Today I want to take a moment and appreciate the simple comforts in my life. I’m incredibly lucky that I have the luxury of doing a site like this where I get the chance to take a step back once a day and think about what makes life great and share it with others. I can only do that because of the comforts that life has afforded me.

I live close by to any of the basic needs I’d want and a short commute away from where I work. The biggest worry about food I have is figuring out what I want to eat. I have access to the internet, a limitless depository of knowledge and entertainment. I have shelter and transportation. I have good friends and a great family.

All too often in life we get hung up on our needs and wants. We think about what we don’t have and what we need to do to get it. We spend so much time being unsatisfied and longing for something else, something we think is more. It’s good to reset every now and then and appreciate what you do have in life that you take for granted after a while.

To me, when you appreciate what you have, when you add to it you build up, you make the whole a better thing. If you only focus on the want or the need and forget the good things you have, when you add something it’s like tossing it into a hole, an empty foundation. The want is still there, and you keep chasing other things when what you were looking for is what you had all along.

Today being Father’s Day, I want to take a moment and appreciate my own Dad. I was blessed to be born to two tremendous parents. I had the best role model anyone could ever ask for in my father. I think more so as an adult than when I was a kid, my father is my hero. He is an incredible man and has been such a big factor in who I am today.

My dad taught me the value of working hard and doing the right thing when you have to make a choice simply because it is the right thing to. I’ve watched my dad work jobs that he hated. Jobs that he did not want to do. But each and every time he went to work he gave it his all. He would always do the best job that he could because it was the right thing do. Someone gave him an opportunity to have a paying job, and in return for being able to pay his rent, feed and buy clothes for me and my sisters, keep the lights on and everything else that goes into being a parent with responsibilities, my dad would work as hard as he could and do the best job that he was able, regardless of the job he was working at.

He’s someone who has touched the lives of the people that he worked with or who worked for him. I had the rare opportunity to work with people who once worked with my dad, and the way they spoke about him blew me away. I got to see my dad through the eyes of other people and see how much he meant to them. There are people walking around who are better just from having known my dad, and that was a really cool thing for me to get to see.

I’ve gotten to see my dad in his element, doing something he loves. I have had the opportunity to do Civil War living histories with him and camp out on battlefields. For all the times that I saw him stoically working away at a job that he was not in to, I have also seem him do something that he loves doing and is passionate about. I have seen him surrounded by his friends and completely at ease, enjoying life.

He’s is an interesting guy. On the outside he is a dad like most, quiet and not very open about his feelings. It took me a while to understand him better. Things would come through like how he would interact with our animals that I would see his true feelings. He was always better at expressing affection with furry friends than with other humans. But I came to understand that the way he was with our pets is the way he felt about me and my sisters, he just didn’t know how to show it.

I grew up watching my dad sacrifice things over and over and over again for the good of his family. As a little kid I watched my dad go on the road and have to be away from his family for extended periods to be able to pay the bills. Later, I saw my dad work nights and come home and stay awake long enough to see me and my sisters off to school. When I played sports he would always come to my games to see me play.

Knowing him better later in life, I can only imagine the stress he went through trying to hold it together at time. It wasn’t easy. But my dad taught me the importance of keeping outwardly calm and not letting the world and the people that are looking up to you know how bad it is. I learned about being dependable, someone that people can count on, no matter what you have going on personally. He sacrificed so much for so long for the good of others. That’s the most important thing of all I learned from him, what love really is. That you do all of that for the people you love without begrudging the world a thing. I love my dad and am incredibly proud of him, and I hope that I will be half the man he is when I have a family one day.