It could happen at school. It could happen on that trip where you took them out of school. It could happen while they’re home sick, watching TV. It could happen at a museum or a music store. It could happen in their brother’s room. It could happen at the zoo. It could happen during a surfing lesson or stumbling across a fossil or while reading a book. It could happen in a college seminar. It could happen at a political rally.

You don’t know—nobody does—where your kids will find their thing. That thing that lights them up, that makes them think for the first time, I want to do that with my life. What they want to study. What they want to do for a living. Where they want to live. What they were put here to do. That’s probably why the great Robert Greene (in his amazing book Mastery, available at the Painted Porch) calls it our “life’s task.” The life’s task of a parent, we might say, is to help our kids find their life’s task.

It would be wonderful if where this was supposed to happen was clear, but it isn’t. Which is why we have to cast a wide net. We have to travel with them, read to them, watch things with them, take them to hear and see stuff. We have to be deliberate…and deliberately allow serendipity into their lives.

How and where did we find that thing in our own lives? Think about how random it was, what a freak occurrence it was…what a miracle it was. We have to do the work to recreate that for them. It’s not something we can give them, but it is a process we can facilitate and encourage and most of all, never stifle.