Part Three — Family, Work, and the Build That Outlasts You

Last week, the first domain: Love — the self that is loved before it loves anything in return. This week, two more. Family, where the build is handed forward. And Work, where the build meets the world.

Part Two — Love and the First Domain of the Relational Three

Last week, a ten-year-old opened an Apache helicopter kit and a father stood very quietly at the edge of a workbench. We landed on this: you were known before you were built. Now we look at where the build actually happens.

Part One — The Apache, the Workbench, and a Father Who Watched

There is something almost mythological about turning ten years old when you are ten years old.

It is not merely a birthday. It is a threshold — a crossing over. You are no longer a single-digit child subject to the indignities of being called little. You are, by the irrefutable mathematics of the calendar, officially a double-digit human being. A grown-up. A force to be reckoned with.

At least, that is what I told myself on the morning of my tenth birthday. And I was completely certain of it.

Part Four: Three Lessons from the Mound

So let me bring us back to the diamond, and to the three lessons that were planted in me that week — lessons I did not fully understand until I became the father and the coach, the teacher and the mentor, that I was apparently destined to be.