Your Children

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bow from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,and He bends you with His might that His arrows go svift and far.

Let your bending in the archers hand be for gladness;

For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

The Prophet

Commitment

" Whether it be shallow or not, commitment is the foundation, the bedrock of any genuinely loving relationship. Deep commitment does not guarantee the success of the relationship but does help more than any other factor to assure it. Initially shallow commitments may grow deep with time; if not, the relationship will likely crumble or else be inevitably sickly or chronically frail...............
Problems of commitment are a major, inherent part of most psychiatric disorders.......Character-disordered individuals tend to form only shallow commitments, and when their disorders are severe, these individuals seem to lack totally the capacity to form commitments at all. It is not so much that they fear the risk of commiting themselves as they basically do not understand what commitment is all about. Because their parents failed to commit themselves to them as children in any meaningful way, they grew up without the experience of commitment.....Neurotics, on the other hand, are generally aware of the nature of commitment but are frequently paralyzed by the fear of it. Usually their experience of early chilhood was one in which their parents were sufficiently commited to them for them to form a commitment to their parents in return. Subsequently, however, a cessation of parental love through death, abandonment or chronic rejection, has the effect of making a child's unrequited commitment an experience of intolerable pain. New commitments then are naturally dreaded. Such injuries can be healed only if it is possible for the person to have a basic and more satisfying experience with commitment at a later date..........." "The Road Less Traveled" by M. Scott Peck, MD