Honouring Your Father's Legacy

I have always admired my Father.

Growing up, the stories of his life told echoed inside my mind, reverberating for years after. During his time, my Father made a name for himself as a widely respected journalist, was captured as a prisoner of war and imprisoned for numerous years, embarked upon travel over thousands of miles between Asia and Europe entirely by road and ended his professional life as a successful business owner.

Most of that happened before I was born, but he always carried an aura of strength, dignity, fearlessness and integrity about him that betrayed his experiences. His teaching to me that every generation should be better than the last (he termed this the 'Generation Gap') drilled its way into my soul. Though I saw only the latter parts of his life, I felt his experience and wisdom just by being in his presence. It would be accurate to say that I learnt more about him by how he was than who he was.

And so, over the course of my teenage years and my 20s, I held myself to his standard as much as possible in my quest to shape myself into the man I wanted to be.

I spent both structured and unstructured time with my Father, I took his advice on matters that shaped much of who I am today, and with each passing year I realised how right my Father was about so many of the things I was too young to see the wisdom of previously.

And yet, I found myself still falling short of some of the things my Father had accomplished and overcome in his life.

There were many times I tried to hold myself up to his standard in specific aspects, and although I give myself credit for coming close, I don't see myself as having achieved his level. I consider myself to have yet failed.

At times I questioned myself as to why I couldn't achieve some of the things he achieved, why I wasn't exactly like him. Perhaps my failure to meet his mark was a sign of my own inadequacy, and something to be endlessly worked on, or perhaps it was simply my weakness that was holding me back. How could I even think about being better and about achieving the 'Generation Gap' when I couldn't even be his equal?

Something was wrong. Perhaps I just wasn't enough.

But then something shifted.

Balancing Perspectives

As the months turned to years, I began to learn more about my Mother's life and she hardships she experienced. I saw a lot of my own character and my thinking naturally align with hers, as though part of me had found its ancestral root. As obvious as it now seems in hindsight, I only then deeply understood the fact that I was not simply a carbon copy of my Father, nor was I supposed to be, I was a mixture of the thoughts, inclinations, feelings and aspirations of both my Father and Mother, as well as some unique God-given traits I alone possess.

The first veil of darkness had been pulled away from the truth I had yet to uncover, but it would be many years before I was able to go any further.

And so, time passed. I have since been blessed with a child of my own. My Son, who is the light of my eyes, is growing and developing with each passing day. The lessons I have learnt from observing the most pure and innocent stage of a person's life have been awe-inspiring and caused deep reflection in many parts of my life.

And it was in this reflection of my stance towards my Son that I finally pulled away the second and last veil of darkness surrounding the truth I have been so desperately seeking throughout my life.

Legacy

It is the normal desire of a man that his Son follow in his footsteps and fulfil his wishes, accomplish things that the Father always wanted to do and to generally live out his dreams. And while most of these aspirations are healthy and to be encouraged, there may be some unexpected hiccups along the way for those Fathers who seek unconditional imitation.

The wishes I had for my Son were (and still are) many, but as he grew and developed, I noticed early on that amongst his affinity for the things that his Mother and I liked and encouraged, he had his own, unique natural inclinations that he was drawn to. Indeed these were the manifestations of what God has placed in his heart, and were representative of his own uniqueness of soul.

My experience first as a striving Son, then as a reflective Father taught me how to balance these perspectives and form them into a unified, cohesive understanding of life.

You don't have to be exactly who your Father was.

It isn't your job as your Father's Son to be exactly who he was. He made his way in the world during the time of history that was allotted to him with the tools he inherited from his own Mother and Father, but also his own unique traits that he alone possessed.

So try as you might, you will never be who your Father was.

And that is perfectly fine.

Rather, your job is to honour his legacy, to carry the mantle of tradition that he bore upon his shoulders from his Father and to pass it onto your Son - with no requirement of total emulation.

In other words, your job is to honour his legacy while being your own person.

Men inherently respect other men who are independent and self-reliant, those who seek only to find themselves, then surpass that person every day. They see one's ability to depend only on their own skills, resources and capabilities as something admirable. The man who wishes to carve his own path, to blaze his own trail is respected even by his enemies. Then what of the man who sees those qualities in his Son?

Brett McKay, quoting William Unsworth says:

"And by self-reliance is meant a firm but modest dependence on your own capabilities, your own efforts and talents, in opposition to a weak and unmanly leaning upon foreign resources and assistance. These qualities blended and combined, will wonderfully help men through the world. But if they do not possess them in some tolerably good degree, they ... will be deeply mortified at their own fickleness, despised by others, and heartily despised by themselves." [1]

As Unsworth writes, those men who do not travel down the road of self-reliance will inevitably be disappointed at themselves. This was precisely the dilemma I faced as I struggled to come to terms with some of the failures in imitating my Father, but my failure was inevitable.

In my quest to be a copy of him, to walk where he walked, to see what he saw and to do what he did, I betrayed my own self. I suppressed and muzzled my own 'self' and dragged it upon a leash in pursuit of what was already an unattainable goal.

The real goal isn't to be exactly who your Father is (or was). The goal isn't to imitate them in everything they do or did in the past. Sure, we may benchmark ourself to some of their achievements and seek to accomplish something similar at a base level, but the idea isn't to be a carbon copy of them.

And they wouldn't want that from us.

Even if our own achievements are not as grandiose, daring or theatrical as those of our Father's, our goal is to understand who we are, what crowning achievement we want to make a reality in our lives and to work endlessly towards that, all while honouring the tradition and legacy of our Father. By doing so, we can carry the mantle of tradition from him, just as he carried it from his Father before him, without letting it crush us.

I am not my Father in all ways I once wished I would, and I never will be. But I am happy to now choose my own path as it splits at this fork in the road. I know that this is what my Father wants from me. I know that he would rather see me reach new heights in different ways, to excel at what I am good at instead of copying another, even if that 'other' is him and his life as he led it.

By comparing myself to myself only, by using the 'me' of yesterday as the only minimum benchmark for tomorrow, only then will I grow. Only then will I flourish and succeed in being someone my Father, myself and eventually my Son will be proud of.

Brett McKay, quoting William George Jordan writes:

"Man can develop his self-reliance by seeking constantly to surpass himself. We try too much to surpass others. If we seek ever to surpass ourselves, we are moving on a uniform line of progress..." [2]

Every Father wishes to see their Son make something of themselves, but every Son is different. Success therefore, is to be true to your own self, to who you are, to what you are good at and to what you want to accomplish, all while honouring your Father.

And this is how, many years from now, we will make something of ourselves for our Sons to wish to emulate in this first place.

This is a lesson that took me more than 30 years to learn, and I will ensure my expectations and standards for my Son are tempered with the encouragement and respect for his own wishes and his own trail he wishes to blaze in life.

His attainment of being true to himself while honouring his inherited traditions and legacies will be the true source of pride for his Father, no matter what he becomes. Through this, he will achieve the very Generation Gap that my Father taught me of all those years ago.

And the cycle will repeat, as it has always done.

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References

[1] - Brett McKay, The Art of Manliness
[2] - ibid.