My dear son,
I am writing this because the house is on fire. It has always been on fire, and it will likely be on fire long after my bones are dust and the memory of my voice has thinned to a whistle in the wind. This is not a cause for alarm. It is simply the state of things.
We live in a perpetually burning building, you and I, and the only question that carries any weight is what we choose to save from the flames before the roof inevitably buckles.
I look at you and I see the same frantic pulse I once carried. You move as if you have somewhere to get to, as if there is a destination that will finally offer you a chair and a glass of water and tell you that the work is done.
It is a lie.
There is no chair. There is only the movement. There is only the breath, coming and going, a small tide in a dark room. I have spent years trying to outrun the smoke, only to find that the smoke is inside me. It is the condition of being alive.
I want to give you a framework, though the word itself is too stiff, too much like a cage. Think of it more as a way of standing in the heat without turning to ash. It is four points, simple and sharp, the kind of things you learn when you stop shouting at the sky and start listening to the silence.
The first is the five minute rule.
It sounds like a trick, a bit of cleverness to get through a boring afternoon, but it is deeper than that. When the world presses in, when the anger or the smallness of a moment feels like it might swallow you whole, you must ask if this will matter in five years.
Most things will not.
Most of what we lose sleep over is nothing but dust motes dancing in a sunbeam. We waste our finite energy on ghosts. If it will not matter then, it does not deserve to ruin you now. You must learn to prune your own suffering. It is a messy business, but if you don’t do it, the weeds will take the garden.
The second is the necessity of daring to live.
To exist is a mechanical habit. The heart beats, the lungs expand, the clock ticks. It requires no effort to merely be. But to live, to actually inhabit the skin you are in, requires a kind of violence against comfort. You must meet the complexity of the world with an open chest. Do not drift like a leaf. A leaf has no say in where it lands. You are not a leaf. You are the tree, and the wind will try to break you, and you must let it try. There is a great consciousness available to you if you stop squinting at the shadows and look at the light until your eyes water.
The third is the weight of memory.
We are nothing but a collection of moments we have managed to hold onto, yet memory is a slippery thing. It transforms the present. When you are fully there, in the room, in the conversation, in the silence, you are not just experiencing the now. You are building the ghost that will haunt you later.
Make it a kind ghost.
Immerse yourself in the sensations of being. The sound of a cup hitting a saucer, the way the light hits a brick wall at four in the afternoon. These are the things that save us. They are the only things we truly own.
The fourth is the conversation you have with yourself.
You are always listening to your own thoughts, and most of those thoughts are unkind. We are our own most vicious jailers. You must be careful how you speak to the man in the mirror.
He is the only person who will be with you until the end.
If you treat him like an enemy, the house will burn much faster. Cultivate a bit of compassion for the struggle. You are a flawed creature, born of flawed creatures, stumbling through a world that does not provide a map. Be patient with the stumbling.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to pour love into things. We are told love is a feeling, a warmth, a soft thing.
It is not.
Love is an act of creation in the face of certain destruction. It is the decision to build something beautiful even though you know the fire is coming.
Whether it is being a father, or writing a sentence, or simply standing by a friend when the night gets too long, you must pour yourself into it without the expectation of being paid back.
We are saved only by this pouring. We are saved by the love we give away, because the love we try to keep for ourselves eventually sours. You will face betrayals. People will fail you, and you will fail them. The world is not fair. It was never promised to be fair. It is a storm you cannot outrun. But you can choose what you anchor yourself to.
If you anchor yourself to the shifting sands of what people think of you, or the accumulation of objects that will only break, you will be swept away.
If you anchor yourself to the act of loving, to the effort of being present, you might just endure.
I am not a wise man. I am just an old man who has stopped running. I have looked at the flames and realized they are not the enemy.
They are the backdrop.
They make the things we save more precious. I cannot shield you from the heartbreak. I would not if I could. To be shielded from heartbreak is to be shielded from life itself, and that is a fate worse than any fire.
The present moment is the only opportunity you have to connect with your life. The past is a ledger of things that cannot be changed, and the future is a fantasy that will likely never arrive in the way you imagine.
There is only the right now.
This breath. This word. The way your hand feels resting on your knee. Do not squander it. Do not fritter away the days waiting for the weather to clear. The weather is what it is.
Walk out into it.
I see you searching for a certainty that does not exist. You want a guarantee that if you do the right things, the outcome will be good.
There are no guarantees.
You can do everything right and still watch the walls come down. This is the painful honesty I owe you. But there is a dignity in the trying. There is a humanity in the refusal to be paralyzed by the uncertainty.
Break free from the need to be ordinary. The ordinary is a trap for people who are afraid of the heat. Forge your own path, even if it is a jagged one. The straight lines are for those who have already given up.
I am tired now.
The light is changing, and the silence is coming back into the room. I don’t have an answer for why the world is as hard as it is. I only know that the hardship gives the love its value. If everything were easy, we would be nothing but shadows.
Our only real task is to decide what is truly worth saving through the act of love and presence. Save what is worth saving. Let the rest burn. I will be here, or I won’t, but the words remain. They are a small thing, but they are yours.
Don’t look for me in the future. Look for yourself in the now. That is where I have always been.
Dad
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Ronan Furuta on Unsplash
