Celebrating My Nephew

I am very proud of my nephew. He is growing up so fast. His teenage years seem to be going well for him. His group of friends are good dudes and really funny. He’s doing well academically at one of our region’s best high schools. He is a rising star on his football team. He is doing it right. I got to spend his birthday with him, in between his parties with other people, and it was a nice time. I wish we had more time.

I often think of him as the fifth Rust, and you can see my mom’s hand in him. I think she perfected child rearing and poured that into B. He’s so well centered and caring. I am curious what he’ll be like as a man. I hope we can spend time together after high school, hopefully at the gun club because he does like shooting trap although his love of animals makes him less prone to hunt. If he keeps up his momentum there’s no telling what he can accomplish in life. There’s a good foundation and a really great attitude there, and that’s the basis of success in life. The next step for him will be finding out what he wants to pour his energy into doing. I always hope technology, business, or engineering, but who knows what he may decide. It will be very interesting once he does discern his interests.

I think about generations improving upon each other. My mom wanted that for us. I think she’d hoped we’d make that leap into whatever she foresaw as a respectable future. I think all of us did find our footing eventually, some later than others (I was in my early thirties when things started clicking for me professionally). But that is what life is all about, it is more of a marathon than a sprint where the course is also littered with obstacles. I often say you can’t be a Rust without being resilient, and that might hold true for most of life. You just need to get up when you get down, and do it all over again no matter how tired you are from it. Once you quit then you fail. That is something we try to teach out kids – the power of effort.

My nephew understands effort. He knows nothing comes easy. You get opportunities in life, and you try to do what you can with them. You’ll get a time to shine if you just keep at it. Effort is incomplete without a goal though, and for us that goal is excellence. Excellence is easy to define but really hard to attain. It is difficult actually, but it is what discerns those who succeed and those who do not. Excellent work is better than mediocre work, although both are technically work. What makes excellence hard is you don’t actually know what it is until you attain it, because there’s always an extra step you can take. If you ask yourself if this is your best work and say I can try a little harder, than you are on the right path towards attaining it.