However, in order to build a brighter future, I think it is important that we look unflinchingly at these painfully sad events and the tragically cruel past. Because we are now receiving life, it is up to us to pass down these memories, reflect on them, learn lessons from them, and turn them into wisdom so that we can make the world a better place for future generations.

As I mentioned in last month’s installment, for those of us who are alive now, thanks to the relay of passing the baton of life in an unbroken chain of connections that forms part of the history of one great life stretching back to the birth of the universe, thinking about the meaning of being filial to our parents also means looking at the origin of our own lives through the lives of our parents and ancestors and asking what we can do now as we look toward the future.

In that sense, these days for expressing gratitude to our parents may be an important opportunity to reconsider the nature of family and parents, along with the words passed down to us by our predecessors: “Fathers should be the object of their children’s respect, and mothers should be the seat of compassion for their children.”