Waypoint 016
Leaving a legacy has taken on a different meaning for me in the second half of life. As a father of four sons, I think about the lessons, choices, and example I will leave behind. I cannot live their lives for them, but I can pass along what my own journey has taught me. That is part of why I created Boarding Pass 365: to plant something useful today that may help someone find their way long after my part of the journey is over.
Planting Trees I Will Never Sit Beneath.
There comes a point in life when we start thinking differently about what we are building.
When we are young, much of our effort goes toward building a life for ourselves. We work, pursue goals, raise families, make mistakes and try to find our place in the world.
But as we grow older, another question begins to emerge:
What will remain from the life I have lived?
I have four sons.
Like most fathers, I have wanted to prepare my children for life, to protect them from unnecessary pain, help them make good decisions, and pass along whatever wisdom I have gained through my own experiences.
But fatherhood teaches us something difficult: we cannot travel the journey for our children.
We can advise them, support them, warn them and walk beside them for part of the way, but eventually, they must choose their own direction. They must make decisions, experience consequences, discover who they are and build lives that belong to them.
I started thinking about the lessons that took me decades to understand. I thought about the mistakes I repeated, the opportunities I failed to recognize and the years when I lived by reacting to circumstances instead of choosing my own direction.
I began asking myself:
What do I know now that I wish I had understood when I was younger?
That question began this collection.
These experiences are not guarantees or shortcuts. Life does not work that way.
A lesson offered by someone else only becomes useful when we examine it, question it and discover how it applies to our own journey.
Some topics may help a young person recognize something earlier. Others may give a father a starting point for a conversation he has been trying to have with his children.
There are truths I wish I had understood when I was younger: wisdom about choices, habits, relationships, work, failure, responsibility, and the importance of being aware of the direction in which we are travelling.
Some of those lessons took me decades to learn. Others only became clear after I had repeated the same mistake more than once.
I cannot return to the beginning and apply what I know today. But I can leave something behind.
Boarding Pass 365 did not begin because I had mastered life or discovered all the answers. It began with the work I still needed to do within myself, a personal journey toward living with greater awareness, purpose and intention.
But as the project developed, I began to see it differently.
I started thinking about the lessons that had taken me decades to learn, and the guidance I wished I could place in my sons' hands as they navigated their own lives.
What began as a journey for myself gradually became something I wanted to share with them and eventually, with other young people and the fathers helping them find their way.
That is how What I Wish I Knew Then began.
It is a collection of reflections from my journey, written first with my sons in mind, but offered to every young person finding their way into adult life and every father trying to guide his children without choosing their destination.
I do not know which insights my sons will need. I do not know when they will need them, or whether I will be present when that moment arrives. But that is the nature of planting trees whose shade we may never enjoy.
We plant them because someone else might.
Perhaps that is part of what fatherhood asks of us: to keep planting, to share what we have learned, to live what we hope to teach, and to leave behind guidance our children can carry with them long after we are no longer around.
I may never sit beneath every tree I plant.
But my sons might.
And that is reason enough to keep planting.
Fair winds,
Chef Martin
Takeaway:
We are always passing something forward. Leaving a legacy begins with noticing what our choices, our words, and our example are teaching those who come after us.
We may never sit beneath the trees we plant, but we can choose to plant something worth growing.
