Being a Father is Not About Your Heart, it is About Your Soul

Our thoughts and prayers go out to our good blogging friend Patrick Lamb whose father died yesterday.

For many of us blogging is something more than the words that appear in the post. Blogs are certainly not websites. Sure, they allow for online publishing of what otherwise might be called articles and in blog jargon posts.

But blogging is, more importantly, an outlet for many people like Pat and myself. For those of us who are unafraid to share our lives thoughts and ideas with the world, blogging provides an unique opportunity. There is no other technology, besides perhaps the coming of age of You Tube, which allows us to expose ourselves to the world.

Blogging is, very much, part of Web 2.0. Blogging builds communities of like-minded people who not only link to each other in hypertext, but as friends and kindred spirits. We care about each other, in many instants despite the fact that we have never met. Carolyn Elefant over at My Shingle recently posted about the interesting phenomena of our blogging community as it related to the anonymity of the Greatest American Lawyer. She appropriately noted that many people knew that the Greatest American Lawyer was in fact Enrico Schaefer, but they never said a word. Why? Because the community in which we live, a community of respect.

What is this phenomena which makes it safe for bloggers like Pat to share with us the passing of his father. Pat says, "it has nothing to do with client service or the management of law firms. But it has everything thing to do with who I am as a person. And it is a measure of how important this blog is to me that I turn to it when I have something like this to share."

I couldn’t have said it better myself. I have posted about the death of my father-in-law, and the death of my grandmother, here and here. In our times of need, we immediately turn to our blogs because we have something important to say about a special person and because we know we will be embraced by those in our blogging community.

Our sincerest condolences go out to Patrick Lamb and his family on the death of his father Robert E. Lamb. Our thoughts and prayers are with you in this difficult time.