Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

Everything I do in life teaches my children something. I try to remember that, but it’s not always in the forefront of my thoughts. Still, whether I remember it or not, such is the reality. How I treat K teaches L how a man should treat a woman, how a husband should treat a wife, and E learns the same lessons from the other perspective. How I respond to disasters, real and imagined, teaches them how they should respond in such situations. Their future, in other words, is contained in our present.

I, in turn, learned how to behave by watching my own parents, and they from theirs. Being human, we sometimes give good bad examples, but that’s part of the limitations of humanity — concupiscence, as the Catholic Church describes it:

In its widest acceptation, concupiscence is any yearning of the soul for good; in its strict and specific acceptation, a desire of the lower appetite contrary to reason. To understand how the sensuous and the rational appetite can be opposed, it should be borne in mind that their natural objects are altogether different. The object of the former is the gratification of the senses; the object of the latter is the good of the entire human nature and consists in the subordination of reason to God, its supreme good and ultimate end. But the lower appetite is of itself unrestrained, so as to pursue sensuous gratifications independently of the understanding and without regard to the good of the higher faculties. Hence desires contrary to the real good and order of reason may, and often do, rise in it, previous to the attention of the mind, and once risen, dispose the bodily organs to the pursuit and solicit the will to consent, while they more or less hinder reason from considering their lawfulness or unlawfulness.

A fancy way of saying our tendency toward the less refined appetites in life.

And then there are the other lessons: teaching the kids how to raise kids. Playing with them is always critical, but sometimes those lower appetites get in the way, the selfish appetites, the desire to do one’s own thing because “I’m tired” or whatever silly excuse.

Incomplete thoughts on an incomplete evening…