Bill Belew has raised 2 bi-cultural kids, now 34 and 30. And he and his wife are now parenting a 3rd, Mia, who is 8.

Ultrarunning and Life’s Lessons

Try as hard as he might, my ex-triathlete, ex-ultrarunning daddy just might not be able to teach me this lesson.

It seems there are some things that can’t be taught. They have to be learned.

The lesson:

“Nothing beats experience.”

I guess it’s the difference between head knowledge and going through something firsthand.

Somebody can tell you something is hard to do, but you can’t know what hard means to you until you have tried for yourself.

Daddy says some people think some things are hard when they are really hard. It’s just a matter of breaking the project down into little pieces and going at getting them done little by little. But that’s probably a different lesson for a different day.

Daddy says that he likes when I make mistakes. As long as I don’t make a mistake that will hurt me permanently or make a mistake that I can’t recover from.

He says sometimes we learn more from our mistakes than from our successes. We just don’t want our mistakes to damage us so bad we can’t recover.

I guess it means I just have to try some things for myself. And then I can know how hard is hard, how far is far, how many is many and how long is long. Because these things are going to be different for me than they are for others.

Experience – bring it on!

Talk to Bill and others about their experiences raising bi-cultural Japanese-American kids.