About Robert "Keith" Cartwright
I am a friend of God, a dad, a writer, speaker, and an advocate for healing-centered relationships.
RKC's Most Recent Article
Don't Let Yesterday Blind You To Tomorrow
I am a story teller. And maybe even more, I am a story collector. I am pretty sure those two things are deeply connected.
Because I do a lot of presentations where I share authentically, and because in those presentations I try to safely invite people to explore their hardest stories, I often have people share stories with me they probably don't share in other places.
It's one of the greatest gifts of the work I do.
After my presentation yesterday, a man approached me and we ended up having a long conversation about life and fatherhood. Toward the end of the conversation, he told me he was adopted when he was 3 years old.
Good people adopted him, he told me. He said he felt fortunate.
And yet, he always lived with wondering.....
He told me that a couple of years ago his daughter started doing some exploring on the website: Ancestry. She was researching her family and encouraged him to do the same. It had been over fifty years, and he hadn't had any contact with his biological family.
He had no idea who his biological family even was.
Well, last year he found an uncle. The uncle told him his biological mother had been looking for him for years. My new friend was a bit surprised to hear she was still alive. And even more, since he grew up in another state and had moved to Virginia, he was shocked to hear that many years ago she too had relocated to Virginia.
A few days after this conversation with his uncle, after fifty five years, he met his mom.
He called their reunion beautiful. He said their relationship today is great.
I thought a lot about this story on my drive home yesterday.
Much was made of resilience in our conference yesterday. I'm not sure resilience gets any more pronounced than a 3-year-old baby taken from his home who somehow turns that situation into a long life of purpose.
I thought about how much resilience often looks like love; his adoptive family was a good and loving family, he said.
I thought about the gift of technology. How with a few clicks a website can help us find something that's been missing for 55 years.
But mostly, I thought about their reunion. How it is always too late to change yesterday, but never too late to change tomorrow. And maybe too many of us lose out on the gifts of tomorrow because we are stuck trying to change yesterday.
(It is possible I am preaching a bit to me here).
We often think healing requires somehow making peace with the past before we can move forward. But sometimes healing begins when we discover that the past, no matter how painful or permanent, doesn't get to make every decision about our future.
This man and his mom can't recover 55 years. They can't recreate his childhood. They can't go back and undo the separation or any of the circumstances that led to it.
But they can love each other today.
And tomorrow.
Don't let your yesterdays blind you to tomorrow. There may indeed be something beautiful waiting there.
Because I do a lot of presentations where I share authentically, and because in those presentations I try to safely invite people to explore their hardest stories, I often have people share stories with me they probably don't share in other places.
It's one of the greatest gifts of the work I do.
After my presentation yesterday, a man approached me and we ended up having a long conversation about life and fatherhood. Toward the end of the conversation, he told me he was adopted when he was 3 years old.
Good people adopted him, he told me. He said he felt fortunate.
And yet, he always lived with wondering.....
He told me that a couple of years ago his daughter started doing some exploring on the website: Ancestry. She was researching her family and encouraged him to do the same. It had been over fifty years, and he hadn't had any contact with his biological family.
He had no idea who his biological family even was.
Well, last year he found an uncle. The uncle told him his biological mother had been looking for him for years. My new friend was a bit surprised to hear she was still alive. And even more, since he grew up in another state and had moved to Virginia, he was shocked to hear that many years ago she too had relocated to Virginia.
A few days after this conversation with his uncle, after fifty five years, he met his mom.
He called their reunion beautiful. He said their relationship today is great.
I thought a lot about this story on my drive home yesterday.
Much was made of resilience in our conference yesterday. I'm not sure resilience gets any more pronounced than a 3-year-old baby taken from his home who somehow turns that situation into a long life of purpose.
I thought about how much resilience often looks like love; his adoptive family was a good and loving family, he said.
I thought about the gift of technology. How with a few clicks a website can help us find something that's been missing for 55 years.
But mostly, I thought about their reunion. How it is always too late to change yesterday, but never too late to change tomorrow. And maybe too many of us lose out on the gifts of tomorrow because we are stuck trying to change yesterday.
(It is possible I am preaching a bit to me here).
We often think healing requires somehow making peace with the past before we can move forward. But sometimes healing begins when we discover that the past, no matter how painful or permanent, doesn't get to make every decision about our future.
This man and his mom can't recover 55 years. They can't recreate his childhood. They can't go back and undo the separation or any of the circumstances that led to it.
But they can love each other today.
And tomorrow.
Don't let your yesterdays blind you to tomorrow. There may indeed be something beautiful waiting there.
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