My dear son,
At this stage in my life, I am less interested in the people who claim to have figured everything out. I don’t trust certainty the way I once did.
Not because I think truth doesn’t exist. Not because I believe everything is relative or that right and wrong are merely matters of perspective.
I don’t believe that.
But I’ve hovered around these parts long enough to discover something far more unsettling than uncertainty.
The most unsettling truths in life rarely arrive alone.
They arrive holding hands with another truth that appears to contradict them.
And if you’re not careful, you’ll spend your entire life murdering one truth so you can feel comfortable with the other.
I didn’t understand this decades ago. I wanted clean answers. I wanted villains and heroes. I wanted to know who was right and who was wrong. I wanted every disappointment to have someone to blame and every success to have someone to praise.
But life is far less interested in our need for certainty than we are.
I’ve spent years thinking about my own parents. Thinking about what they gave me and what they couldn’t. Thinking about the ways they loved me and the ways they hurt me.
Yes, they made mistakes. And, yes, they did the best they could.
Both things are true.
There were moments when they failed me. Moments when they didn’t understand me. Moments when I wished they had been wiser, gentler, more patient, more emotionally available.
And yet, when I look back now with older eyes, I can see something I couldn’t see then.
They were frightened people trying to raise five children while carrying burdens I never fully understood.
They were human beings trying to solve problems they themselves had inherited.
They were making decisions with the tools they had available.
This doesn’t erase the pain. It doesn’t excuse every mistake. It doesn’t require me to pretend that hurt never happened.
But compassion and disappointment can exist in the same heart.
In fact, I think maturity begins the moment we realize they must.
I want you to remember that.
Because someday you’ll discover that the people you love most will eventually disappoint you.
Not because they don’t love you.
Because they’re human beings.
And you’ll disappoint people too.
Not because you’re cruel.
Because you’re a human being, too.
The world will convince you to put things in boxes. It will repeatedly tempt you to simplify people into categories.
Good or bad.
Hero or villain.
Victim or perpetrator.
Right or wrong.
Resist that temptation.
Human beings are rarely one thing.
Most of us are walking contradictions trying our best to survive ourselves.
I was angry at people for years. Angry at what they said. Angry at what they did. Angry at what they failed to do.
And some of that anger was justified.
In growing up, I’ve discovered that understanding someone isn’t the same thing as excusing them.
You can be hurt by someone’s actions and still understand the fear, insecurity, loneliness, or suffering that created those actions.
You can hold someone accountable and still feel compassion for them.
You can walk away from someone and still love them.
The world tells us these things are contradictions.
They aren’t.
They’re evidence that we’re paying attention.
I think one of the greatest mistakes we make is believing that emotional honesty requires emotional simplicity.
It doesn’t.
The truth is almost always messier.
There are people I miss who I know were wrong for me.
There are experiences I’m grateful for that I would never want to repeat.
There are moments of profound happiness that existed inside periods of tremendous pain.
How can all of those things be true?
Because they happened.
Because life happened.
And life doesn’t care whether its truths fit neatly together.
Here’s another contradiction I’ve wrestled with for years.
In my waning years, the more aware I am of how little any of this will matter.
Not in a depressing sense but in a liberating one.
A hundred years from now, nobody will know my name. Period.
Two hundred years from now, nobody will remember the things I worried about. Period.
The arguments I won. The mistakes I made. The embarrassments that kept me awake at night. The opinions I defended as though civilization itself depended on them.
They’ll all disappear.
And strangely, I don’t find that terrifying anymore.
I find it beautiful.
Because if none of this lasts forever, then every act of love becomes infinitely more precious.
Every conversation.
Every meal shared.
Every laugh.
Every tear.
Every hand held.
Every moment spent with you.
The fact that something ends does not make it meaningless.
It makes it sacred.
When I wrote letters to you, I never wrote them because I believed they’d survive forever.
I wrote them because you exist now.
Because I exist now.
Because I love you now.
And sometimes, son, that has to be enough.
I’ve also spent a great deal of time thinking about how small we are.
A human life is astonishingly brief.
We’re born onto a tiny planet orbiting an ordinary star in a universe so vast that our minds cannot meaningfully comprehend it.
From a cosmic perspective, we’re barely visible.
And yet.
And yet.
I’ve watched people give their lives for one another.
I’ve watched parents sacrifice everything for their children.
I’ve watched strangers help strangers.
I’ve watched human beings create music, art, literature, faith, and love in a universe that never promised us any of it.
How extraordinary is that?
We’re tiny.
And we’re magnificent.
Both things are true.
You should never forget how small you are.
And you should never forget how important your life is.
Carry both truths together.
Walk through the world with humility, but never with insignificance.
You’re not the center of the universe.
But you’re the center of your universe.
And that matters.
Then there is death.
The subject most people spend their lives trying not to think about.
I understand why.
I am afraid of dying. Yes, I am, son.
There. I said it.
Not every day. Not constantly. But enough.
I am afraid of leaving people I love. Afraid of unfinished conversations. Afraid of losing everything familiar.
And yet, strangely, I’m also grateful that I will die.
Because death gives shape to life.
Imagine if nothing ended.
Imagine if every conversation lasted forever.
Every sunset.
Every embrace.
Every joy.
Nothing would matter because there would always be more.
The reason your life matters is because it is finite. Limited.
The reason love matters is because we eventually lose it.
The reason courage matters is because we’re frightened.
Death is not merely the enemy of life.
In some strange and painful way, it is also the thing that gives life its urgency and beauty.
I don’t know exactly what comes after this life.
I have my faith.
I have my hopes.
I have my prayers.
But I also have my uncertainty.
And I’ve stopped believing that uncertainty is the opposite of faith.
Sometimes uncertainty is simply the price of taking existence seriously.
What concerns me more now is not whether I have all the answers.
It’s whether I have enough courage to live honestly without them.
Many of our strongest opinions are not really convictions.
They’re grief.
They’re monuments we’ve built over truths we couldn’t bear to hold.
Sometimes we insist our parents were entirely wrong because admitting they loved us imperfectly hurts too much.
Sometimes we insist someone was entirely evil because admitting they were wounded feels unbearable.
Sometimes we cling to certainty because uncertainty feels like falling.
But what if wisdom isn’t choosing one truth over another?
What if wisdom is learning to sit quietly in the space where both truths exist?
What if becoming fully human means resisting the urge to simplify everything so we can feel safe?
I don’t know if that’s right.
I only know that every year I become less certain about many things and more certain about a few.
Love matters.
Compassion matters.
Humility matters.
Forgiveness matters.
Faith matters.
And the willingness to sit beside uncomfortable truths without running from them might be one of the greatest forms of courage there is.
I will leave you with this, son.
Don’t rush to certainty.
Don’t flatten people into heroes and villains.
Don’t mistake complexity for weakness.
Allow yourself to be angry and compassionate.
Allow yourself to feel grief and gratitude.
Allow yourself to recognize your own smallness while living with enormous purpose.
And when you discover two truths living side by side inside your heart, resist the temptation to bury one of them.
Sit with both.
Listen to both.
Because the deepest truths you’ll ever encounter won’t ask you to choose between them.
They’ll ask you to become large enough to hold them both.
And perhaps that, more than anything else, is what it means to become a fully evolved human.
Dad
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Paulo Freitas On Unsplash
