Help them find their wings

My son has been gone for almost a week now. Now before anyone panics, I should clarify that he's not missing...he's camping with a class from school. Somewhere deep in a provincial park with no cell reception and bears. It's his first major trip away from home and we have zero contact with him. Trust me when I say we (the Parents) had a bigger problem with it then he did!

When I was 16 and 17, I was away from home for months at a time; touring Canada and the U.S. with a World-Class Drum Corps called The Bluecoats (Bllloooooooo!!!). If my parents were lucky, they would get a static-laced collect call from some payphone at a truck stop in Nowhere Nebraska. We could go weeks on end without speaking, but that was 20+ years ago and times were different. Today, in our hyper-connected world, most people have a cell phone or social media and are reachable online at all hours of the day and night.

It can be hard to let go and not have control of a situation when you're used to having that ability. We knew we couldn't control the weather or the mosquitoes. We knew he would have rough sleeps and cold meals and we knew he couldn't reach us unless it was an emergency. We knew these things and still we worried. I guess any other parent in our situation would worry a little too.

But as the week wore on and it became clear that he hadn't been left on the side of the road or hunted down by a back wood family of cannibals we started to relax more. The conversation turned from "I hope he's all right!" to "I bet he's having an amazing time!" And therein lies the lesson:

There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

When we let go of the things we cannot control or do not need to control, when we stop worrying about the things that need not be worried about--we let others around us fly--and we find our own wings to join them.