My dad turned 70 last week. That’s a big deal. Seven decades, a world of travel, military service, one wife, four children, countless adventures. Sometimes, listening to my dad I realise that the world has both been transformed in countless ways and yet has stayed so much the same. He’s part of the baby-boomer generation, literally born into a world recovering from war. I wonder what pressures that must have put on a whole generation of children and what scars their parents must have been carrying with them.
Of course, life is one big adventure. We do our best to find our way with the map we’ve been given, often it’s a bit a tattered and has ‘here be dragons’ scrawled in the corner, and the guides we’ve found, also a bit tattered. For most of us, the vast majority, the adventure has it’s white sandy beaches and mosquito ridden swamps. For some of us it’s all swamp, sadly.
I hope when I look back on 70 years of adventure I can say it was pretty awesome, and I hope that I have achieved as much, and am as loved, as my dad.
Happy Birthday, Dad.