Don’t waste the magic of Saturday mornings with work.
All in Reflections
The two strategies - providing special attention and treating everyone consistently well - need to be in tension.
There are men that are trying to reimagine what it means to be a man. As in, how to be a different and hopefully better kind of man.
And we are doing this without role models to draw from. We are breaking ground, and it is remarkable.
Radha was never born or conceived. Yet, I know she is my sister. I hope our sons realize the gravity of the gift - brotherhood - they have.
When we took Apollo to his final visit, the Veterinarian disarmed me with her compassion.
Bo, Myles, and Emmett - if you ever find this remember that you are not here to justify us as parents. Remember to love each other. And remember our prayers for you.
We all try to avoid unpopularity because it’s terrible. And so we have this big, consequential, choice: do we try to become popular by being aggressive or will be choose some other way?
We are all on a journey. We are all living out our own memoir, in a way. For our journey to become that of a hero, we must face our fears and conquer them. For me, that means confronting and conquering loneliness.
Every generation has to take it’s turn and lead. For millennials, our time is nearly here. How will our grandchildren remember us?
Exploring space has expanded what we believe about the universe and ourselves. The James Webb Space Telescope could change everything that follows.
Our Christmas Tree is our life story, our histories intertwined with the branches and lights. It is the only time machine I know of that actually works - drawing me into memories and stories of a different time and place. This to me, is magic.
I want to get out of this self-perpetuating cycle of men being held to a low standard of parenting.
The world of children, I’ve found, can be a remarkable window into the world of adults. So much of our behavior, motivations, fears, and hopes end up being so similar, at their core, to those of children.
Little kids want to be seen, because they know intuitively that to be seen is to be loved. And adults, it seems, are not that different.
At some point in the past 10 years, I stopped dreaming. Everything became goals and ROI and avoiding waste. I didn’t realize it at the time, and even in retrospect it was hard to see.
I don’t want that. I want to dream again.
But I’ve lost, for good reason, the youthful swagger and ignorance that propelled me to dream. The new question has become, how do we dream from a posture of humility?
I don’t want to live in a fear-driven culture for the next twenty years. I’ve grown tired of it.
It seems to me that “know thy self” is good advice to end an attachment to fear. If we have something more compelling to focus on, we have something to think about that’s more compelling than the fear others are trying to project into our lives.
We recently returned from a few days in North Cascades National Park in northern Washington. We heard about it from a list of “underrated National Parks” and it really is terrific (and underrated).
If you have spent any time hiking and camping, these vignettes will likely rekindle memories of your own adventures in nature. If you haven’t been to one of our country’s amazing National Parks, I really recommend it.
I have such inner turmoil about feeling like I’m lagging behind my peers, in terms of career development. It’s totally irrational and stupid (and I know it), but I still feel it. I always thought it was just it was social comparison and some inevitability of human psychology.
But now, I’m wondering whether it’s just a response to the kind of covert bullying we adults torture each other with. If career angst is a response to the stimulus of feeling bullied, that’s actually a good thing. Because we can choose to respond differently.
Ballet, and dance in general, is one of my great loves. Reflecting on it as an adult, I’ve come to appreciate it as more than just a performing art. The craft of ballet is one that cultivates a mindset of joy, grace, and intensity.
I wanted to share a bit about ballet because I’ve come to lean on it as an alternative to the cultural mindset of dominance, competition, and winning at all costs.
Unless I define “enough”, surplus doesn’t exactly exist.