A Father

Many factors determine success in our future endeavors, but they can all be correlated to just three components: truth, honor, and guidance. Our willingness to seek the truth in the goals we have set forth for ourselves determines our stress tolerance, ability to think outside of the box, and passion for knowledge. This active pursuit of the truth proclaims the credibility of our plans to achieve said dreams, as the conscience of this kind of individual battles with the forces of deceptive measures like distraction, hopelessness, and outside influences.

When we speak aloud of our deepest desires by affixing our vision on the pedestal of accountability amongst our peers, coworkers, and family members, we engage with the notion of honor. We try to uphold our word by honoring a promise to ourselves or others that accomplishing these goals is attainable with unhinged confidence and a hint of delusional faith. This is another disciplinary method that successful individuals use to guarantee favorable results and an outcome that honors their word or the people with whom they made a direct or indirect vow.

Our innate proclivity to validation parallels our yearning for guidance from the earliest stages of our lives. We are naïve and inexperienced individuals who learn from circumstances that we are not accustomed to. So, the advice or guidance we receive targeting our field of interest from our parents, teachers, friends, or anyone else can shape our future. But in some cases, that guidance we yearn for may not be present, and we must find this component within our thoughts and visions to propel us toward achieving future success in our goals.

In this life, we strive to attain commodities that we deem valuable based on how difficult they are to achieve for others in society, like riches, popularity, and materialistic showpieces that we can flaunt in the public sphere. However, we seem to mistake a vital desire that every person yearns for no matter their age, and that is a father figure. A man who resembles that of a knight in shining armor, there to save the day. A man who sacrifices his life for the sake of his family and takes responsibility as his duty demands him to do. These individuals represent an early role model for any young person, as they greatly influence their actions and behavior.

The concept of male responsibility is significant. The consequences of its neglect in a family have shown in recent years, as the growing number of fatherless children has spiraled out of control. There is a higher risk of a child adopting an abrasive behavior due to a lack of discipline at home, being prone to make poor decisions as they are not accustomed to being able to communicate with an older male figure from an early age with the absence or neglect of a father in a young boy's life.

The importance of fathers has diminished over time as specific barriers have arisen and caused disdain among the populace as to what should be prioritized from what should not. Self-control, discipline, honor, truth, selflessness, perseverance, compassion, guidance, and what I believe to be the most powerful word in the English dictionary, love, are the integral qualities that every man should possess or be engraved into their mind from an early age to offset these future occurrences of utter cowardice and failure to act by what they have been ordained to do.

However, one might ask, are we always to blame for these actions within our disparaged communities of broken families? We most certainly are. Even though we live under a generational curse and are afflicted with hardships that make our perspective of life unfair, we are called to rise above these adversities and break the cycle.