Letting Go

I've just spent an exhausting, heart-rending week delivering my youngest to college in Florida. It's an incredible place--a small liberal arts college right on the beach, complete with great vegetarian food and a wonderfully supportive faculty and staff. She's already already signed up for sailing lessons and the search and rescue team. I know she'll have a great experience there and that does help. A little.

Yet this morning I found myself needing to reach for The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, and rereading this passage:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.