Fathering the Future

When I was little I spent time wandering the streams and fields of my childhood home. We shared time with dogs, cats, and horses each day. When there was nothing to do, we created games with the trees and sticks. We raced through the trails in the woods and shared what we found.

The summers were endless and the sunsets were our daily entertainment.

I remember when we expanded our social awareness in middle school and began to include the suburb kids and the city kids in our activities, and they didn’t know what fireflies were. Catching bugs and creating lanterns with their glowing tails was alien to my new friends.

The reason being that the stillness that preceded these activities was also absent these suburban friends.

On the farm, we had 4 television channels and cable lines did not reach us until after the year 2000. Even then, it was fiber and not cable. So we had janky antennas and were constantly told to go outside, to read, or to make art. This meant that there was not a background noise of media constantly drowning our home. Yes, in the afternoons, my father would add talk radio to the mix; but this was intelligible and not constantly seeking to capture the audience.

Our home was far more STILL and CALM than homes with televisions filling the space with dissonance.

And now as an adult, I often declare that my children will not use screens; and not be used by them. Yet I see so many parents recruiting the ipad as the nanny. The television as the primary care-giver. Will I really be different?

I see friends joining churches and participating in afterschool volunteer roles to ensure their child has a shot at being noticed, at achieving success, and at social integration. But is this the path for me?

My girlfriend and I are seriously considering marriage and children, so these questions are critical to answer before we embark on this journey. What we know for certain is that time will constrict when the children arrive. And what we know is that our lives have been consistently enriched by painting outside the lines, travelling the world, and doing things differently.

So we are mapping out worlds where we spend summers in Bali, school years in LA and Tulum, and buy vacation homes in Italy. These distributed global community hubs will stretch our children’s awareness beyond the consistency of one neighborhood and open their minds to the world. Not to mention this global lifestyle is SIGNIFICANTLY more affordable than living in LA year round.

But within the global lifestyle, how will our children create structure? That critical component that allows children to assemble their frame of the world and know how to make sense of it all. I believe that this will be rooted in practice. The practice of mindfulness and presence. As Veronica and I both meditate each morning, we plan to include our children in this practice from birth. We know it will not go as planned; and the children will cry and be uncomfortable; and we will still proceed.

I can hear the parents reading this laughing at us; but that’s nothing new. What if it works out? What if we get through the temper tantrums and exhausted tears of the kids and they learn to self soothe early on?

The inner awareness of breath and body is the foundation for a life that makes sense, divorced from any specific location. We will build and train inner security so that our family will know where we are at all times. We will instill in the family that sense of stillness and calm that characterized my upbringing on the farm.

We have spent the Thanksgiving holiday with my family, including several nieces and nephews. As aunts and uncles, we cannot overstep on parenting. However, my siblings have chosen the screens to assist in parenting. This created an always on buzz behind each moment such that the first time the kids were outside, I immediately ran to each room and turned off the televisions for the first time since we arrived. This revealed a stillness reminiscent of my childhood; yet fully absent from the home today. I called out to my father and mother, “can you hear that?!” To which my father responded with relief, “it’s quiet.”

I believe the children can feel this. And if we establish the baseline here; they will return here instead of continuing to seek dysregulation and stimulation until they crash. In fact, when my niece was young I taught her yoga and meditation and she loved it. I heard from my brother that she had been asking for yoga youtube channels to follow at age six! This tells me that she felt and appreciated the effects of inner stillness and will remember that anchor even after only a few days practicing.

So what is clear is that as Veronica and I prepare for parenthood; we are also called to deepen our embodiment and mindfulness practices. We get to cultivate the environment that will enable our family to exist and thrive in all locations around the world.

( …note to self to look back at this post and reflect on how naive this may be… )