Nice poem and good question.

Aren't we all smarter than our parents? It's probably because I am young that I have the gall to say that.  But I stand by it. We are smarter than our parents in the fact that as we grow they hand us all the stored knowledge they have accumulated in their lives. And we take it subconsciously. We see their pitfalls and we know to avoid them. We take their lessons from a lifetime of failures and apply them so we have a lifetime of other failures that we similarly won't let our children experience.

Think about it, children have to be the smartest in every family, how else would we progress? As we grow into our families we develop an innate understanding of our parents, and our relationship to our parents, and our relationship to the network of other relationships that played a role in building our houses.

All parents, whether they know it or not, have the same dream, that their children might fulfill their dreams. You ask Penelope how we transmit to our children knowledge of what is important in life without burdening them with our own personal goals. Maybe the answer is that we should inspire in our children not any specific dream, but dreaming itself. As children we need to thoughtfully understand our position in our family before we might separate our own dreams and hopes from the dreams and hopes of the rest of our family and culture.

Before we have children it is our responsibility to our parents to follow our dreams as far as they'll take us. And once we become parents it is our responsibility to protect and nurture the dreams of our children. In this way the two can coexist peacefully.

My question is, should there ever be a time when we don't pursue our dreams with everything we have without hurting anyone else? Or should we ever resign to not fulfilling them... That sounds morbid...

Morgan, I'm not sure I agree that dreams are something which parents hope their children will fulfill for them. Sometimes -- but sometimes not. Each living creature hopes, I think, on a deep level, for some kind of self-realization, and this is something each person has, in some sense, to do alone... Yes, children continue this, build from it, react to it: but no one else can save you the difficulty and joy of your own becoming, nor can you do this for someone else.

Because of this I think it's very powerful when one begins to understand one's own context. The point at which we begin our journey conditions much of the subsequent adventure (though certainly not all, and certainly not in any kind of deterministic way). As children we grow up around people for whom certain issues, questions, modes of life, modes of understanding are important. As a result certain things are, for us, naturally important...

A childhood friend of mine is a successful doctor. Her father and grandfather were doctors before moving to the US and some other people in her family are as well. Could she have done something else? Yes, certainly; there were strong inclinations towards music. But in that family medicine was what was taken seriously. More than this it is a point of pride that the daughter is able to carry on the tradition. It is something which in an otherwise undemonstrative family creates a common bond.

What makes a person happy in life? Is it belonging to a beloved community or creating one's world from scratch? Can one even do such a thing? Had she become a musician, her world would be no less full of tradition and legacy; nor, I think, would her work take a less emotional place. But it would also have meant not to give her family a certain happiness, and herself a certain satisfaction at being able to achieve that. At the same time, it's strange to think that one grows up to fill a role rather than to create one.  Or is this a sign I've lost my sense of how impressive historical continuity can be?