June 15, 2023
My amazing son,
In my mind’s eye, I can barely picture the woman who began this journal almost two decades ago. I had started work at the Department of State, and your dad and I had married the year before in Oxford, excited to start a family as we both turned 30. It was as if we wished for you and you arrived. I found out I was pregnant after we had already planned a trip to Australia in October 2003 to attend a friend’s wedding in the wine country of the Barossa Valley (I did not anticipate having to avoid alcohol or fly 20 hours across the world newly pregnant). You were a world traveler from your earliest days!
As you embark on this next chapter, with the newfound independence that will come with it, I wanted to share a few humble pieces of advice. What I offer here, I earned one gray hair at a time. It is the wisdom of trying and failing, of being disappointed but seeking resilience afterwards, and of loving imperfectly and learning from life’s heartbreaks in the many forms in which they come. I offer this advice knowing that your journey will be different than my own. And I offer it knowing that if someone had offered it to me at your age, I would not have known how to adapt or change. But nonetheless, here it is with hope and love.
Change
At my high school graduation, I gave a speech that I am sure was full of trite expressions of the consequential moment it represented to me and my classmates. My grandmother had just passed away, and I remember wondering if she could see me delivering that speech “from heaven.” The only parts of the speech I recall are mentioning her death, quoting Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If,” and offering a bit of wisdom I could not possibly have understood at the time – that“the only thing we can rely on to remain constant in life is change.”
It's true. When I was younger, I thought life was a linear progression. A straight line up towards “success.” It would be defined by all the standard markers along the way: college graduation, grad school, a job I was proud of, a marriage, children, a home. I thought as I ticked off all of those accomplishments, I would be headed towards “success.” But now, in the middle of my life, I see that life is full of surprises – both good and bad. It is not at all linear. There are ups and downs, joys and sorrows. There are crushing disappointments and unfair things. Beautiful things too.
There is no moment at which we obtain “success.” Indeed, the only way to true success is to develop the skill to live in the moment as it is happening. Try not to worry about the future or regret some aspect of the past. You do not have control over the future or the past. You can only control how you experience and conduct yourself in the moment you are living.
Enjoy those moments – they are precious. Every one of them. Pause and look around you whenever you can. Take in the sights, smell the smells, listen to birds and the ocean and happy chatter. Do you remember when we worked on a project about Mary Oliver’s A Summer’s Day? It ends with: “Tell me, what is that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
After you read it, you went for a walk in the woods along the bike trail you take to school. You told me how – without your phone and your airpods – you saw things you had never seen before on the path. Try to turn off your phone and pay attention whenever you can. There is beauty and wonder all around you.
And each moment is fleeting. The moment you are in right now will never happen again. Relish it.
Someday, you might find yourself sitting with your toddler when you’re tired and have some looming crisis at work. You might find yourself wishing away the moment, hoping to get to the next one when things will be less stressful. In that moment, pause. Look at your adorable, frustrating, beautiful, willful toddler and pick him (or her!) up and snuggle him. And remember, one day, you’ll be sitting down to write a letter tearfully nostalgic for that moment and wishing you had lingered longer in it.
Your Knowing
Of all the advice I have shared with you in my life, this is the advice I wish I had known and believed earlier. I was an adult with a career and two children before I even saw glimpses of this truth. And as I have settled uncomfortably into it, I have felt lighter, freer, at peace.
Inside of you is something I like to call your “knowing.” I have often put my hand on my midsection when I talk about it and said something like “our knowing is where are hearts and our mind meet up in our tummy.” That’s, at least, how it “feels” to me. Your knowing is the voice inside you that tells you what your passions are. That knows what is kind or good or true. If your knowing were a compass, it would point true north.
Too often, the clear, strong voice of our knowing is drowned out in the noise and cacophony of life. People will not hesitate to share with you what they think you should do. I often marvel at how freely we humans give advice to others about how others should live their lives (when we are usually hopelessly ruining ours). I also marvel at how much we humans want others around us to think about and see the world as we do. If possible, avoid people with strong opinions about how you should live your life. (In fact, if possible, avoid people with strong opinions).
Instead, practice listening to yourself. Sometimes I have to find a quiet, hidden place to listen to myself. For any problem you have, think through the pros and cons (Nana calls this the Ben Franklin balance sheet), anticipate the consequences of various courses of actions, and be thoughtful about the effects of your actions on others. And then, sit quietly after having weighed those factors, and the way forward will come to you. You’ll know. You won’t need to find it somewhere else. It will be right there – inside of you.
Do the things in life that make you feel passion. Do what brings you joy or meaning. I am not suggesting you shouldn’t seek advice from people you trust. I have always found it useful to ask people who I know have my best interests at heart how they view a problem. And I am certainly not saying that you should hedonistically do whatever feels right to you in the moment regardless of how it affects other people. One of the things I love most about you is that you are thoughtful and kind. I think there is enormous value in going through life being graceful and avoiding unnecessarily hurting others.
Instead, I am sharing that I spent much of my life, until very recently, scanning every room I was in to see what other people thought of what I was doing and saying. I was hungry for other people’s approval (for myriad reasons) and I often twisted myself in knots trying to please everyone. I often ended up displeasing more people by trying to please everyone. I sometimes even twisted my own truths to please others. You simply cannot please everyone. And there will be people in your life who will want things because it is good for them, not because it is good for you.
So, as much as you can, strike out on your own path instead of following a herd. If you do something and it brings you joy, do it more often. If something doesn’t feel good or hurts, that’s a sign – leave it. For your career, pick something that will inspire you, that will make you want to get out of bed with a sense of purpose. Don’t do it for money or prestige. Do it because you find meaning in it.
You are an old soul. Wise beyond your years. Your knowing will always guide you to your true north. Listen to it.
Love
Finally, a word on love. About two years ago, I asked you about dating. You shared that you had read a statistic that only 7% of high school romances result in marriage, which surprised you. A source of "unnecessary heartbreak." I hoped to convince you then, as I do now, that we humans tend to get better at love when we practice a bit. I hope you won’t be afraid to date, to get your heart broken, to fail and try again, and to find meaning and joy in your relationships with others.
I say this because there is nothing better than love. Love from your family, romantic love, love of a friend. It is the most important thing in life and the one thing that makes life worth living.
When I was in college, I read a passage by the philosopher Bertrand Russell entitled “What I Have Lived For.” I was so enthralled with it I saved it and would quote from it from time to time. Russell shared that he lived life for three passions, the first one of which was love:
“I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness -- that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined.”
I imagine in the first and last sentences, Russell was speaking of romantic love and surely it does bring poetic ecstasy -- although that seems a bit artificial and saccharine to me today. What I notice now is that Russell leaves out the opposite face of love – that it can also bring sorrow or grief through loss.
Loss through a death, a slow drifting apart, or an angry parting. I lost my dad to a sudden heart attack in my 20s. His death rocked me. How could someone I loved be here one day and gone the next? This duality of love – that it brings both “ecstasy” and pain – is why some people avoid it. To protect their hearts from the pain of loss. They may even enter into relationships but never open up or share what’s inside themselves with another. They do not want to be vulnerable.
C.S. Lewis, in his book The Four Loves, wrote this about those people:
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give it to no one. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”
Do not let a fear of being hurt prevent you from loving. There is so much beauty and comfort in love. We go out into the world stronger and truer when we know there are people who love us at home or in our hearts. There is often something akin to relief in being understood and loved.
So many times, I have shared a problem with a friend and have felt the peace that comes from seeking solace in someone who knows me. Knows my intentions. Knows my inclinations. It’s a sort of a shorthand developed over years of love that allows one to start any conversation with an assumption of good will.
Adrienne Rich says: “An honorable human relationship - that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love" - is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other. It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in so doing we do justice to our own complexity. It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.”
There are many important ideas here – love is not a feeling, it is a set of actions. It is a process. True love takes time to build. And it should be built slowly, faithfully, carefully, and honestly. Building love requires vulnerability. Building it requires you to share yourself, even the parts you don’t like or want to change. And building it makes you a better person – because someone who loves you will not let you live in self-delusion. Someone who loves you will help you be a better you and will grow with you.
The Intersection of Change, Knowing, and Love
So here is where my three offerings come together. The basis of any true loving relationship between two people is the courage to share our true selves, and in order to do that, we must first know ourselves. Just like the Bard taught us: “This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou cannot then be false to any other.”
Tell the people you love, with integrity, who you are and what you want. Avoid attempting to “control narratives” so that you are always the good guy or the best. Do not be afraid to let someone you love see you, warts and flaws and all. We all have our weaknesses. But the people who love you know your weaknesses and love you anyway. So be honest with them, and in your sharing of your true self, you will have a partner in your continued growth.
The people who love you will be with you throughout all that inevitable change in life. They will be with you when you’re soaring to celebrate you. They will be there when you’re nose-diving to help soften the crash landing. They will be there to tell you when you’re not being your best self – and that, my son, is an act of love and courage.
When someone who loves you invests in you to help you see something about yourself that you’re not seeing, accept it with gratitude. Sometimes, I have been dragged kicking and screaming into understanding something I didn’t want to know about myself by someone who loves me. After I got over my righteous certainty, I felt gratitude that someone would go that hard way with me and take the time to make me a better me. Listening to those who love you is not inconsistent with listening to your knowing. Your knowing will tell you whether those people have your best interests at heart, whether the source of what they are sharing is love for you, and whether there is wisdom worth considering in what they are sharing.
Launching
One of my favorite books is The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. In it, he writes about the relationship of a parent to a child:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and
He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
That is how I picture this moment: your launching off into the world and my being so honored to have had the time with you to prepare you. I know your arrow will go far. Enjoy every minute of the journey and know how much I will always love you.
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