The Work that Awe Requires: a letter to my son

My Little Guy,

You’re three months old now, and we’ve just spent three weeks together. Three of my very favorite weeks of my whole life.

What is parenting like? How are we? How are you?

I don’t know how to answer any of the questions I keep fielding about you in a way that feels remotely adequate. It’s all too lofty. Yet, I love trying every chance I get. Where to begin?

I was on a run in the Fall a few years ago, listening to John Green’s podcast, when I was stopped in my tracks. He described his son’s pure awe looking at a leaf he’d picked up on the ground. It was that perfect time of the season, where the leaves are falling but there are still so many colorful ones clinging to branches for dear life. When you’re looking at the beauty that you’re also crunching underneath your feet. Kind of like right now.

“After watching my son look at it, I began to look as well, and soon, I realized it wasn’t just a brown leaf. It’s veins spidered-out red and orange and yellow in a pattern too complex for my brain to synthesize. The more I looked at the leaf, the more I knew I was face to face with something commensurate to my capacity for wonder. The magnificence of that leaf astonished me, and I was reminded that aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see. From the cork to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires. Still, I’m quite fond of our capacity for wonder.”

The past three weeks have been a wonderful time of learning so much about you, playing and smiling and gushing all day long, and realizing some of the ways I already want to be more like you. To start, I want to look at everything in my life like you look at the ceiling fan. Pure awe and wonder. I now have more context for that quote that was already so powerful for me.

See, there’s a reason awe takes work. We constantly trick ourselves into thinking all of life isn’t a miracle. Albert Einstein once said we can live our lives one of two ways- as if nothing is a miracle, or as if everything is a miracle. I want to do the latter, and I think you have a head start on me, little guy.

Awe takes work because us grownups let our phones give us adult-onset ADHD when we instead could be looking out at the trees. When you think about it, trees are really just standing all around us, loving on us. All the time. I wonder how often other grownups stop to think about how trees are, in their very existence, loving us endlessly, all the time. I rarely do, cause I’m looking at my silly phone instead.

I’ll be honest, and all parents who have “been there before” are going to laugh at my naivety… but I had a grand to-do list for my paternity leave. “Ohhh, I’ll get this done. I’ll get that done.” Oh, was my past self comically wrong! I squandered the few free moments trying to keep the house reasonably livable and spent every one of your waking seconds marveling at your mere existence.

I didn’t get anything done on my list, but that list served as my teacher anyway. There’s a reason the early desert mystics walked around and chanted “today… today… today…” all day long, every single day. They knew it was all they had, all any of us ever have. There’s something about trying to lean into it, to engage so fully in the present NOW, that you empty yourself of every prior notion of productivity. New questions emerge in that place of full engagement.

Is there anything more worthy of my time than staring into your sparkly, curious eyes? Is there anything on that list that will even remotely compare to soaking in every solitary second with you? The work of awe is the work of uninterrupted attention on the beauty, the miracle, right in front of me, all the time.

We looked out the window together many times each day. It was calming for us both. It centered me; it amazed you. I tried to notice my breath and silently express gratitude; your eyes lit up in authentic, uninterrupted wonder. We watched over the three weeks as every leaf fell from the big trees in the front yard.

My son, I’ve asked myself more than once why anyone puts themselves through this. To love this deeply is vulnerable to a visceral degree, it really is. To be wholeheartedly invested in the well-being of a tiny person, you, with all that we have such little control over, is painful. As soon as I wonder why we’ve done this to ourselves, I cannot imagine life before you. It’s as if the deepest, rawest emotions are all dancing in a room together, saying, “It’s worth it. It’s all worth it.”

There will be a time, and it won’t be after too long, I rub the little bald spot on the back of your head for the last time. There are a limited number of bouncing-you-to-sleep’s remaining. You will grow, and we will embrace new rhythms we love and then can’t imagine letting go. We will discover new purely you things that will endear us over and over. You will change and we will wrap our hearts around each moment as tightly as we can, doing the work awe requires.

I would attempt describing all you’re teaching me about God, but if you’re anything like me you’ll get a little squirmy. There’s just something unsettling about quick and easy descriptions of the infinite. My younger self would launch into a cut-and-dry metaphor including all the big, catchy theological words. Now, I’d just tell you about the look in your eyes as you stared at those leaves. I’d tell you there’s no need to segregate the natural world from the spiritual word as so many do, and I’d thank you for showing me that with your eyes as those trees hugged our souls. I would simply tell you what it feels like when you wrap your fingers around mine, when you grip a little tighter than the last time. Or about your smile when you wake up from a nap. Or, how you look at the ceiling fan.

You are teaching me pure presence, the total emptying of everything else to be right here, right now. You’re helping me lean into the great mystery that is this very moment, here and now, and how to savor it forever. It’s so hard to attain, maybe impossible. But a worthy endeavor. It would again remind me of those early desert mystics, who in what most would call their lunacy, would walk around and chant one word all day long… “Today.”

Here’s to our capacity for wonder, for doing the work awe requires, for today. Today. Today. Today.