A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

- Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?

I don’t know, man, I don’t know. Who knows where this is going to go. Who knows.

That was the mantra yawning in me at 1:00am on November 6, 2024.

Who knows.

I’m writing this after what felt like the most pivotal night for the future history of the world I or your mother will ever see. I’m writing this in the week leading up to anniversary of your birth. I don’t normally tear up at numbers on a screen changing this way and that. My main job (if you can call it a job) is to make so-called rational, wide-eyed judgments about the numbers. To coldly evaluate the figures of a company’s balance sheet, its income statement, its cash flows, and the analyst community’s morass of growth projections. My job is to adjudicate the data. I’m basically a judge at a numerical beauty pageant. To remain sober and mindful, that’s the responsibility.

You don’t know what any of that means just yet, but I’m sure you’ll find out. The numbers streaming in last night had me choking back tears. They had me craving something to mute the angst. The fears about an uncertain future, about the possibility of more and deeper wars, rising hatred of non-normativity, and some abstract harm you would encounter as a mixed-race child who likes to wear dresses every now and then.

I have my limits, my circle of competence, and I recognize them as any good little investor should. But I’m also always trying to improve. I still sing to myself in the car, mostly when I’m alone. Songs that remind me of this new phase of you — the executive producer, head writer, and director of our daily play. This new phase of us. Songs that remind me of your mother when we started a-courting.

I try to land the harmonies. Harmonies of innocence and of wisdom looking back at innocence.

Which is all to say we’ve all grown up in the last four years. Your daily play rituals now — they’re like choreographed dreams, well-lubricated machines. Rituals make up a life. And breaks from rituals make a life, too. Breaks break into new rituals, for better or worse.

For example, our mornings didn’t used to be like this, but now I wouldn’t have them any other way. After I’ve worked out, showered, and gone back to bed to wait for you to wake me up again, I think up an answer to the loveliest question anyone ever asks me during my day. Dadda, what were your dreams? It’s a writing exercise in and of itself, coming up with a string of dreamlike images that convey (in a way dreams can) the feelings I’m feeling in the moment.

It’s a creative therapy, a catharsis, and it’s one of the only times in my day I feel like I have permission to share something a little deeper of myself. You have no idea what these few minutes every morning mean to me.

One time, I told you that I dreamt the three of us were a family of butterflies. We were fluttering beside a great big tree with too many branches to count. Each branch extended out as far as our eyes could see. And on each branch was a row of cocoons, all green and crystalline and perfect. And, in this dream, we watched them open up, one by one. But none of them produced butterflies. Some cocoons gave us candy, a finger, some sharp pieces of glass, even a whole weed whacker, but no other butterflies. Some cocoons just opened up, pffffft, empty.

These dream telling times are one of the only moments when you let me snuggle with you, and I know I’ve done well when you press your nose into my ear and nuzzle and breathe so as to tickle me.

Oh my gosh, you said to this butterfly dream, Dadda, that’s such a silly dream.

But this morning, going on little sleep, my dream telling was more on-the-fly, a much rougher draft. I told you the three of us were going for a walk in the neighborhood, and one of our neighbors’ giant yards had a giant hill of Cheetos. In the dream, you wanted to eat the Cheetos, but I tried to tell you they were too dirty to eat. You wouldn’t let go of the desire to eat the Cheetos. I relented. You let go of my hand, and you ate every single one of our neighbors’ Cheetos till your belly stretched the fabric on your Curious George shirt just enough to make you look pregnant.

This morning, you chuckled again. Nuzzled again. Oh, Dadda, that’s a silly one.

I don’t have much of a public life. Unlike many people (I assume), I don’t air my grievances or my beliefs upon the digital world of other pixels and other eyeballs and other brains. I keep the thought-vomit and the braggadocio to myself. It wasn’t always this way. I used to spill my poetic guts as it were, posting lines and witticisms and quotations and portraits to put a voice to my pixels stored bitwise on some corporation’s servers. This is a part of growing up that I didn’t see coming – that digital, adolescent need to broadcast and make statements. For me, that public relations urge has faded into the background and plays as loud as a shower down the hall.

Not even with a whimper, it’s just evaporated.

These days, you and your mom comprise the vast majority of my waking thoughts. There’s not much I want to say to the world most of the time, not much I want the world to see of me. Maybe that’s because of our social station and not wanting to call attention to it, maybe it’s because of the worry that I have nothing much to say that the world might actually need to hear. I have what I assume to be normal thoughts for a youngish father these days. What world is my kiddo going to grow up into? Am I doing everything I can to be there for my kiddo? For my life partner, the current default parent?

In short – how can I be better and how can I make it better?

Like I said, I have been trying a lot — I have been failing a lot — to improve myself in numerous ways. I’ve come up short in restarting a writing practice. I’ve come up short in recreating my physique. I’ve come up short in curbing my various retail therapy habits.

I don’t read as much as I would like. Nor do I floss as much as I know I should. I bite my nails. I use bathroom breaks to scroll the internet (the modern day equivalent of smoking). These mistakes and shortcomings flutter by inside some short-term memory chamber inside my brain. Most mornings, sleep is able to clear the whooshing, and I’m able to wakeup feeling mostly good about myself.

But this morning, lacking sleep, the normal cache-clearing process didn’t run. I felt an impulse to kick myself.

So, another mistake, another miscalculation. We’ve had torrential rains today, off and on. Good weather for a somber mood and a feeling of loss. The mistake was trying to run through it anyway. I was weighed down, you see. Underfed. Underslept. And yet, I attempted to do battle with the emotional weather. You can imagine the result. In what was supposed to be a 2-hour easy run on the AI-generated training schedule, I found myself huffing and puffing and untying my shoes in a puddle of sweat and rain and disappointment after just about 30 minutes.

Growing older, mistakes and miscalculations and disappointments become part of the water. You also learn how important sleep becomes to your overall functioning as a responsible and healthy human being.

Which is to say something clicked in the shower. Amidst the fear and sadness and anxiety and sleeplessness of last night, the failures and losses and overestimates of the last twenty four hours, I could hear myself thinking a thought that might be worthwhile. Something to share.

Growing older, I’m convinced now, is like a narrator’s voice fading in over the background noise of the droll day-in and day-out to remind you that (1) the future has already happened and (2) you can’t cross any bridge until you get to it. I don’t know if this letter explains what that means or not. But this feels like a good summary of the main thing I’ve learned in the last four years.

You are still young at the time of my writing (and maybe the time of your reading) this. This narration doesn’t even register yet; the background music is still too bumpin’ (it’s probably “Step in Time” from Mary Poppins). And I’m glad this is how it is, because I’d be afraid that our morning routine would be less magical otherwise.

You’ll undoubtedly grow out of our current morning routine – you might be doing so now – but I don’t have to cross that bridge yet, thankfully.

There are more branches on the tree, extending out past what we can see. There are more cocoons yet to open up.

This is what you’ve taught me in these four years. You taught me how to thank this fact of life. The cocoons may not give us butterflies, but we can make do with glass shards, candy bars, and weed whackers. When life presents you with Cheeto mountains, eat that shit up. What other job could there be?