The greatest thing you'll ever learn

[pegkerr]

As I was making my breakfast this morning I had the KSJN Morning Show on, and the song "Nature Boy" started playing.

After listening for a moment, I stepped out into living room, where Fiona was playing a computer game and Rob was talking to Delia, who was sitting on his lap.

"May I have your attention for a moment?" I said. My family looked up at me expectantly. "I just wanted to say that I think that this song has it right. The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return." I went over and kissed Delia on the top of her head. "If you take anything from what your parents teach you, remember that."

"That's a pretty good rule," said Rob.

If you had to boil down what you want to pass on to your children to one sentence, what would it be?

Comments

[longtimegone]

Wow, yes. I think I would have to go with you on that one. I don't have kids so that may change in the future. I love that song too! I have Celine Dion's version, and it's magical.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I'm not ready for that this early, but one of my top three would be:

Do not do unto others as your would have them do unto you, for they are not you and you are not they: Do unto others as they would have you do, within reason.

[shellefly.livejournal.com]

Learn everything and never stop asking questions.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

Virtue will always be harder than vice.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

That reminds me of what J.K. Rowling says the Harry Potter books are about: learning to choose what it right rather than what is easy.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

Ah... I knew there was another reason to like Harry Potter just lurking around here somewhere. :)

I chose this one because it's the only thing that saved me from so many of the mistakes my peers were making as we grew up. I stuck to it because my mother's enduring lesson to me was, "If everyone's going to jump off the Mississippi River bridge, are you going to do it too?"

Her general message was to fight against the crowd, and fortunately I decided that meant fighting the crowd when they said being cool involved doing stupid things. But I think the moral context needs to be there.

So: virtue is hard, but be virtuous anyway.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

"Be kinder to the world than the world is to you... but not to the point of self-immolation."

*g*

[malkingrey.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think I'd like to pass along the advice I got from my father: "So long as nobody's getting hurt from it, 'just for fun' is a perfectly valid reason for doing anything."

On the other hand, my mother said, "Always make your bed as soon as you get out of it in the morning; otherwise you'll never get it made all day," and she was right about that, too.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Be kind to one another and clean up your mess. (Slightly altered from John McCutcheon, "The Poem on the Kindergarten Wall")

[porphyrin.livejournal.com]

Remember that love is the way you act toward others, not the way you feel toward them.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

That's a good one.

!!!

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Oh, taking that one, oh yes.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

p.s. may I quote that with your name in my journal?

[fairmer.livejournal.com]

Show up. Pay attention. Speak your truth. Balance passion with perspective, and perspective with passion.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

If my children are anything like me, they'll need this reminder, which hit me last year like a bolt of lightning from the pulpit:

"Be careful, lest the desire of defending what you deem truth turn you aside from your great business, which is love."

- Rev. Robert Hardies of All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C., paraphrasing William Ellery Channing.

[primroseburrows.livejournal.com]

*high-fives fellow UU*

[kristenj.livejournal.com]

"Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new." - Ursula K. LeGuin

Because love is active, not passive; it requires our continual involvement and attention and presence.



"Love conquers all. Let us too yield to love." - Virgil

Too often this quote gets cut off at "love conquers all" = "We can do what we want because love is fighting on our side and will conquer all the obstacles in our way." But that isn't what Virgil is saying. You and love are not to be conquering together - rather, allow love to conquer you. Everything else has the sense to yield to the power of love; let us too have that sense, rather than requiring love to fight for us, let us too like all else yield to love, be conquered by love.

[aome.livejournal.com]

That's hard to choose. Yours is good, but so is the traditional "Love your neighbor as yourself".

I don't know if it's really just the ONE thing I'd want my kids to know, but one that my husband has taught me is: "Courage is not a lack of fear - it is being afraid of something and doing it anyway."

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

Be nice to people.

I am continually astounded at how many people just aren't nice. They're not nice to their families, they're not nice to the wait staff (to paraphrase Dave Barry, "The person who is nice to you and nice to your friends but is not nice to the waiter is not a nice person."), they're not nice to their friends, they're not nice to random strangers. My parents taught my sister and I to be as nice to each other as we would be to someone we just met, and we have never had all the horrible sibling problems that I gather many people have. It's really a pretty simple, good rule.

Although Nature Boy's got a good one too. :)

[rain-girl-ak.livejournal.com]

The best advice that I ever got from my mother is this: If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.

And I try to remember that this is not only when you are speaking to someone, but also about someone.

That is not all I want to pass on to my daughter, but it's a start!

[trinker.livejournal.com]

I think there are some not-nice things that need saying.

"Uncle Morflebink is not a safe person for you to be around. Please let me know if he tries to take you off somewhere alone."

[lrg861.livejournal.com]

hmmm...i often tell my boys..."doing the right thing is rarely the easy thing..." so always ask..do i want to do the right thing or the easy thing???

[primroseburrows.livejournal.com]

Oh, there are so, so many, but this one comes to mind first:

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."--Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

[madlori.livejournal.com]

You've got me thinking about in in terms of song lyrics.

"You are beautiful, no matter what they say."

In a similar vein, Sting said "Be yourself, no matter what they say."

Hmm. If I could make my own refrigerator magnets...

People are as happy as they decide to be.
No one can complete you except yourself.
All the strength you'll ever need is inside you.
The smartest thing to do isn't always the best thing.

One long sentence.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

"'Life is unfair', but that means that you deal with acts of the universe with grace, not that it's okay to cut down trees to fall on someone's car just because Mother Nature can do it."

[ctrinity.livejournal.com]

i dont have kids. but one sentence i would tell them: When they give you lined paper, write the other way.

[nmalfoy.livejournal.com]

Keep believing and keep pretending. (Stolen from the Muppets)

[jemyl.livejournal.com]

My children are grown now. What I most hope that they learned from me was: treat everyone with respect and compassion and be honest and true to yourself, always. I also tried to teach them to write well and to speak well and to both choose their battles wisely, being careful what they wished for. That my girls be spiritual and aware of the importance of self-esteem was also important to me. It turned out that one of them is a born again conservative Christian stay at home mom married to a Christian magazine editor while the other is a single wiccan wonder-woman who works as a system administrator. One completed college with a degree in geography while the other took enough hours to complete a degree but not enough in any one thing to complete a major. The second is my renaissance woman. Both of them tend to think outside the box and don't do things just because everyone else does them. Both are strong women.

Since all of my boys were originally Bill's family, I did not raise them or my oldest daughter. I taught my girls to be independent of thought and deed and not to blindly accept anything just because it was said by a male, even their husband or boyfriend. I think I would teach the same to a boy, with the exception that I would also teach him that women were not chattel and that marriage is a joining of equals. At the same time I know I would teach boys, as Bill did ours, that it is mainly the husband's job to work and provide economically for himself and his family. I would also teach that the way a man should be is not set in stone and he and his mate have to work that out on their own without being tied to convention or stereotypes. For instance, it could turn out that he was the better cook and care giver while his mate/wife/woman could be the better wage earner and that was OK too.