013: Pass It On

September 07, 2026

My son had a stye that had been bothering him for almost two weeks. It had changed enough that it looked more like a little blister on his eyelid, and one night I told him I could drain it with a needle. He agreed, right up until I had the needle in my hand and started moving toward his eye. Then he got scared. His eyes filled up, his body tightened, and he wanted no part of the deal he’d made thirty seconds earlier. I didn’t tell him there was nothing to be afraid of. There was a needle coming toward his eye. Fear made perfect sense. I told him to catch the feeling instead. Recognize it. Know what it is. Sometimes fear is trying to keep you alive and you’d better listen. Sometimes it gets in the way of something that still needs doing. I told him I get scared too. There are times before I go into a burning building when I’m afraid, but people are depending on me to do my job. I catch it, recognize it, let it go, and get to work. He isn’t good at that yet. He’s a kid. I told him that too. He won’t be good at it tomorrow either. Learning how to manage yourself takes practice like anything else. All I could really do was tell him something life had taken me years to learn and hope it might save him a little time.

There isn’t a manual for that. You can read every parenting book ever written and still end up shooting from the hip when it’s your kid sitting in front of you, because no book knows him the way you do and none of them know what waits for him twenty years from now. You spend half your life paying full price for lessons and then spend the other half wondering how much of what you bought can actually be handed to somebody else. I’d love to save my kids some of the trouble. There are things I wish somebody had taught me twenty years earlier: how to recognize stress before it starts making decisions for you, how money works, how important exercise is, how to defend yourself, when to keep your mouth shut, how to fail without deciding you’re a failure. Nobody ever taught me how to study. I was told I’d better get good grades. It took years before I figured out how my own mind worked and how I actually learned. Once I did, school didn’t become easy; I just knew what to do when it wasn’t. For years I had been handed destinations when what I really needed was some help finding my way. A map tells you where somebody else found the road. A compass helps you find your way when the road isn’t there. That’s probably closer to the job.

My son’s name is Decland Danger, and yes—Danger is on the birth certificate. To me, Decland sounded like the first part of declination, the adjustment you make to a compass because magnetic north and true north aren’t always the same thing. I liked the idea that where you stand matters when you’re trying to find your bearing. Most of us are handed a pretty ordinary roadmap anyway. In the fire service mine was EMT, box time, Firefighter I academy, volunteer time, applications, get hired. I spent eight years trying to get hired, so I don’t dismiss the value of the map. But when the path took longer than I expected, I started noticing the same familiar faces around me. We were all following the same map. I needed to separate myself from the pack. That was when I noticed that the people separating themselves were usually willing to keep going after the directions ran out: paramedic school, wildland firefighting, another certification, the ugly assignment, the responsibility everybody agreed was important but nobody particularly wanted. The outliers tend to spend some time looking toward the things everybody else sees and says, fuck that. So that’s what I did. That became the idea behind his name: set your declination to danger. Not recklessness. Not looking for trouble. Look toward the hard things other people keep finding reasons to avoid.

I have no idea what my son’s version of that will be. He may never wear a badge or step inside a burning building. His hard thing may be something I know absolutely nothing about, and I hope it is in some ways. He needs a life that belongs to him, not a smaller copy of mine. That’s exactly why the principle matters more than the instruction. I can tell him what worked on my road, but his terrain will be different. My map is mine. Maybe the bearing will still be useful to him. And maybe one day, long after he has forgotten the stye and the needle, he’ll understand what I was trying to give him that night. His middle name was never about being fearless. Danger doesn’t mean fearless. It means learning how to take a bearing while fear is still part of the terrain.

My mother used to say I was the kid who had to learn everything the hard way, and she wasn’t bragging. My sister could watch me step in a hole and learn enough from the view above it. I was the type who needed to climb down there myself and inspect the bottom, usually less like a careful examination and more like a belly flop. She was also quicker to leave things when they got hard. She never cared much for confrontation, even when the confrontation was with herself. I was different. There were plenty of times I would have loved another option, but quitting usually wasn’t one I ever recognized as available. If I started something, I had to see it through. I hated some of those years. I hated some of those jobs. I hated some of those lessons. There was no inspirational music playing in the background while I became a better man. A lot of it just fucking sucked. But after enough of it, difficulty stopped carrying the meaning it once had. Being miserable didn’t necessarily mean I was in the wrong place. Being afraid didn’t necessarily mean I should turn around. Wanting something to end didn’t mean I couldn’t endure it. Hard and wrong aren’t the same direction. I know that because life gave me enough chances to confuse the two and eventually sort it out.

My sister found ways around some of those lessons when we were younger. At the time, I thought she had escaped them. I don’t think anyone really does.  I don’t say that because I think everyone needs my path or because there is virtue in making life harder than it already is. I say it because life has never seemed particularly interested in whether we feel ready. Sooner or later there is a problem you can’t hand back, a loss you can’t undo, a person you have to confront, or a responsibility that belongs to you whether you wanted it or not. Life is going to find you one way or another. There is no hiding from it forever.

Knowing life will find them doesn’t tell me when to step in and when to get out of the way. I know what some of those hard experiences gave me, but I also know what they cost, and I don’t want my children hurt needlessly just so I can congratulate myself for raising tough kids. At the same time, I don’t want to clear every obstacle out of their way and discover too late that I cleared the very things they needed to become capable. So I shoot from the hip like every other parent. If I can see a lesson coming and the price is low enough, sometimes I let them step in it. Losing is cheap when you’re little. Embarrassment is cheap. Frustration is cheap. Being wrong is cheap. Finishing something after it stopped being fun is cheap. Being scared and discovering you can still move is cheap. Life sells adult versions of those same lessons for a hell of a lot more, and right now I can still be there when they get the bill. The point isn’t to make their lives unnecessarily hard. It’s to lay the bedrock of resilience before life gets the chance to test it. Every difficult thing they work through becomes evidence they can carry into the next one: I’ve failed before. I’ve been scared before. I’ve wanted to quit before. I’ve been overwhelmed before. I’m still here. Resilience isn’t believing everything will be okay. It’s knowing that even when it isn’t, you have what it takes to see it through.

There are other things I learned the hard way that I have no intention of making them earn for themselves. I’m forty-three years old and still walk on eggshells around my father. I never know what will set him off. A kid raised around a temper gets good at reading a room because he has to. You notice the face, the voice, the mood, the little change in the air that tells you whether today is the day the pressure releases or whether it still has a little more time to build. I don’t want my children to develop that particular skill because of me. I don’t want them afraid of their father. I want them to respect me. Fear can imitate respect for a long time, but it can never become it. My dad passed that lesson down without ever meaning to. Some inheritance arrives as an example. Some arrives as a warning.

My uncle showed me the other side of it. He has been a huge influence in my life, and one of the memories that has stayed with me is him taking me to buy my first pair of button-fly denim jeans. That was a big deal back in the day. There wasn’t a speech attached to it, and I couldn’t tell you what we talked about. I just remember that he took me. Years later I watched him run a successful business, work twelve- and sixteen-hour days, survive the busts, and stay a couple of years ahead during the good ones. I also watched him make time for his kids. Hunting. Fishing. Target shooting. Vacations. Both of them became valedictorians and both are attending UCLA; his son is working toward becoming a doctor with the drive you don’t see in most young men. His wife deserves plenty of the credit too, and I wouldn’t pretend there’s a straight line between a fishing trip and any of those accomplishments. What I remember is a man who never seemed to have enough time and still genuinely wanted to spend some of it with his children. It never looked like obligation. He made room for what mattered. Apparently, he made some room for his nephew too. I couldn’t tell you what jeans I wore last Tuesday. I can tell you who took me to buy that pair decades ago.

He also taught me something I needed at a time when I was spending an awful lot of energy being angry at how things should be. I could see problems in the systems around me and had no shortage of opinions about what was wrong with them. My uncle pointed out that I was spending a lot of time and energy beating my head against those systems simply because they weren’t the way they should be. He wasn’t telling me to roll over. He was telling me to understand the ground I was actually standing on. There are walls worth knocking down and walls you waste half your life headbutting when there was a door twenty feet away. I was wasting time romanticizing the way things should be instead of recognizing them for what they were. I didn’t get that lesson from my father. I got it from my uncle. Other things came from my wife, who is a success story in her own right, and from firefighters, captains, mistakes, good men, bad men, and people I hope never to resemble. Other people can correct the bearing. Sometimes it’s an uncle. Sometimes it’s a captain, a teacher, a coach, a journeyman, or somebody who spends ten minutes with a kid at exactly the right time. We carry pieces of people who may never know how far their influence traveled. A man’s compass gets calibrated from a lot of different places.

That changed the way I think about inheritance. It isn’t simply everything our parents handed us. Some of what my father gave me ends with me. Some of what my uncle gave me will reach children who weren’t his. My wife and I came into our marriage carrying things from two completely different families, and we’ve had to decide together which of those things deserve a place in ours. There are things neither of us received that we’re trying to build anyway. Whether we mean to or not, something is always being passed along. Kids listen to what we explain, but they also watch what we demonstrate, what we tolerate, and what we neglect. They notice where we spend our time and what changes our mood. They learn what love looks like by living inside ours. We get some say in what survives us, but preserving everything exactly as we received it isn’t the job. Blood doesn’t turn damage into tradition. Some things handed down deserve to be buried.

When I picture my children at forty-three, I don’t spend much time thinking about what houses they live in or what titles follow their names. I want them able to function completely without me, financially and emotionally. But one of the simplest measures of whether I did this right will be whether they want to spend time with me and my wife when they no longer need us for anything. I want them to be able to tell me I’m wrong without wondering what it’s going to cost them. I want them to still call each other because they genuinely like one another, not because somebody told them blood alone should be enough. I want them to become a safe harbor for the people they love. I especially want them to speak to themselves with my kindest voice. When life finally knocks the shit out of one of them, I hope what they hear in their own head is, This is hard. You made a mistake. You’re still a good person. You can fix this. There is accountability in that without condemnation. It took me a long time to learn how to admit I was wrong without turning the mistake into a verdict on who I was. Maybe they won’t need as long.

But none of us can hand another person wisdom whole. That’s the limit of all of this. You can inherit a principle. You cannot inherit the experience that gave someone conviction in it. I can tell my son that hard doesn’t mean stop. He can understand every word and believe me completely, and someday he’ll still find himself somewhere he desperately wants to quit. I won’t be there to make the decision. If he holds his ground, works through it, and discovers something about himself on the other side, the lesson changes. It isn’t Dad’s anymore. The same will be true for my daughter. I can tell her not to let somebody else decide what she’s worth, but I can’t build her confidence for her. I can warn them both about people, money, pride, anger, comfort, and a hundred other things that have taken their turn teaching me. Some of it they’ll believe because I’m Dad. Some of it they’ll ignore because I’m Dad. Some of it won’t mean a damn thing until twenty years from now, when life puts them in exactly the place where the words finally make sense. A principle you’ve been taught is knowledge. A principle you’ve tested becomes conviction.

That’s why my children need their own stories, even when every instinct I have as their father makes me want to help write them. They need failures that belong to them, victories they earned, scars I couldn’t prevent, risks they chose, and problems they solved without Dad. They need moments when they discover Dad was right. They also need moments when they discover Dad was completely full of shit. I imagine I’m wrong about plenty of things. If my son comes to me at forty-three and tells me one of them, I hope we can sit down and talk about it. I could never do that with my old man. If all I teach my children is how to obey me, I haven’t prepared them for a life where I’m no longer there.

The fact that my son could disagree with me without fearing me would already tell me I got something right. If he can take a principle I gave him, hold it against his own experience, decide it doesn’t survive the test, and still sit across the table from me explaining why, somewhere underneath that disagreement may be another thing I helped him build—the ability to think, question, test, and trust his own judgment. That’s not the inheritance failing. That’s the inheritance doing its job.

Their lives get a vote in what survives. Some of what I believe will hold for them. Some of it won’t. They’ll face things I never did, learn things I had no way to teach them, and find answers I couldn’t have found from where I stood.

I think back to that little stye and the needle in my hand. In that moment I couldn’t give my son courage. I couldn’t reach inside him and turn the fear off, and I’m not sure I would have if I could. All I had was something fear had taught me after years of dealing with my own, and a few minutes to put words around it while he started dealing with his. That may be as close as I ever get to handing him the lesson itself. Instructions require you to know the situation. Principles travel. My children will live through situations I can’t predict, in a world I won’t completely understand, on roads I have never walked. I can give them my best bearings. They will still have to find their way.

By then the compass shouldn’t look like mine anymore. It ought to be scratched from use and corrected where I was wrong. There should be markings on it I don’t recognize and miles on it I never walked. Someday one of them may find a child sitting across from them scared, lost, heartbroken, or unsure what to do next. When that day comes, they won’t have to reach all the way back to mine.

They’ll have one of their own.

The map was never the inheritance. The compass was.

Pass it on.

TOUCHSTONE
PASS IT ON.
GIVE THEM A COMPASS.  LET THEM FIND THEIR WAY.

— Sea of Mud Apparel Co.
Talk less. Say more.