Letters to My Son: The Leaking Cistern

My dear son,

When the sun comes up there is a terrible, silent ripping of the night that most men sleep through because they have forgotten that a day is a thing to be reckoned with, not merely endured. It bleeds into the sky with a promise and a threat, handing you a coin you did not earn and cannot keep. You wake up and there it is, this heavy, golden currency of hours, warm in your palm, and the great tragedy is that it feels infinite when the morning is young. It feels like a river that will never stop flowing, but it is not a river, son. It is a cistern with a slow leak, and every drop that hits the dust is gone forever.

I have been thinking about the ledger of a man’s life. We are careful creatures when it comes to our pockets. If I gave you a stack of bills, green and crinkled, you would fold them tight. You would hide them in a boot or sew them into the lining of your coat. You would watch the eyes of strangers. If a thief tried to snatch them, you would fight with a desperate strength because you know what that money cost you in sweat and bent backs. But time? Time is a different ghost. It comes to us unbidden, free of charge, and because it has no price tag stamped on it, we treat it like water in a flood season. We let it spill. We let it run through the floorboards.

You have twenty-four hours. That is the allowance. It is deposited into the bank of your existence every midnight, a fresh stillness that belongs only to you. There is no rollover. You cannot stash an hour of Tuesday in a jar to use on a Sunday when you are tired. You cannot lend it to a friend or borrow against next week’s sum. When the clock strikes twelve and the day turns over, whatever you failed to use dissolves into smoke. It is the only fortune that vanishes whether you spend it or not.

Now, I see the way the world pulls at you. I see the glowing screens and the little windows into other people’s lives that serve no purpose but to make you feel small or hungry for things you do not need. It is easy to let the time slip away on scrolling, on that numbness that isn’t quite rest and isn’t quite living. It is a kind of paralysis. You sit and you wait. You worry about calamities that haven’t happened and likely never will. And while you are suspended in that gray fog of inaction, the clock is marching. It does not pause because you are sad. It does not slow down because you are confused. It eats the seconds with a voracious, mechanical appetite. I want you to look at your day as if it were a field you have to plow.

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A man cannot plant a crop if he does not know what he wants to grow. Most men wander through their hours like a stray dog in a marketplace, sniffing at this and that, distracted by a sudden noise or a scrap of meat. They react. They do not act. To use your time, you must have an intention that is harder than granite. It is not enough to say you want to be happy or successful. Those are just words, smoke rings blown into the air. You must know that today, this specific Tuesday, you are going to lay three rows of brick, or you are going to read until your eyes ache, or you are going to walk until you understand the shape of the hill behind the house.

When you wake up, the day is raw material. It is clay. If you do not put your hands on it and shape it immediately, it hardens into a lump of nothing. You must seize the morning with a kind of ruthlessness. Do not let the world dictate your first hour. If you check the news or look at the screen first thing, you are letting a thousand strangers march through your bedroom in muddy boots. Keep the door barred. Decide what the day is for before you let the world in.

There is a difference between being busy and being purposeful. I have seen men who run around like ants on a hot stove, sweating and panting, moving piles of dirt from one side of the yard to the other, accomplishing nothing but exhaustion. That is not spending time well. That is wasting it with great energy. The real work of living requires attention. It requires you to look at a thing — a person, a task, a problem — and see it clearly, without the film of distraction over your eyes.

When you are with a friend, be with the friend. Do not be halfway somewhere else. When you are working, work. The scrolling you do, the waiting, the worrying — these are thieves. They are pickpockets. They steal the richness of the moment and leave you with a hollow feeling in your chest. To pay attention is to love. It is the only way we can truly possess the time we are given. If you are chopping wood, pay attention to the grain and the heft of the axe. If you are listening to a woman speak, pay attention to the way her voice catches on certain words. This is how you stretch time. You make it deep instead of wide.

The ledger balances itself at the end, always. There is a terrible clarity that comes at night, just before sleep, when you look back at the trail you left. Regret is a heavy stone to carry to bed. It is the knowledge that you had the capital and you threw it into the fire. You traded a precious, unrepeatable hour for a cheap distraction. You traded a chance to be kind for a moment of petty anger. You traded the building of a skill for the comfort of laziness.

But there is another side to this coin. There is the exhaustion of a man who has spent himself completely. This is a good tiredness. It settles into the bones like a warm bath. It is the feeling that you have wrung the rag dry. You used the time. You didn’t save it — you can’t save it — but you converted it into something real. You turned it into a memory, or a table, or a relationship, or a piece of knowledge. When you close your eyes after a day like that, there is no regret. There is only the quiet satisfaction of a job finished. You want to build a life where you are too tired for regret.

Understand this, son: the clock is a machine that does not care about you. It is indifferent to your joy and your suffering. It ticks the same for the king and the beggar. It will tick while you are crying and while you are laughing. This sounds cruel, but it is actually a liberation. It means the responsibility is entirely yours. You cannot plead with time. You cannot bribe it. You can only ride it.

You are the captain of this small, leaking vessel. Every second gets spent. That is the rule of the game. The only choice you have is what you buy with it. You can buy numbness. You can buy fear. You can buy envy. Or you can buy mastery. You can buy connection. You can buy the quiet dignity of having tried your best.

Do not fool yourself into thinking there is always tomorrow. Tomorrow is a ghost. It is a rumor. All you have is the heat of the sun on your neck right now. All you have is the breath in your lungs this second. The shadows are getting longer even as you read this. The sun is already sliding down the arc of the sky.

So, take this day. Take it with both hands. Do not be gentle with it. Use it up. Wring it out. Spend it like a millionaire who knows he will die a pauper. Let the scrolling go. Let the worrying die of starvation. Look at the world, look at your work, and pour yourself into it until there is nothing left but the dark and the sleep of a man who has truly lived.

Dad

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This post was previously published on medium.com.