When my father advised me to seek greater skies from his shoulders I shuddered. His shoulders were great and to me he was Atlas holding up all the skies. I found it difficult to believe that there were greater horizons than even he could perceive.

While he may have been Atlas holding up the sky on his shoulders, when he wrote his autobiography he thrust a weight greater than all the skies upon mine. He announced not only to me but also to the world that he had high expectations of me and nothing weighs greater on a man's shoulder than that. I spent the spring of my life racing against myself and my father's greatness. While it is not autumn yet in my life, I still believe I could have enjoyed a better youth if I had let myself. I only wish I had set my own benchmarks; in fact I wish I had not set any benchmarks. Why must everything in life be a target that must be achieved? My father, in his book, felt he was in a position to tell me why life is not all turmoil and fruitless toil. I'm not quite sure if mine was free of both although I took every word of advice he had to offer.

As a young man I had places to go before it was too late so marriage was out of the question, leave alone a son I could write a letter to. It wasn't until recently I was able to find the woman who taught me that there are no races to be won in life, that you could get there first and you still wouldn't have won. There are no greater skies to fly, no deeper seas to swim. Your life is where you are; there are no oceans to sail and continents to conquer. The woman who is my wife today taught me that you can search the world for newer questions but the answers are always with you and where you are. The woman who taught me love, who showed me the simple joys of life, widened my horizons threefold when she gifted me a son so beautiful that I now find all my answers with him. With great joy I have named him Summer to celebrate this glorious bright new season I face in my life.

I know that there are generations of fathers in my family who have written to their sons in a proud tradition. I know not why they saw it fit to pass on wisdom that their failures and occasional success taught them. The most important lessons in life are for each of us to learn. I believe my father should have stopped with toilet training me and sending me to school.

Sometime in the future my turn will come to keep this tradition alive but I see no purpose in telling my son to enjoy his youth just because that was the mistake in my life. I see no point in telling him to reach for new skies or in apologizing for anything I did wrong. I see no point in leaving behind special words of wisdom that I will write in the twilight of my life; I have no idea how melancholic those words will be. I also fear any incompleteness in my life might find its way into my final words to my son. There is no point in reminiscing over a lifetime and preaching lessons or morals from it. Every life must happen and there will be lessons in them for each of us but they are for us alone. Perhaps we will commit mistakes that we will regret, but perhaps if we had not committed these mistakes there would have been other mistakes to regret. Invariably there will always be regrets but our disappointment from these cannot teach others good lessons.

I think morals at the end of the stories ought to be learnt from Panchatantra or Aesop's fables, not from human folly. I refuse to tell my son to learn from my flawed life. I wish him the best in his life and I wish him his own share of mistakes and successes. I wish him a life that he deserves, a life of his own making.