Say Yes to Life

For the second time, I'm attempting to read James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. It's a part of my new Summer Reading Initiative, which is simply me attempting to pay some more-than-cursory attention to the the books that i own that i haven't read. My Amazon wish list/cup runneth over with prospective purchases, but to indulge would be unfair to my current progeny. (i doubt they really care)

so i chose Baldwin. why? twofold. start small. only a couple hundred pages long. secondly, it's literature in the truest sense of the word. a book that you don't just read, but you languish in it. you get a lawn chair and lie between the middle pages...just waiting for the tide of joy and understanding to eclipse you. each page is a delicacy.

a tiny morsel:
"But people can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life."

it always amazes me how the most important concepts come in the most simple packages. say yes to life. how easy it is to overlook something so seemingly mundane. But those four little words represent an abyss that most people are not equipped to peer into.

that leads me to the question: How do we instill this in our children? How do we teach them to 'say yes to life'? if there was ever a parenting goal to have, that would be it for me. I want them to be men who aren't afraid of a challenge or of the unknown. I want them to have the courage to take the calculable risk and every now and then, the perceived "foolish" one. how could they learn otherwise?