Happy 189th Birthday, Chicago. I chalked a William Blake quote for Wednesday, March 4th.
I tossed and turned last night thinking about something my Oldman told me when I was a kid growing up at 220 South Lombard.
He said once you step outside that front door, the world doesn’t care who you are.
At the time it sounded harsh, but the older I got, the more I understood what he meant. The world isn’t cruel, It’s just busy. It keeps moving whether you’re ready or not.
That is something that I wrestle with now raising the Shepkids.
They carry anxiety and labels. They carry the weight of divorce and the confusion of growing up in a different world than the one I knew. Sometimes I want to shake them and say what my father said to me: nobody out there gives a shit, but Blake reminds me of something different.
The real work in life isn’t convincing the world you matter. The real work is learning how to see the world properly and seeing the meaning in small things. Finding purpose in ordinary effort while holding something infinite in the palm of your hand.
That lesson isn’t easy to pass down. Because raising kids means watching them struggle with truths you learned the hard way. It means realizing that grit, humility, and responsibility aren’t lectures. They are discoveries each person must make on their own.
Parenting, it turns out, is harder than anything my parents ever warned me about, but maybe that’s the point.
You raise them, you guide them, and you hope that one day they look at a grain of sand, a wildflower, or a hard day’s work and finally understand why I’ve been pissed off at them most of the time.
