Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast where we provide one lesson every day to help you with your most important job being a dad.

These are lessons inspired by ancient philosophy, by practical wisdom, and insights from dads all over the world.

Thank you for listening, and we hope this helps.

This was a wake-up call.

We can imagine that parents who have nearly lost a child or parents who tragically

have operate on a different plane of consciousness than those of us who have not. A parent who had a

health scare, a parent who helped a child claw their way back from an addiction, a parent who has

been estranged but reunited. These people know what they missed or almost missed. To take anything for granted,

even just an ordinary minute with their kids, this would be to reject the hard-won insights of their

experience. We can try to envision going through that ourselves. How would you feel seeing your

son with tubes coming out of his nose in a hospital bed? How would that change you?

How would waiting for the phone, not knowing if your daughter was in the car when it crashed feel?

Think of what you'd be praying to yourself in that moment, all the things you'd be promising if they could just make it through this.

But here's the thing. This is what happened. It might not have been so

immediately obvious or dramatic, but the last year was one of those events. You could have easily

been one of those families rushing to the hospital. You quite easily could have been one of the

thousands of families who buried a child in 2020 or the hundreds of thousands of families that

buried a spouse. You dodged a bullet. You dodged a more serious case of COVID. You dodged a tragedy.

There was and is a deadly virus in the air. And luck spared some and not others. Let that be a wake-up

call. Let it be a transformative experience. Let it change you.

Let it make you present, make you aware, make you love, make you feel lucky because you are.

You are so lucky. One of the best parts about being a kid, of course, is cereal.

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