories because that’s probably three acts, and it should just be the same director instead of different directors because we didn’t know what each person was doing. I’m going to try it again. Why on earth would I try it again, if I knew they didn’t work? Because you figured something out when you’re doing it the first time, and [the second attempt] was Sin City.” TIM: “Amazing.

About 41 percent of mothers are primary breadwinners and earn the majority of their family’s income. Another 23 percent of mothers are co-breadwinners, contributing at least a quarter of the family’s earnings.30 The number of women supporting families on their own is increasing quickly; between 1973 and 2006, the proportion of families headed by a single mother grew from one in ten to one in five.31 These numbers are dramatically higher in Hispanic and African-American families. Twenty-seven percent of Latino children and 51 percent of African-American children are being raised by a single mother.32 Our country lags considerably behind others in efforts to help parents take care of their children and stay in the workforce. Of all the industrialized nations in the world, the United States is the only one without a paid maternity leave policy.33 As Ellen Bravo, director of the Family Values @ Work consortium, observed, most “women are not thinking about ‘having it all,’ they’re worried about losing it all—their jobs, their children’s health, their families’ financial stability—because of the regular conflicts that arise between being a good employee and a responsible parent.”34 For many men, the fundamental assumption is that they can have both a successful professional life and a fulfilling personal life. For many women, the assumption is that trying to do both is difficult at best and impossible at worst. Women are surrounded by headlines and stories warning them that they cannot be committed to both their families and careers. They are told over and over again that they have to choose, because if they try to do too much, they’ll be harried and unhappy. Framing the issue as “work-life balance”—as if the two were diametrically opposed—practically ensures work will lose out. Who would ever choose work over life? The good news is that not only can women have both families and careers, they can thrive while doing so. In 2009, Sharon Meers and Joanna Strober published Getting to 50/50, a comprehensive review of governmental, social science, and original research that led them to conclude that children, parents, and marriages can all flourish when both parents have full careers. The data plainly reveal that sharing financial and child-care responsibilities leads to less guilty moms, more involved dads, and thriving children.35 Professor Rosalind Chait Barnett of Brandeis University did a comprehensive review of studies on work-life balance and found that women who participate in multiple roles actually have lower levels of anxiety and higher levels of mental well-being.36 Employed women reap rewards including greater financial security, more stable marriages, better health, and, in general, increased life satisfaction.37 It may not be as dramatic or funny to make a movie about a woman who loves both her job and her family, but that would be a better reflection of reality. We need more portrayals of women as competent professionals and happy mothers—or even happy professionals and competent mothers. The current negative images may make us laugh, but they also make women unnecessarily fearful by presenting life’s challenges as insurmountable. Our culture remains baffled: I don’t know how she does it. Fear is at the root of so many of the barriers that women face. Fear of not being liked. Fear of making the wrong choice. Fear of drawing negative attention. Fear of overreaching. Fear of being judged. Fear of failure. And the holy trinity of fear: the fear of being a bad mother/wife/daughter.

… The frayed and gritty edges of everyone’s world were being worried away by neighbors you’d never noticed until the air spilled over with the tragedy of their loss. The war had taken them or their children; killed them, lost them, torn off body parts, shipped them back brain-fried…. … Tales fell from hearts in heavy, wet tones of grief and confusion…. … Even when rare moments of relative calm and clarity crept briefly through our days, they crawled in with head hanging through that most familiar of all tunnels, our sense of loss. Each new friend seemed only to step in and announce himself with his last breath. Why hadn’t we loved him earlier when there had been more time? That overriding sense of loss was the dismal cloud through which you viewed the world. Dreading life’s relentless advance, but knowing your locks could never keep it out…. … As the late 60’s gave in and died, and I trudged through my first year as an art student in college, even the old folks were growing up. Their World War II glories clouded over. Someone had shot the president, his brother, and a great civil rights leader, dragging us all out of our warm, snuggly innocence. People seemed infested by life, burdened by the stifling weight of it, until we could only force shallow, labored breaths. Each new day was just an old one playing through again, a dust-laden August, a storm always riding right on top of you that never quite cut loose. It settled into your joints until they grew achy, too heavy to lift; tarring all hearts with a dark, heavy plaque. Days stuck together as walking and breathing grew tedious. Until even my bubbly sister couldn’t offer up a smile without a shadow lurking inside it. We trudged through life as our mighty nation killed our sons and broke our buddies, defending itself from skinny barefoot farmers with sticks, in rice swamps somewhere on the other side of existence, where you couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad. Some lost tiny nowhere that hadn’t even existed when you’d been a kid; when the world had been innocent and untainted. Back when Father Knew Best, Beaver’s mom fed his dad all the answers, and Annie Oakley never had to shoot to kill…. - From “Entertaining Naked People

Dad’s favorite subject was history, but he taught it with a decidedly west-of-the-Pecos point of view. As the proud son of an Irishman, he hated the English Pilgrims, whom he called “Poms,” as well as most of the founding fathers. They were a bunch of pious hypocrites, he thought, who declared all men equal but kept slaves and massacred peaceful Indians. He sided with the Mexicans in the Mexican-American war and thought the United States had stolen all the land north of the Rio Grande, but he also thought the southern states should have had as much right to leave the union as the colonies had to leave the British Empire. “Only difference between a traitor and a patriot is your perspective,” he said. * * * I loved my lessons, particularly science and geometry, loved learning that there were these invisible rules that explained the mysteries of the world we lived in. Smart as that made me feel, Mom and Dad kept saying that even though I was getting a better education at home than any of the kids in Toyah, I’d need to go to finishing school when I was thirteen, both to acquire social graces and to earn a diploma. Because in this world, Dad said, it’s not enough to have a fine education. You need a piece of paper to prove you got it. MOM DID HER BEST to keep us kids genteel.

Every day I try to do something good in the world. Today, for example, I put on deodorant.

Some people are solving major world problems, and I'm over here all excited because I found a missing sock inside a pair of my underwear.

Hell, you ought to go see a doctor, Dad," I told him. "You probably just need some kind of pep-up medicine. Why do you want to be so contrary?" "I ain't contrary," he said. "I just don't want to pay no doctor to tell me what I already know. There ain't no medicine for old age." "You're just tight," I said. "You ought not to let a few dollars stand between you and your health." "I am tight," he said. "I'm rich, too." "You don't live like it," I said. "No, because I want to stay rich. The best way in the world to get poor is to start living rich.

You have gifts that people can only dream of having. They make you special and utterly unique in a way that is as far from weird as you can get. You blew my mind when you were a girl. I loved coming here to see what you could do, whether it was solving difficult math puzzles, destroying your dad at chess, memorizing the entire Human section of The Guinness Book of World Records, or trying to beat me at video games." She jolted up, her mouth curving in a grin. "Trying? Seriously? Was there a video game I didn't win?" Cheer-up mission accomplished, but his ego was taking a beating. "Guitar Hero was never your strong suit." "Don't even think about challenging me," Daisy warned. "I was a free-shredding machine." He gave a dismissive shrug, baiting his trap. "You were young, so Sanjay and I let you win..." She gave him a calculating stare and jumped to her feet. "The guitar is mine." "The guitar is lame. Drums are where it's at." He picked up the mugs and plates. "Two songs and I'll call an Uber." "What if we tie? It will have to be the best of three songs and I'll call an Uber." "Are you sure you're up for it?" He watched the gentle sway of her hips as she climbed the stairs. "I don't want you to feel bad when I destroy you." Daisy looked back over her shoulder and gave him a grin. "You are so going down in flames.

My dad was the best dad in the world. “I love you, Dad. I won’t ever leave you. I’ll live with you and Mom forever.” Dad kissed my temple. “And I love you, princess.

Five things I could see. The window had six panes. The curtains were blue. The rug was thin and old. Mósí was looking at me like I was crazy. My sheet had flowers. Four things I could feel. My pajamas were soft and warm. The floor was cold. I plopped down beside Mósí and stroked his soft fur. He headbutted me and his nose was a little wet, but when I kissed him and he rubbed my chin and I kissed him again, my heart started to feel a little better. Three things I could hear. Mósí purring, really loud. That made me smile, and I kissed him again, and he crawled up in my lap and I hugged him. His purr was so loud I couldn’t really hear anything else, but I guess silence is a thing. And when I listened very, very hard, I could hear the sea. Two things I could smell. I breathed in and tried to name it, like I was one of my characters. It smelled like dampness and stone. And Mósí, who always smells clean and sweet and nice. I kissed him again, closing my eyes, and felt tears stinging my eyelids. I love him so much. He is the best cat ever in the world. I was supposed to think of one thing I could taste, but I didn’t want to get up, and anyway my heart felt better. My dad did a good thing with Mósí. My cat doesn’t care what happened to me, what I did. He just wants me to love him.

You could have all the money in the world, but bad days were free.

As a result of personal losses and the losses of clients, I had to let everyone in my fledgling company Bridgewater Associates go, and was so broke, I had to borrow $4000 from my dad to help pay my family’s bills. At the same time, this was one of the best things that ever happened to me, because it changed my whole approach to decision-making.

And he was the best negotiator I ever ran into. My dad had that unusual instinct to know how far he could go with someone—and did it in a way that he and the guy always parted friends—but he would embarrass me with some of the offers he would make, they were so low. That’s one reason I’m probably not the best negotiator in the world; I lack the ability to squeeze that last dollar. Fortunately, my brother Bud, who has been my partner from early on, inherited my dad’s ability to negotiate.

What I remembered most about Mom was how Dad’s eyes shone with love whenever he talked about her. I had loved going through the things in her closet and listening to his stories about her as he fingered the fabric of her favorite dresses, like he was telling me the world’s most important fairy tale—how they’d been best friends when they were kids and had thrilled everyone when they had gotten together as teenagers. I never wanted to dress up as Cinderella or Snow White, because Mom had been my favorite princess.

Loss of education. Too often, people count their house and savings and retirement plans as all they have in their asset column. Because they have no money to invest, they simply don’t invest. This costs them investment experience. Most never become what the investment world calls “a sophisticated investor.” And the best investments are usually first sold to sophisticated investors, who then turn around and sell them to the people playing it safe.

Sweet and Sour Summers “There is something my parents did, and it was pretty unique. My brother and I refer to it as ‘The Sweet and Sour Summer.’ My parents would send us, for the first half of the summer, to an internship with a relative or a friend of the family who had an interesting job. So, at 12, I went and interned with my godbrother, who is a lobbyist in D.C. I would go along with him to pitch congressmen. I had one tie, and I was a pretty good writer. I’d write up one-page summaries of these bills we were pitching, and I’d literally sit there with these congressmen with these filthy mouths—you know, the old Alabaman senator and stuff like that—and watch the pitch happen. It was awesome. I learned so much and developed so much confidence, and really honed my storytelling skills. “But then, from there, I would come home and work in a construction outfit, in a nasty, nasty job. I mean, hosing off the equipment that had been used to fix septic systems, gassing shit up, dragging shit around in the yard, filling up propane tanks. Just being the junior guy on the totem pole, and quite literally getting my ass kicked by whichever parolee was angry at me that day. I think it was part of their master plan, which was: There’s a world of cool opportunities out there for you, but let’s build within you a sense of not just work ethic, but also, a little kick in the ass about why you don’t wanna end up in one of those real jobs. . . .” TIM: “You had the introduction to the godbrother, for the lobbying. Did your parents also help organize the sour part of each summer?” CHRIS: “The guy who ran that construction company is my dad’s best friend, and he was under strict orders to make sure we had the roughest day there.