In this parenting blog post, Ryan Holliday shares 15 questions to help us be better parents and humans.

The one that caught my eye and made me reflect the most:

“Will I be an Ancestor or a Ghost?”

Bruce Springsteen explained the concepts in his Broadway show Long Time Comin’, thus:

“We are ghosts or we are ancestors in our children’s lives. We either lay our mistakes, our burdens upon them, and we haunt them, or we assist them in laying those old burdens down, and we free them from the chain of our own flawed behavior. And as ancestors, we walk alongside of them, and we assist them in finding their own way, and some transcendence.”

We always have a choice.

With our words, our deeds, our way of thinking, our attitudes towards others, we are providing our children vital clues as they watch us live out our lives through stressful times, and times when all is as we want it to be.

How am I measuring up?

What do I need to do / stop doing if I am serious about being an Ancestor?