Moments from North Cascades

If you get a chance to visit a National Park - even if you’ve never camped before - I really recommend it. Here’s a series of reflections from our recent trip to North Cascades National Park.

If you’ve spent any amount of time hiking and camping these will probably feel familiar to you. If you haven’t been outdoors much before, I hope you find something in these vignettes that will make you want to plan a trip.

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I am angrier now than when we started the day. 

After all the difficulty in getting here - canceling the first few days of our trip because of a Covid exposure, the early flight, the late night packing, and all the frustration I’m already holding in my shoulders because of our daily grind - I wanted to be on the road out of the city already. And yet, the camping store doesn’t have fuel for my backpacking stove. And I feel like I’ve taken every left turn in Seattle to go three blocks. The kids are jet lagged and haven’t napped.

I have spent weeks anticipating the familiar, friendly feeling of hiking boots laced up around my feet, and having my breath taken away by the mountains, lakes, and forests I’ve been reading about. And we’re still hours away.

The drive was more spectacular than I even expected. This is one of my favorite parts of any trip to our country’s National Parks - the approach. I remember the desolate, exhilarating, trek across the Mojave into Death Valley. And the winding approach past Moab, ducking and dodging the towering rock faces into Canyonlands. And my favorite, the most beautiful drive I’ve ever done, through barely touched wilderness into Denali. Getting there is part of the dance, the adventure. It is a chase and a tease, building anticipation the further you go. And as we traverse each mile, the booming mountains and the songs of the whistling trees and lyrical creeks draw us in, luring us more deeply into the Cascades.

It is later than I hoped, but we are here. The tent we tested in our backyard just yesterday is ready for a crisp overnight sleep. We are dressed and have our supplies in the bright green day pack we usually only take to Palmer Park, Belle Isle, or Mayberry State Park, Bo is wearing the bright pink socks he picked out at REI for the trip. Myles is on my back in the baby carrier he’s almost too big for now. We are on foot, trying to salvage our evening with a short hike before dinner. I’m desperate to settle the itch for the trail I’ve had all day. We heard there was a short hike with a vista near the visitors’ center so that’s where we go.

And as we turn the last bend of the boardwalk, we see it - it’s the Pickett Range. Robyn and I see the boys - right as we get the same feeling of awe and wonder ourselves - experience the majesty and beauty of nature for the first time. We all exhale and soak in the full frame we have in front of us. I am starting to cry while I write down this memory, just as I did when we lived it a few days ago.

We just survived our first night in the tent with two kids, barely. We are on the trail for a morning adventure before nap time. I ask Robyn if I can take her picture. I want to remember being here together. I am thinking back to our honeymoon, when we spent 2 days - just us and the trail - at Mammoth Cave National Park before continuing to Nashville. I am grateful for our marriage, our family, and how we’re spreading our love of outdoor adventures to another generation. I always feel whole when we are together, but my cup is especially full as I snap the photo of her.

I did not grow up with siblings. But even though I forget it sometimes, our boys are brothers. I see it with my own eyes, vividly, as they scamper together down the trail hand in hand. I remember back a few days earlier, when Bo asked Myles: “Will you be my best friend?” We will have many moments during our few precious days here, to remind me of something important: this was worth it. All the setbacks, all the discomfort of travel, all the preparation - all of it was worth it for the three days we had. The chance to visit a National Park - the rare gems of our truly beautiful country - is always worth it.

For the first time since we arrived, we turn left out of the campground into State Road 20 - we are heading home. Robyn and I are holding hands as we weave west back to Seattle alongside the Skagit River. Myles points out the window and says his new favorite word, “mountain”. As we talk to Bo about the past 3 days and how we can plan another trip soon, he asks us, “Can we come back to Cascades National Park?” 

Robyn and I smile at each other and I remember something she said a day earlier, after we descended after only making it halfway up the Thunder Knob trail - “we’ll be telling stories about this trip for years.” In that moment I have an uncommon amount of gratitude - for nature, for our family, for our marriage, and for the National Park Service - because I know deeply in my bones that she’s right.

Gratitude and grief for slow-feeling time

My thirty-third year was not actually longer or shorter than any other trip of mine around our sun. Every day I was thirty three, still had 24 hours in it and it still had three hundred sixty five whole days, each with a sunrise and sunset.

And yet, thirty three will be the age I held onto the longest.

It was the year that we put everything on hold. We held off on house projects and trips. We held off on swim lessons and soccer practices. Instead, it was just us, our family, our close friends, and our neighbors. And  everything was slow-feeling. It was like we could savor each day just a little more because we were holding off on letting our lives change with the seasons.

But I don’t think I’ll remember this longest-age-I-ever-was year, exactly as the year of “slow-feeling” time. I’ll remember the year that our boys realized they were brothers. I’ll remember the year Myles became a walking, talking, bruiser and Bo got his big-heart and his imagination. I’ll remember the year Robyn and I had so much time together, and we started this ritual of turning to each other and saying, “Hey babe, it’s a good life.” I’ll remember the year Riley finally trusted me enough to become father and son.

It was all so slow-feeling because we were just stewing and simmering in all of it - all the muck and the tantrums and the love, tears, chocolate chip cookies, and all the grief and singing and hugs, and uncertainty and glorious monotony. That is what I will remember from the age I held the longest.

The day I turned thirty-four we played tennis at the park. It was our immediate family. Our boys running to and fro, Robert minding the net with his new racket, for the first time. And perhaps symbolically, I literally ran out of the soles of my shoes. And none of us said it, but playing tennis as a family was like the unofficial end of this year that was stewing, and simmering, and slow-feeling. We pulled the pot from the stove and that was that.

In short spurts I’ve noticed this gift of slow-feeling time starting to fade away. Our friends are starting to become busy again. We are running more errands or heading into offices every once in awhile. We’re talking about swim lessons and soccer practices like we were 18 months ago. We’re doing house projects and planning trips. Our friends and family are starting new jobs, moving cities, and making moves again. The sizzling and crackling of fast-feeling time is coming back.

And I have had this chewing feeling that I haven’t been able to put my nose on until today. It’s grief. 

I’m thirty four now and the year of my longest held age, in all it’s muck and wonder, is over. With all the relief of vaccines, and reopening, and reunions, life has resumed it’s forward motion, yes. The year of slow-feeling time is over.

And I know I can’t hold onto my boys at this wonderful age any longer. They’re going to make up grow their way through lost time. Robyn and I will have more days where we are ships passing in the night. Riley’s snout will get grayer, and so will I. Everyone we love will be busier.

And it won’t be any faster or slower than it ever was. But it will feel faster. It will feel like I’m having to let go more. It will feel like a changed season and a new era. And it all will feel too fast, just like it did before I was thirty three.

And I guess what I’m asking for, Father, is a blessing. A blessing of friendships that endure as the seasons change. The blessing of having time feel slow every now and again. The blessing of gratitude for glorious monotony. The blessing of memories and stories and celebrations we can remember as our hair grays. 

Thank you, Father, wherever you are out there, for the gift of slow-feeling time and the chance to understand it so early in life. Please bless us with more birthdays to cherish and the good sense to age with grace.

The essential role of aunts and uncles

I have come to appreciate aunts and uncles more lately, because now I see the effect that they have on our sons. 

I am just in awe of how loved the boys feel by their aunts and uncles, whether they are blood-relatives or just close friends that care about our children as if they were blood family. And the love of an aunt or uncle is different than what we can give them, it’s something more generous perhaps. It’s as if the boys know, “you are not my parents, but you care about me and love me for who I am anyway, and that makes me feel safe and valued.”

Seeing the special love of aunts and uncles in the lives of our boys, has reminded me of my own aunts and uncles. I never could put words to it before, but I feel that same special, freely given, unconditional love from them. Thinking about it in retrospect, the love and support of my aunts and uncles has been a stabilizing force in my life.

I remember when my car broke down on the way into New York after college - miles away from the George Washington Bridge - and my Masi and Massasahib and extended family rescued me from a shady mechanic shop in the middle of North Jersey. 

Or when my uncles in India deliberately ripped on American domestic policy to get a rise out of me and make sure I had some fire and fight in me. Or all our family friends who subtly reminded me I was a good kid in the middle of high school, by letting me sit and listen and hang out while they talked about scientific discovery, foreign affairs, or literature.

Or when Robyn’s aunts and uncles pulled me in and made me feel like part of the family, even from the very first family dinner I met them at by telling me stories and asking me questions. And they showed up at my father’s funeral as if they had known me my entire life.

I think what’s special about the love of aunts and uncles is that it’s redundant, affirming, and honest. It builds stability and resilience because it’s not the primary, day-in-day out sort of relationship you lean on. But it’s there, waiting to catch you, and to pick you up. And at times, it’s only an aunt or uncle who can really sit you down and get you out of the muck because they are able to have unconditional love but also enough distance and objectivity to call it like they see it.

It’s this combination of redundancy, affirmation, and honesty that makes aunts and uncles so important for a family’s culture. Theirs is a moderating influence that kicks in when things are going wrong.

And the more I think of it, the more I believe that every organization and community needs people who play the role of an aunt or uncle to thrive. In a company, for example, “aunts and uncles” are the people who take an active interest in you and give you advice, but don’t manage you directly. I can think of dozens of people who have been that sort of guide from afar, for me or others. When you mentor and develop others for whom you aren’t directly responsible, it’s such a gift to the culture of the company.

The same dynamic exists in a city. There are plenty of people who don’t have formal responsibilities over something but raise people up anyway. It could be neighbors who aren’t a block captain, but throw parties on their block and keep an eye out for neighborhood kids. It could be successful business owners who give advice behind the scenes to those coming up, outside of the auspices of business incubators and mentor programs.  It could be the elderly couple in the church parish who invite newlywed couples to have dinner once or twice a year and help to nurture them through the ebbs and flows of marriage. These little acts are gifts that build the culture of a City and make the community more resilient. Which, it seems, is exactly like what aunts and uncles do.

I organize my life around three pillars - being a husband, father, and citizen. But what I’m realizing is that “uncle” is a really important role that fits within this framework, that I want to be intentional about - despite how invisible that role may be.

Visualizing the Highest Version of Ourselves

I feel so many pressures to “be” very specific, culturally-prescribed, things. Be productive. Be smart. Be professional. Be loving and kind. Be pious. Be cool.

And being all these things is so confusing, because being one seems to conflict with another, much of the time.

Lately, I’ve wondering if I could stop trying to be something specific and try to just be the highest version of myself. Paradoxically, maybe trying to be the best of everything would actually be liberating.

And that’s when this thought experiment came to be. Like an athlete visualizing peak performance in their sport, what if I picked a specific environment in my day-to-day life and just visualized being the “highest” version of myself? It could be in a meeting at work. When with my family on vacation. When running. When mowing the lawn. Doesn’t matter - it could be any environment.

In any environment, what if we tried to imagine the highest version of ourselves? Would we be more likely to live up to it? Would the process change us? Would we be more or less frustrated at ourselves?

I didn’t know, so I gave it a try. I don’t think you need to read my reflection (below), unless you want to. I include it only to illustrate what I mean.

What I will say is this, I did this on a whim, just to see what would happen. And I don’t know what will happen in the future.

But after I did this thought experiment (in italics below), I had a tingling feeling in my lower abdomen. Not the queasy stomach feeling, but the kind of tingling you feel when you are about to give someone a gift on their birthday. Or the butterflies you get at the last step before solving an equation in math class. Or when the curtain goes up at the theater.

If you want to, give it a try. Just take the sentence below and replace what’s after the ellipsis with something relevant to you. I hope you get the same warm, tingling feeling if you try it for yourself.

I close my eyes as I type this, and push myself to imagine the highest version of myself in a typical situation…in this case when eating dinner, with my family, on a week night, 12 years from now.

I am at the dinner table. Specifically, our dinner table at home with my wife and kids. It is about 12 years from now - say in 2032. We are eating tacos, the same way we have every other Tuesday for nearly 15 years. It’s early autumn. We all sit quietly and pass our dinner around the table, everyone taking a turn. We are light and easy and comfortable feeling, because we are home. Robyn is laughing with one of the boys about a new joke they heard from a son’s friend on their way home from school - Robyn had pickup duty today. I laugh as I put a dollop of sour cream atop a small mound of avocado. Even though I am assembling a taco, I’m paying close attention to everyone. I look up, giggling at the joke.

I scan the room with my eyes only, this is my opportunity to check how everyone is feeling. If they are laughing as they normally do, all is well. I see our other son crack a smile but he doesn’t laugh. Hmm, how unlike him.

I quickly look down at everyone’s plate. Normal, normal, normal, hmm. Our same son, the one that didn’t laugh didn’t take as many tomatoes as he normally does. How unlike him. I sit up straight and start my meal, keeping him in the corner of my eye softly.

We do our nightly ritual of catching up on the day, and we do our “highs and lows”. My son seems to be his normal self, but his eyes are wandering a little bit. There’s something distracting him. I decide instantaneously that I should try talking to him after dinner. I mentally note that and focus my attention back on the entire family and our meal, so I don’t disengage myself.

As we start to break from the table, I ask, “Son, could you help me store the dog food? It’s a pretty big bag and my wrist still hurts from playing tennis yesterday.”

I probably could store the dog food myself. But my wrist IS still sore and I want to create the space for him to open up.

I ask him as he opens the container, “So bud, what have you been thinking about lately?” As he pours the kibble into the bucket, he starts to talk. He mentions a friend off-hand and how he had to cancel on their weekly study session.

I see my opening, but I opt not to take it. Instead I say, “Hey bud, since you’re already over here would you mind helping me load the dishwasher?” When he agrees, I smile extra wide and say thank you.

We chit chat the whole time. Just as we load our last plate, my son pauses, seeming to collect his thoughts. And then he hesitates. I wait . Then I gently raise my eyebrows to let him know that it’s his turn to speak if he wants to.

He takes my cue. Then he says, “Hey papa, have any of your friends ever avoided you?”

I take a moment, and pour two glasses of water. I motion him over to the now spotless dinner table.

“Yeah bud, sometimes. Let’s relax for a minute and I’ll tell you about it.”