This hosting site’s prompt is, “What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?”

I’ve spent years and years trying to learn how to sift & sort through the Very Helpful thoughts of others. Often, the advice we get is equal parts thinly veiled aggression and not-veiled-at-all arrogance. We walk around airing our grievances (as we all know, the only time that is acceptable is on Festivus) and preferences of how everybody else should think, act, and feel. It’s not really for/about us, it’s about control, and it’s mostly pretty rude & disrespectful.

But it’s not ALWAYS unhelpful. Sometimes, when the planets align, we can be lucky enough to have the kind of person in our lives who genuinely has our best interests at heart. They are probably very self-aware, don’t want to give criticism or advice unless they are specifically asked, and therefore, should be taken very seriously.

It’s not that hard to tell the difference. What is difficult is to receive the helpful advice from the 1st group. It’s rare, but not impossible, that one who is selfish, nasty and oblivious actually has something true & valuable to offer. Can we see through the person to the information, through the attack to the substance?

But this is not the site’s question, is it? The AI prompt generator wants to know the quality insight we’ve been given, and not the avalanche of garbage we’ve been served. As for me, I do have an answer. The advice was from my dad.

You might wonder which group he fell into… His was a complicated legacy for me to hold/carry. He was selfish, at times nasty and oblivious, and he was hilarious and we loved each other like crazy. As it happens, we just displayed our love in wildly different ways, not always easy for the other to spot and accept. So, yes, he could be the 1st group (spouting his opinions loudly, forcefully, like a punch in the stomach – I once heard a song lyric, I think, that said, “frequently wrong but never in doubt.” Maybe that applies.) but he was always the 2nd, sometimes at the same time. He always had me, my health, growth, development, happiness in mind.

Anyway, he said a thousand times, “Be very careful who you marry,” and no one has ever gotten better advice than that. Even Solomon had nothing on the wisdom of my dad, in those 6 words. He’d shake his head and sigh, “be very, very careful who you marry,” often followed by, “how would you like to be married to her???”

He’d say it after an encounter with a particularly…um…well, with an encounter with a woman that he wouldn’t have wanted to marry. Never a man. I don’t know if he just couldn’t conceive of a world where a woman would have to be very careful who they married, or if he was simply tailoring his proverb to a heterosexual young son. [In my experience, young girls should hear this much more often.]

I bet it was 5 thousand times that he said this.

You see, he had this idea of who I could marry, and he knew that a wife like this would help to create a family & home like this, and he knew how much I would love her, and how much better that love would make everything else. He knew, if I were to marry the right woman, she would allow me to see my own possibility, encourage me to become all of who I am, she would be a safe place that we could both be willing to risk, to jump, and we would always catch each other. He knew, if this home was peaceful, we could enter into the drama of others, we could love them without reservation. He knew I would truly know how out of my league she would be and that I would be grateful beyond words.

He passed away 20 years ago, but he did get to meet the Angel and come to our wedding, so he knew I had listened.