Yesterday I wrote about the boy who woke up, the story of The Prodigal Son. The way I see him, he was the young man who had to turn his back on his family and childhood structure in order to mature enough to finally “come to himself.” It was not until he sank so low in his life that he finally paid attention. He stopped following the chatter and heard a deeper, calmer voice. He woke up and he returned home.

Here is my autobiographical projection on the continuation of the story. Some time later, the son admitted to himself and perhaps his father, “I needed to do all that. I needed to get away from here. I needed to get away from you. I was so angry, but I didn’t know what I was angry about. I needed to be someone else. Then I needed for things to fall apart. I even needed to end up feeding those pigs. That was the only way I was going to stop and pay attention.

“But I was no longer the same person. I couldn’t fit into the family like I used to. But I recognized the importance of what I learned in my childhood. I was fortunate to have been loved enough to have permission to leave. When I left, I rejected my past. I returned because I saw my past as giving me the platform to stand on so I could decide how I wanted to live my life.”

He had to reject his past in order to embrace his past as his launching pad for his adult life. That has been a decades-long process for me, and it continues. I have watched my two grown children do that, and continue to do that. Their lives do not look like mine. Nor do they look the way I once imagined and hoped for them. I have watched things fall apart for them, and it has been painful for all of us. But I see how all those delightful moments as well as the confusing and conflict-laden moments of their childhoods have blended together to give them a launching pad.

Things do fall apart. Damn. I wish that were not true, but it is. Things do fall apart, and they must fall apart. If I can avoid labeling those times as “bad,” if I can stop spending all my energy trying to work my way out of those times, if I can stop worrying about how it will all turn out, if I can simply be in the “falling apart experience” and live fully in the moment, well, that is life. And life has a way of moving forward despite our efforts to avoid it or change its course.