Dear Everyone,
The quiet spaces become more precious the older I get. Which feels backwards, because the house has been getting quieter and quieter. In fact, the Child Per Capita Noise Production Rate (CPCNPR) in our household dropped precipitously after the kids hit double-digit ages and has continued a steady downward trajectory ever since. Long gone are the running and shrieking toddlers, the battery-powered bears with no volume controls, the ninja warrior play. Now they're teens (!), which means they're getting their first taste of feeling tired when bedtime is not at hand. Now they start processing things quietly. Now they learn solitude.
Even the dead sprint pace of life that comes with kids is showing signs of letting up. It's not exactly slow yet, but it feels like the world's foot eased up on the gas pedal some. Just a bit. Last Saturday I woke up not knowing what I was going to do that day, and reflected that it had been 1.5 decades since I'd last seen a day begin that way.
Everything feels noisier, though. Though the pace and the literal decibel levels in our home are lower than they were 10 years ago, somehow life itself is straight louder to me. And I think it's the emotions. The stakes.
My son just finished up working his first seasonal job. He'll have his driver's license in 7 months. The weekend after Thanksgiving, I took my daughter to her first death metal concert (which was literally loud, so very literally loud). Both of them are discovering that they have emotions they don't consciously grasp, needs they can't quite put a name to. We're getting promotional mailers from colleges. It's getting easier, but it's also getting so much harder.
I think back on that period when Jack was three and Georgia was fresh baked. I was home most of the time, in the process of being very, very slowly laid off from my first software development job. I was awash in the chaos and racket and mess of being a more or less stay at home dad while confronting the anxiety of losing my first professional job. All this happening in the midst of a contracting job market that had just been flooded with dozens of programmers. There was plenty of free-floating anxiety, resentment, and with a toddler and a baby in the house, noise. It was really something.
But when I think about those times now, they seem magical to me. Not easier, because you can't call a house full of tiny people spraying tears and Cheerios and poop everywhere easy. Sleep was hard. Stress and exhaustion levels were off the charts. But it was simpler. The difficulty had a laser focus to it. It wasn't complex. And that difficulty was the cost I paid to get to stay home all day and bond with my children in a way dads almost never do. Turns out the idiot who destroyed my company did me one of the biggest favors of my life.
But once high school and college are on the horizon, their needs get simultaneously fewer and harder. That feeds the darker corners of my parental fear. What if we're putting too much on him? What if we aren't pushing enough? Is she really okay, or is she just saying that while she quietly goes to hell behind our backs? I started out with grand dreams of them becoming interesting and successful adults, and I've no doubt that will happen, but honestly I'll consider the job done if they can just make it to adulthood relatively happy and without taking on significant damage.
It's hard to be a whole person. It's exponentially harder to make one.
All that fear creates its own background noise, and it follows you everywhere, a sort of minor-key thrumming of your brainstem, accompanied by a mild but pervasive muscular tension. And the only way to treat it is to turn and face it every single day. Quietly, mindfully, lovingly. Acknowledging that it's there. Embracing it. Allowing it to soften you, rather than using it as justification to become brittle and hard. And you can only do that in the quiet moments.
I take them where I can get them. In the lopsided office chair outside my son's piano lesson. Carrying my 45-pound rescued pit bull baby to bed so I can snuggle with his much older, much smaller brother. Sending Slack messages to a dear friend who's spent the last couple of years trying very hard not to die of cancer. Meditating while first my daughter and then the pit bull cropdusts me. Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in. Breathing out, I vow never to breathe in again.
It's a practice of finding the hidden reading nooks in your day, in your mind. You won't be able to spend hours in them, but even a few minutes can set you to rights again, if you follow the simple rules they used to teach us about train tracks: Stop, look, and listen.
Listen:
You are, right this very moment, sitting in a chair, or possibly standing. You are reading a letter written by a bald man in a place with the unlikely name of "Arkansas". That letter is sparking thoughts and feelings in your head that may be pleasant or unpleasant. You are inhabiting a body that has volume and weight. It is constantly telling you things about temperature and pressure and light and odor and sound, and it is occasionally a mutinous bastard, but it is yours and you are in it now. In the back of your mind is the subtle clamoring of plans, future worries, past resentments and regrets. You might be remembering an errand you need to run or someone you need to call. Those thoughts never shut up, even when you think they have. They are with you now.
Now you be with them, with all of it. With this letter, your body, your worries and regrets, the dog farts wafting up from the area rug, the sounds of play from children and hovering worry from their mothers, the snores of their fathers. The cool sensation of the in-breath in your nostrils, the warmth of your exhalation. Be with it, savor it like you've never experienced any of it before, or perhaps like you might never again. All of this, this current moment. This is your only possession. It might well be your liberation. And it tells you a very simple story that goes down to the core of the earth:
You are here. You are home.
Happy holidays from all of us.