Downward Mobility

We must decrease.

Recently, I’ve been having a similar conversation with my various dad friends. The main point of these conversations seems to be: kids teach you that life is not about you.

Maybe it’s because we’re all hitting (or are well into) our 40s, and almost all of us have young kids - which means that we are balancing growing professional responsibilities alongside growing responsibilities at home. Maybe it’s because mid-life often brings with it that dreaded “crisis” that we hear so much about. Maybe it’s because our parents are getting older, and so we are faced not only with their mortality, but also our own - causing us to think more deeply about what to do with what Richard Rohr, in his great book Falling Upward, calls the “second half of life.”

In all, though, our conversations as dads seem to circle back to the simple fact that life is not about us anymore.

Which has me connecting my experience as a husband and a dad to the teachings of my faith tradition (Christianity).

Jesus talks about f…