I have heard everyone say it. If I had to, I could not count how many times my pals with kids have asked, “So when are you going to be a dad?” or “How come you don’t have any kids yet?” For years I fielded kind words from my friends who considered me well suited for it, who wondered aloud why I was taking so long. For years I thought they were mad for giving up so much of their free time.

Meanwhile, I was spending mine on every indulgence. Travel, people, ideas, experiences. I do not know what boredom is. Put me in a room and I can occupy myself indefinitely. I was missing something. It was great sometimes. It was also unfulfilling. Eventually I grew stymied by my own modest successes. Eventually, without any sacrifice, without a reason, one day I woke up and began to allow the idea in – that it all meant very little. Matt Johnson wrote it best as a sarcastic anthem to the selfish side of being human, True Happiness This Way Lies:

Have you ever wanted something so badly that it possessed your body and your soul? Through the night and through the day until you finally get it – and then you realize that it wasn’t what you wanted after all? And then those self-same, sickly little thoughts now go and attach themselves to something or somebody new and the whole goddam thing starts all over again…

I am grateful for many things and thank the gods moment to moment for each of them, not least of which is this mother of all adventures. I thought I knew what true collaboration was. I thought I had an idea of how much I had to learn about patience and taking care of myself. There was a time I presumed to be standing on the edge of understanding what was important to me. It may have been practice or it may have just been wasting time. Now, I am learning a kind of generosity I did not know I was capable of. Somehow, there are more authentic versions of such heavy things following me around like sauntering breezes tumbling leaves around my ankles. I have at last been introduced to myself. Looking into the eyes of your own child does that. My pals were hardly kidding.

Tonight my little boy lies here over my shoulder, asleep. Inspired by this picture of Daschel and I, taken by his mother, I write this as I snuggle him and rub his face gently with the back of my hand. I am at this and each passing moment fully aware of him, his mother, our life, and my impact on it. This is now the definition of success. Whatever I used to care about, whatever I once thought important is dust. You better believe this is everything it is cracked up to be. If there is a bigger, more ultimate, adventure I would love to know what it is. I am grateful I did not miss out.

We wished for him, you see, his mother and I. We both wanted nothing more than to be parents. Each of us, alone, from the midst of our previous and interesting (albeit unsatisfying) lives daydreamed a child of our own. A miraculous occurrence. Here he is looking at me (with just one eye now, he’s getting snoozy). In that previous life I would have quietly asked myself, “What are the chances of that?”

Now, I know better. Things just got more interesting than I could have imagined.

One day I will fruitlessly try explaining this to him, knowing full well he will merely have to stumble around until he discovers it on his own as I did. I will likely blather on saying something like, “Baby, life is what you make it. Thoughts become things. Choose only the best ones.”

This is the beginning of a little boy. Imagine a small, special box tucked discreetly away within a very large place, filled with moments, pictures, and stories, all notions of a little boy named Daschel.

I think about water. A lot. I think about water because it has this exquisite power: water can change dramatically while retaining its original properties. It morphs into unrecognizably different states of matter while continuing to be itself, unaltered.

It is easy to resist change. We are conditioned against it in most of our cultures, generally speaking. Is it a natural reflex to resist it? Many of us make great sacrifice to avoid it. Laws are written and put into place to stymy it. Large, expensive buildings are built to protect against it. Minds are made up against it and reject ideas that even hint at it. Blockades of all sorts are built against experience that may lead to it. The fights against it use energy we don’t even have to spare. In some cases, some put themselves at risk in the process physically, emotionally. Heavy stuff.

Steeped in a culture of change, I anticipate it, ride it, enjoy and thrive in it. They say change is the only thing that stays the same so, even as a child, it was clear: why not make friends with it and welcome such opportunities for growth and learning? I owe my resiliency to having a family that faced many changes and stayed together through each and every one, relying on change, even as it was difficult. We collectively and individually learned to make the most of each one and find lessons in change that could not have been learned from any school. We taught ourselves to live better through it and within it. I owe the quality of my life and my capacity for experience to these lessons and to my family for providing access to them.

Wherever I go I meet people who spend a lot of time, energy, and resources fighting change. Inevitably change wins out and I am forced then to watch them tire and cave into it reluctantly, sometimes painfully. I try and not speak during such situations. I have only the choice to let others make their own mistakes in whatever way they choose. There is no other way to learn. We can try to tell them to just let change take them on the ride and enjoy it, but that doesn’t work. It only inspires them to resist more zealously.

I think about water. While I’m watching those I barely know or those I love with all my heart as they adapt to change, I think about water. I think about how long water has been doing it, changing, adapting, enduring, and yet it does not really change. Water does not waste time or energy in the face of the inevitable. It literally just rolls with it. It finds a way around obstacles. Every time.

I think about children, too. In children lies this spirit, willing to explore change, even revel in it. Somewhere along the line most of us seem to lose touch with a kind of innocent tenacity, the way a child solves a problem in play. The effort to change is transparent in children, like water. They have the ability to exhaustively problem-solve using none of the biased doubt (I call it ‘obstructionism’) often found in grown-ups. We make excuses and use our amazing brain-machines to come up with answers for everything, or create atmospheres of resistance, even subconsciously trying to derail change, arrogantly, ignorantly, trying everything except friendly solutions to accepting it and making it work for us.

Being afraid is no fun. It causes stress. It is no good. It affects everyone around us while we give into it. My strategies for dealing with it is this: I think about water. I think about children. Mostly water. I come from the water.

This piece speaks for itself:

Since becoming a grown-up, there are many things about childhood I remember fondly but one of them I was happy to forget about forever and wasn’t anticipating having to deal with again: allergies. For my entire adult life I was allergy-free living in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. .

In Chicago, I have tried over-the-counter remedies, which all leave me feeling speedy and just “off.” But, wait. There’s a better solution: locally made honey.

Check this out: honey has anti-microbial properties and has for centuries been used for medicinal purposes of all sorts, including as a dressing for serious wounds. It’s also high in antioxidants and tastes real good on cereals, in sauces, lemonade and all kinds of stuff.

The most interesting use I’ve ever heard of for honey is as a natural remedy for seasonal allergies. According to various natural health practitioners, pollen found in locally-grown raw honey works over time to desensitize the body to allergens much like traditional allergy shots.

It’s working for me. The season so far has been allergy-free, even amidst rumblings from pals that it is unseasonably allergy-ish, and I would like to thank the local apiaries for selling multiple varieties of the stuff – it has saved my sanity and will make my summer completely enjoyable. Thanks, all you bees and beekeepers out there.

What a year it’s been so far:

We tip our hats to @kdragon87 for the tip on this one:

From Wikipedia:

Tabula rasa is the epistemological thesis that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception. Generally proponents of the tabula rasa thesis favour the “nurture” side of the nature versus nurture debate, when it comes to aspects of one’s personality, social and emotional behaviour, and intelligence. The term in Latin equates to the English “blank slate” (which refers to writing on a slate sheet in chalk) but comes from the Roman tabula or wax tablet, used for notes, which was blanked by heating the wax and then smoothing it to give a tabula rasa.

Of course, this debate has since taken a different route as put forth here by the inimitable Evelyn Fox Keller. All quite interesting enough.

I love the unfettered, personal nature of this:

Part 1

If you didn’t care what happened to me,
And I didn’t care for you,
We would zig zag our way through the boredom and pain
Occasionally glancing up through the rain.
Wondering which of the buggars to blame
And watching for pigs on the wing.

Part 2

You know that I care what happens to you,
And I know that you care for me, too.
So I don’t feel alone,
Or the weight of the stone,
Now that I’ve found somewhere safe
To bury my bone.
And any fool knows a dog needs a home,
A shelter from pigs on the wing.

Since forever, I’ve been hooked on flight. In planes big or small, balloons, anything that flies, goes fast and is otherwise in direct opposition to the side of me that believes strongly in being safe by observing best practices at all times.

I once lived in Juneau, Alaska and used to watch paragliders from my deck, wondering how it must feel to soar unaided by anything but the wind and a little technology, simple in its complexity. I wondered how I’d ever get a chance to find out. Enter my new pal, Gever, who took me up in his paraglider yesterday over Mussel Park just south of San Francisco.

We had so much fun, we’re going out again today. Gever told me it’s just the thing and, after all, some meetings at the Exploratorium and a trip to the airport will take us right by Mussel Park, again, where I shot the footage in the short edit from yesterday’s flight – “Twist my arm,” I said: