What I imagine a conversation with my grandchild will one day look like -
“Please don’t let it pass you by, my dear boy. These are the years of looking behind things, under things, finding a calling and shouting it from rooftops to passing postmen and CEOs alike. Then, the following day, sitting quietly on a street corner, watching a thousand lives unfold despite all of your dreams, joys, sufferings, and alignments.
Understanding that two things will often be true, even in contradiction with each other. Understanding love is the greatest treasure of all, and yet it owes you nothing and comes and goes as it pleases. Life quiets down with age, so let your dreams grow loud, my boy. Tilt your head a little to the left and look for the sky. Have you ever seen the world this way? Do you notice anything new?
Now tilt your head toward your fears and hopes. Watch them change and shift. You have seen most things only a few times at best. No use convincing yourself of anything close to certainty just yet. Only that which you know beyond words, that which lives in your bones beyond the corruption of ‘understanding’ and the microscope of answers. It could be said that only this is worth putting any faith into. Trust what is beyond you, question what you create in the name of answers.
— but here I am, at twenty-one, looking for answers, writing as if I understand anything. I have no idea what I will one day say to my grandson. I am far better off calling my own pop-pop, who sits in Pennsylvania combing his own life by the telephone, awaiting a call and conversation just like the one I am fabricating alone in my notebook, with a broken pen and a long life awaiting just beyond the café door.”
