“What if everybody had an ‘I’m all right Jack, pull up the ladder’ attitude to life?”

What if every man was for himself? Not difficult questions and the answer is simple too: Society would become increasingly chaotic. We’d certainly have an increasing number of lost young men as their self-centered fathers deserted them. Young men left to find their own way in life often fall into the wrong kind of company.

Thankfully there are plenty of men who understand the need to be a good father. It often takes a lot of strength to be a good parent. A parent who’s prepared to look closely at the relationship they have with the mother or father of the children.

These same man and women understand the difficulties we all face within our relationships. Some of them are very patient, gentle and understanding, of their partners. Relationships can become very strained at times, and when we’re unable to understand why we may be rejecting each other, conflict grows and grows until the eventual split.

“It also takes a lot of strength for parents, who’ve decided to split, to become accepting of the importance of their respective, continued involvement, with the children”

It may be convenient for us to believe that a child only needs one parent. However convenient it may seem though, study after study has shown, when a child has a balanced and wide perspective of life – and idea of what it means to be a grown man or woman – they have greater chance of living a happy adulthood.

“And so it’s the ‘I’m all right Jack’s’ of this world who make it so challenging for the rest of us. Once again this has a lot to do with maturity”

In my previous post I spoke of my need to empower before feeling any sense of direction and purpose. For me to continue concentrating this need – on just one individual – as I did as a younger man, would be suggestive of emotional immaturity.

To only focus this need on the closest to me – potentially my partner – would also indicate an ‘I’m all right Jack’ kind of attitude. It simply doesn’t serve society well, if all we think of empowering, are those in our immediate vicinity; those in our family or close social circle.

Think of all those individuals who’ve chosen to work with our troubled and abandoned young. Youth workers and teachers. Do they have a self-centered attitude to life? Hardly. Potentially, and as hard as you might find this to accept, they’re the one’s stopping this whole mess from falling apart at the seams.

“We need a greater number of people, who recognise what kind of maturity is required to escape self-centeredness, teaching us how to find this for ourselves. The more mature we all are, the stronger our positive bonds, become”

In the long term there is no benefit to being self-serving. Think of the eventual pain and loneliness experienced by those who’ve lived codependent relationships. When one of them dies so does the other. When we see beyond the dead-end-brick-wall of self-centeredness, we open up our lives to more love, more compassion; more of everything.

Join us this September and experience what the maturity of paying it forward really means.