The Greatest Love of All

I believe the children are our are future, teach them well and let them lead the way, show them all the beauty they possess inside

• the song most synonymous with the late great Whitney Houston is a song that has always resonated with me mostly because in it's purest form the song is just a great song and Whitney Houston is such a great singer, I say this because although her physical being has left us, her music will live on eternally. At the same time the song lyrics have a message that tell us the greatest love of all is indeed a love of self and that we should also teach this love of self to our children to empower them to dream, empower them to know their worth, to love themselves for who they are, flaws, imperfections and all.

See, I'm of the opinion that the greatest love of all should be the person that we see staring back at us each time that we look in the mirror, that person who is reading these here lines right this minute and once that self love is achieved it should be extended to our children who in turn we should teach to learn to love themselves and believe that the world we live in has no limitations and endless possibilities. This sense of power starts with the mind and ends with the mind. An adult's mind is a mind that has been shaped with all of our previous life experiences, all of our ups and downs, all of our wins and defeats, be them good or bad but experienced all the same. A child's mind is a blank canvas that we can essentially program and install values, expectations, goals, dreams, inspirations, fears, limiting beliefs and a wide range of things that we do so consciously or unconsciously.

I remember growing up and constantly being told the things that I couldn't do, the things that I couldn't achieve. The places I couldn't go, in fact looking back it feels like there really was no sense of "all things are possible" and you know what, maybe it was just the situation and environment that I personally grew up in, although I have had this discussion with many of my peers and essentially have come to the same conclusion that there were limits put on the potential that is inherent to me and to all of us by the way we were raised. That is not to say that we were not raised with love and devotion from our parents, just that they maybe did not know any better back then. To them "success" was getting a good education and being able to get a good corporate job and enough to buy a house, that was the dream that was such a huge thing to my parents, grandparents and those of the parents of my generation.

Of course it was a much different time back then, the world was a lot smaller and expectations were literally just within the confines of your town and/or city or province or whatever you would call the immediate surroundings. Nowadays almost the entire world is at your fingerprints as with the advent of the internet age the world has become a much smaller place and seemingly all regions of the world are accessible to each and every man and woman, which makes it all the more important for us to teach them well and let them lead the way.

As a father it is my responsibility to raise a young man with values and respect for other people to become a productive member of society. It is my desire though to raise much more than that, I aspire to raise a champion, an individual who will know how to think for himself, to not be led by peers and “follow the crowd”, to have compassion for his fellow man and have a strong sense of self-worth and know that as long as he loves himself, he will never be without love. A boy to man, who will become everything he wants to be in life for he’ll know that anything is possible as long as he puts his mind to it and believes it. A life without limits!