“The nature of impending fatherhood is that you are doing something that you’re unqualified to do, and then you become qualified while doing it.”
—John Green

Writing about what it means to be a father is a difficult task. Holding Arlo and Mae as newborn children was nothing short of terrifying and awe-inspiring at the same time. There were these intensely contrasting feelings of awe, wonder, excitement, and hope, pitted against fear, fragility, pain, and doubt.

Thinking back on having Arlo just three years ago, I realize just how wholly unprepared I was to be a father. And yet this seems to be the paradox of becoming a dad. I’m the type of person who likes to feel like I know what I’m doing. Most of my life, though, is realizing that I don’t know what I’m doing, and instead being humbled in the process of becoming. I think that this is the way God intended things—for us to look to him in all that we do, and to have a Father to walk with us in all that is life. In this way, being a father is not much unlike being a child.

When I became a dad, I suddenly had the realization that I would be a father for the rest of my life. Questions raced through my mind: Will I inevitably wound my children? What wounds am I carrying from my own childhood? Will I be a good parent? Will I fail? And what does that even mean? What if I don’t have what my kids need from me? With the birth of our daughter Mae this past winter, the same questions inevitably rose to the surface again, but with a new sort of shape. With Arlo they were baked into fear. With Mae I’ve realized that these fears are real, and that they’re simply the realities of being human in the world. I am a broken human-being. Yes, I will wound my kids, and I do not have everything that they need. And yet at the same time I am continually being shaped into a new creation.

“No man can possibly know what life means, what the world means, what anything means, until he has a child and loves it.”
—Lafcadio Hearn

Being a father (so far) has been nothing short of a daily process of giving oneself; of sacrifice, apologizing, asking forgiveness, and receiving grace. And yet in this there is deep joy. To be made new over the course of a lifetime in the presence of my kids is God-glorifying; it is to taste and see that the Lord is good; that he favors love and change over stale pride and hardness of heart.

The beautiful thing is that I have so much still to learn. In all there is to know, learn, and experience about being a dad, I am like a child. My prayer is simply that I would remain as one instead of trying to pretend like I know everything or have it all together.

Reading: Finished or mostly finished, in no particular order.

The Sea Around Us, by Rachel Carson
Do Pause: You Are Not a To Do List, by Robert Poytnon
95 Poems, by E.E. Cummings
The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems, Emily Dickinson
Two-Dimensional Man, by Paul Sahre
Dubliners, by James Joyce
National Audubon Society Field Guide to Shells
National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Wildflowers
The Poetics of Space, by Gaston Bachelard
Collected Poems 1957–1982, by Wendell Berry
Life with God, by Richard Foster
When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through, A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, Edited by Joy Harjo
He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art, by Christian Wiman
Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
The Beauty of Everyday Things, by Soetsu Yanagi 

Listening: My favorite albums this year (not necessarily released in 2020), in no particular order.

Fugitive Light and Themes of Consolation, by Andrew Wasylyk
Chris Cohen, by Chris Cohen
Tracing Back the Radiance, by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
Many Moons, by Martin Courtney
I Can Go With You, Sam Burton
For Organ and Brass, Ellen Arkbro
Healing is a Miracle, Julianna Barwick
Shore, Fleet Foxes
Self Discovery for Social Survival
Tender Epoch, by Rudy De Anda
Suite for Max Brown, by Jeff Parker
The Party, by Andy Shauf

Arlo has picked up a favorite hobby in the last year: playing records. I love it. As soon as we come downstairs every morning, he wants to pick one out to play during breakfast. One morning it might be The Byrds; another it might be the Dirty Projectors; another John Lennon. After breakfast, he’ll pick a new one while he plays in the living room. When I go down to our spare bedroom/studio to work, I can hear him switching these out almost all day with Katey. During our time at home this season, his joy in our record player has cast a warmth throughout our home—there is almost always music playing.

When I was in high school, I loved combing dusty record store shelves and thrift stores for a good jazz album. The hunt is part of the fun of building a collection. Before we had Arlo, Katey and I might play a record every few days if we had a night in, or might put one on during dinner. Even then, Spotify was often an easier choice since we’re constantly holding our phones and can just pick a song and set it on the dinner table. But with convenience there’s always something missing, and I think we both recognized this when Arlo took up his own listening habits.

Back in October, we decided to divert our $15 budget item for music (for Spotify Premium) towards buying records and music directly from artists. It was not only because Arlo spurred us to love our collection again, but this article from NPR that I had read. While Spotify is convenient and simple to use, we decided we’d rather pay the artists and labels we love more directly, and to build our collection over a longer period of time. For the most part, we’ve been purchasing vinyls directly on Bandcamp, digital albums from Apple Music, or just heading over to Last Exit Books or Square Records.

Being able to own a tangible artifact produced by creative artists and musicians is a joy—album artwork is half the reason I wanted to become a graphic designer before going to college. But most of all, I love that we get to listen music together more often (which often means at least one person doesn’t like what’s being played). It’s a small, daily occurrence now, and will perhaps even become normal (in some ways, switching records all day for a toddler is certainly tiresome), but I think it will also become a cherished family activity.

This year we decided to put up a small advent calendar in our kitchen made of small pieces of paper and clothes pins. Each day has a small corresponding activity, like hanging stockings, making clementine candles, or taking food to a pantry. Even though we’ve kept the activities relatively light, my favorite part is that this calendar has put time into perspective, and has built anticipation for the celebration of Christmas, Immanuel. I think God meets us in the daily aspects of life, and this calendar has taken me by surprise in that it places focus on both the daily tasks at hand and on the waiting.

In the film 180° South, Yvon Chouinard talks about how climbing is essentially a useless act: “You get to the top of a wall, there’s nothing up there. Lionel Terray, the great French climber called it ‘The conquistadors of the useless.’ Yeah, the end result is absolutely useless, but every time I travel, I learn something new and hopefully I get to be a better person.”

I love this observation about climbing, and I think it reflects the way I’ve always viewed skateboarding. In many ways, it is a useless act—but in the same way art is a useless act. In a culture which centers around work and pragmatics, doing something purely for the sake of enjoying it can be refreshing.

I started skateboarding back in elementary school. My uncle Kevin had grown up skating himself, and gave me a couple of his old boards right before I started middle school. I would spend hours skating around in the street, and eventually it became a primary activity with friends throughout high school. While many stereotypes of skateboarders exist in America, it might also be seen as an art form and as a craft. We were often kicked out of locations, or viewed as burn-outs with nothing to do. But I think my friends skated for the same reason I did. There is a beauty in carving down a hill or feeling the wind in your shirt. When I started college, skating eventually faded out of my life. In an attempt to find a few personal projects in the midst of the pandemic, I decided to reuse the trucks from my uncle’s old board, bought some new wheels, and shaped my own deck out of an old cabinet shelf.

We’ve been living under a quarantine for a little over 2 months now, and it’s had me thinking a lot about stillness, idleness, and pause. When I first heard of the possibility of a lockdown in any sense, my first thought was: “but what will we do? How will things just… stop?” I think in one way or another, this has to feel the same way for the rest of the globe, too. Each day of the news is filled with empty streets, airports, coffeeshops, and train stations. Everyone is stuck at home—some alone, some with loved ones—in some amount of idleness. Many have lost jobs and are not able to work. Others are asked to work from home and, maybe like me, are feeling tired and and unmotivated. Either way, our country is facing a large moment of stillness, of pause: economically, socially, culturally. I think there’s so much we can learn here.

In the world of design, one of the most common terms we throw around almost aimlessly is negative space. It’s the space in between objects, foreground and background, which allows our eye to move around. Massimo Vignelli has even pointed out that the letterforms we design with have black space and white space—and that often we focus on the black imprint of the letterforms, when really it is the whitespace around each letterform which gives shape to those letterforms. Similarly to music, it’s the space between the notes which defines the succession and emotion of the song. Robert Poynton, in his book Do/Pause: You Are Not a To Do List relates negative space to the way we use time, the way we pause. Our society is used to hurrying, and to productivity. I find it to be such a strong idol in my own life, an I think this is because it is so acceptable to work hard and to be proud of it—especially in the midwest! I know that in my own work, I often become sucked into the idea of completing tasks—of getting to the next thing. And not only at work, but at home. Whether it’s things to do around the house, or how I spend time with Katey and Arlo. But Poynton asks an important question:

“…our children can easily become just a stream of endless tasks: feeding, dressing, getting them to school or football practice or dance class, doing homework, bedtime story and so on. In the midst of all that, do we allow ourselves time to actually be with them, to enjoy them? …In general, we don’t pay much attention or give importance to the spaces in between all the tasks.”

Certainly amongst this quarantine, thinking about this space between is one of those things which I feel blessed to have found out. These moments of space, whether cooking, reading with Arlo before bedtime, or taking a short walk can be smaller pauses within this larger pause of quarantine—breaking up space and allowing for pockets of rest and reflection. My own heart is learning how to enjoy this new slowed down pace. But Poynton takes a nuanced approach to exploring the idea of pause, and clarifies that the idea that we must choose between fast and slow is a bogus choice, and while doing so we can miss the many possibilities of understanding how pause relates to our cultures and habits, or how it can be used as a tool. I highly recommend the book. There’s so much here that’d I’d love to write about, but it’d be better for you to just read it.

Kenya HARA, in his book White explores a similar concept of emptiness. Yet in the prologue he clarifies: “This is not a book about color.” Instead, White is an exploration of HARA’s own culture, an attempt “to find the source of a Japanese aesthetic that produces simplicity and subtlety through the concept of white.” In many cases a blank, white page in a book denotes the concept of emptiness. It is not filled with anything—not even a page number. But HARA points out that emptiness doesn’t mean “nothingness” or “energy-less”, “rather, in many cases, it indicates a condition, or kaizen, which will likely be filled with content in the future.” He provides another example:

“A creative mind, in short, does not see an empty bowl as valueless, but perceives it existing in a transitional state, waiting for the content which will eventually fill it; and this creative perspective instills power in the emptiness.”

How do we see this quarantine? Is it a negative state? A gap that takes place inside of our “normal” course of life? Is it capable of being filled in a meaningful way, like an empty bowl to fill with fruit? In my own life, I find that want to fill the bowl quickly because I’m afraid of it being empty—that I might then be forced to see the inside of it. So I fill it with gardening, writing, yard work, house projects, or watching movies with Katey. And while these are certainly valuable things in their own right, I feel challenged to take a step back to consider how these moments of pause can be carried with me no matter the circumstance. I think these examples of pause and emptiness from Poynton and HARA are important not only because they reveal the reality of these concepts in our country’s current state, but because they reveal the beautiful potential of this time to be filled in a meaningful way.