michael-dean-k/

After being a father for six months, here’s a predictable observation: days feel similar. I bring my daughter out, of course, to parks and pools, so we’re not entirely homebound. But I can’t, for example, spontaneously take a train to Manhattan the night of July 3rd to see the ball drop before the semiquincentennial—it’s not that I particularly want to do that, it’s just that every impulse to “get out” is filtered through, an is-it-worth-doing-this-with-a-stroller-and-supplies filter, or an is-this-even-possible filter, or a would-this-be-inconvenient-to-my-wife filter. There is a common groove: work bright and early, baby stuff all day, and then resetting, relaxing, and recalibrating at night.

So, at least for now, there is notable change in “experience.” Not a change in quality, but in type; it’s a lapse in variety of experience, which personally doesn’t bother me. Your mental fortitude for early parenting probably bears some resemblance to how you fared during the pandemic. There is no virus, but a similar warping in the nature of days.

But, the pearl and point of having kids is the experience of raising a child; it lacks the variety that a single nomad in Bali might have, but it is a singular channel of experience with extreme depth, meaning, and change. Once you figure out how to make your kid laugh, and how to intuitively communicate without language, and where they are ticklish, and how to guide their attention to get them to focus on books—you discover the tremendous variety within the thing that matters most.

As a writer though, it seems like I prevent myself from writing about parenting. I tend to mention it loosely, without my daughter’s name and without much detail. I always find myself not thinking linguistically in moments with my kid. Maybe I should? I just usually forget. There feels like so much nuance packed in a single event and glance, that to stop and write it both severs me from the potency of it, and sever me from them.

So, while I find myself in recent months with few “stories” I’d happily share an essay around, I do find myself reading more than I ever have in my life. Considering she sleeps a lot, on me, it’s just a space I have. I imagine when she starts walking, or gets older, this might evaporate, but for now I’m reading 1,000+ pages per month. I feel less anxious about the lapse of new experiences, knowing that in a few years it all comes back, and I’ll come back with a new head, a new constellation of nodes to bring to the variety of experiences, along with a little person who will force me to see everything anew.

I set up a chronofile, inspired by Buckminster Fuller's system, where he logged every 15 minutes for like 70 years. That's intense! I'm going to run an experiment. In the past I've operated under the premise of "capture as little as possible," as in, capture just what's worth it, because then you'll have a mess of notes to go through. But agents change this; all the yak shaving (tedious, endless work) is handled. This could lead to hyperlogging, 100-400 logs per day. I've done this before as a kind of Hermetic T1 ritual (from Franz Bardon), and it's an intense way to see everything crossing your mind. This scale of writing might be the best way to "meta-program" your psyche. Essays do this in a way, but an essay let's you go very deep on a particular idea (and you might be deluding yourself, or you might be articulating a take in an ideology that you'll outgrow in 5 years).

It's almost never worth neglecting your core routines to sprint on a project. Projects should happen within the calibrated confines of your routine; they shouldn’t eclipse everything. This doesn’t mean everything should be manicured and precise (obsession is blind to structure). It means that deadline and fire should never override your freedom.

When people or pets die, we feel the sadness that they no longer get to experience our year-to-year reality. Our day-to-day seems totally stable. We feel pain that our dying father-in-law will never meet our unborn kids.

Of course this pace of life is experientially real, but in times of pain it helps to remember that life itself is actually the exception. For most of existence you’ll be unborn or dead. At the cosmic scale, it’s as if a whole person’s life is just a day. Have you had a good one?

Your grandparents died yesterday, your parents died today, you die tomorrow, and your thrice great grandkids die by the end of the week. This mindshift helps. I am not owed 100 years, I was granted today. It becomes less about you and more about the unbroken chain.

After ordering my chicken roll I felt the impulse to grab my phone and process my email. Instead I let myself look around, bored. I noticed ornate lamps, an old pizzaman statue, the imagined lives of the two disinterested employees, and the multiple silos of spices in glass shakers. Each thing compounded into the next with associations and collisions of meaning, triggering something unsayable that you might call “a feeling.” (Is this what they’re referring to in that Black Eyed Peas song?) This only takes 10 seconds. It feels like I have access to awe-on-command, but often I’m just running background scripts. There’s a slowness and an intention required to see things outside of your preconceived schemas—to bypass your shortcuts of sight, and instead behold all things through twin lenses: of what the thing actually is, and what it might mean. And perhaps when you tap into that flash of mysticism, there’s an added meta-excitement, that you are—for just a moment—outside of yours illusions and ego games, a living being lost in a perceptual jungle-puzzle.

How to write about aesthetic awe without sounding nuts … What kind of person has a peak life experience from looking at the back of a train seat's headrest, or window grime? This is not a wedding or child birth or a psychedelic. I'm just heading into Flushing. If anything, it’s a brief, temporary, but shocking reversion to a truly childlike vision. That doesn’t even mean playful. It means to see something fully, without scheme or schema, complication or concern. Without ego (name, street address, phone number, or your monthly goal), the mundane takes on religious lighting.

To see moments outside of narrative almost feels apocalyptic. A stop sign and a certain angle of light can produce a religious experience for someone who has just delatched from the day's, week's, month's, year's, and life's plans. What it is to be a pair of eyes again.