Eyes help us unsee

We’re often told to look people in the eye when we speak to them, because it’s a sign of respect. But this week, I realized that eye contact does more than just show respect.

When we look someone in the eye, we do more than just connect—we actually “see” them.

We see their emotions and more. Eye contact lets us feel what they’re feeling, making it easier to empathize with them and relate. In this way, the eyes help us truly see the person in front of us.

But the eyes also serve as a focal point. When we look someone in the eye, we can momentarily forget about everything else—the logo on their shirt, the color of their skin, the gray in their hair, or whether they use a wheelchair. Eye contact helps us “unsee” these external details, allowing us to connect with the person beneath them. In that moment, we’re less distracted by the things we might consciously or unconsciously judge, and more focused on who they really are.

So, eye contact isn’t just about respect—it’s a powerful tool for equality. If we want to truly see someone as our equal, we need to first unsee the distractions. And looking them in the eye is a good, practical, way to start.

“Dawg, I can’t afford this anymore.”

These problems matter a lot to me:

• How do I be a good guy in a stressful world?

• How do I do my part to build a marriage of mutual respect, even though I have selfish tendencies?

• How do I show unconditional love and patience as a father, even though my kids need a LOT from me?

• How do I bend society to be a more trusting place - even though I’m just one person?

• How do I make the organizations and communities I’m a part of places where there’s a virtuous cycle of growth and development - even though I’m just one person?

• How do I bend society to have fewer people die by homicide or suicide - even though I’m just one person?

This problem has caused me the most agony in my adult life:

• How do I get powerful, influential people to tell me I’m awesome?

Honestly, I was ashamed of being vain and narcissistic enough to need others to tell me I’m awesome. For a long time, I deluded myself into believing that my ambition was wholly for the benefit of my family’s standard of living or the advancement of society.

Honestly, it wasn’t.

I know I shouldn’t be too hard on myself for being vain and narcissistic - I am human. But damn, over the course of my life, this problem has been so expensive. I was probably spending 20-30% of my emotion budget worrying about whether powerful people thought I was awesome.

That’s so expensive. That’s so much of my energy and emotion budget stolen away from more important problems. I just can’t afford that.

I’ve been struggling with this for at least a decade. Then, over the course of a few hours, I listened to a book during a long car ride that presented the question properly. Then, a decade’s worth of change happened in an afternoon.

The book I listened to was The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, and if you burn energy on unaffordable problems, I’d highly recommend it.

We can choose which problems in our life we give a lot of effort to. Once we have an honest catalog of what we’re spending our emotion budget on, it becomes much easier to say, “dawg, I can’t afford this anymore.”

They Need Me To Lead

I believe in the practice of walking the talk, especially as a father. Because even as cliche as it is to say, actions definitely speak louder than words.

I know it, because I act like my father. At the hospital, the day before he died, some of his colleagues came to see us and warmly recounted how passionately my father would present a data analysis and how he’d gesticulate, wildly sometimes, to make his point. I never knew that about him, I thought, but I do that too. And sure as shit, when I see my sons, already, intonate their words up or make up pretend games about spaceships, I know they’re acting like me.

As a general rule, I don’t want to be a morally lethargic parent, allergic to even the smallest personal transformation, that cranks on with tropes like, “do as I say, not as I do”. Like, if I want them to stop picking their noses or stop exhibiting the desperate signs of needing to please authority figures, I have to stop doing that myself, or at a minimum be silent on the issue.

And yet, I’ve found a specific uncomfortable, alien, circumstance where I cannot do what I tell them to do.

What I tell them is something along the lines of:

“Bo and Myles, if you want your brother to stop hitting you, you need to tell them to stop, clearly. And if they don’t listen you need to tell them why. I’m here to help you if you can’t figure it out on your own.”

But if it’s bedtime and Myles is going around in circles to the point of running face first into wall of their shared bedroom, while Bo is jumping on his bed and giggling and screaming about the potty, I cannot do what I told them to do.

I cannot tell them to stop running and yelling because that attention just eggs them on and because this behavior, though irritating, is not expressly unsafe. This part is a practical matter.

But I also cannot tell them why I want them to stop. I cannot tell them that I desperately want to spend 20 minutes with their mother talking about something other than our daily grind or syncing up on parenting tactics. I cannot tell them I am exhausted and they’re keeping me from doing the dishes, and the dishes are keeping me from working, and my work is keeping me from sleeping. I cannot tell them how selfish they are for waking up their baby brother who is sleeping in the nursery across the hall. Even though every ounce of flesh in me wants to offload all this frustration and anger onto them…

I cannot ask them for help either. Maybe there’s some exception here but doing so is dangerous territory. I can ask them for help cleaning up toys off the floor, or handing me an infant diaper when my hands are full. But in the middle of a bedtime circus, it’s different - I cannot ask them to carry my emotional burden.

I’m their father, their papa. They need me to be sturdy. They need me to lead and to lean on. They are the sailboats and I must be their safe harbor. They are the explorers and I must be their map and compass. As the temperature rises, I must be their thermostats, not a thermometer.

To make sense of this world, their not-even-school-aged world, they need me. To reassure them that no bad guys will come to get them and take them away under cover of darkness and dreams, they need me. To be the one who stays steady, instead of retaliating, when they hit or scream or kick or spit or piss in anger, they need me. It won’t be like this forever, but for now, they need me to lead.

I have wondered for a long time about childhood, or what it’s supposed to be I guess. I just don’t remember having one. I did, at some point, exist as a child and in childhood, but what was it like? I can’t recall it, save for photographs and loose threads.

I had my early years and it was full of the acceleration you would expect for a middle-class, suburban, child of scrappy South Asian immigrants. And as I kept racing and pacing, my adolescence passed. So did my father, shortly thereafter. And as he left us behind him, I was growing ahead of my time, once again.

It’s as if the passing of my childhood was something I’ve always grieved, without having the presence of mind to use that word as it was happening.

I cannot shatter the glass ceiling of their innocence so early. I just can’t. Not yet. Not until I have to. I can’t thrust them into my world of struggle and responsibility just yet. I can’t get them to help me with the distortions in my own mind. I just can’t. I want them, so badly, to stay in their not-even-school-aged world a little longer.

I feel so often that parenting is a paradox. It’s excruciating but it’s the best. It’s a never-ending slog but it goes by too quickly. It ages you gray or bald, but also keeps you young. So this, it seems, is just the latest paradox - I need to walk the talk because actions speak louder than words, but not on this one thing…I just can’t on this one thing.

Parenting is Truly Bittersweet

I rarely take naps on the weekend. But I happened to today because I’ve been getting over a cold, though I somehow managed to avoid catching Covid-19 from my sons.

This is the exact view I woke up to when I opened my eyes from this rare occasion of a nap:

It has four examples of the complex experience of “bittersweet”:

First, the item in the foreground is exactly what it appears to be: a monkey sitting on a Paw Patrol slipper. That’s so hilarious and creative, but it’s so frustrating to be jolted from a nap by a monkey bean bag riding in a slipper. That’s must be the light thud I half-asleep-remember feeling on my stomach.

Second, you an see a facial tissue on the coffee table: It’s disgusting that Bo left a tissue on the table, but it is a relief that he uses tissues instead of his sleeve like I did for most of my life.

Third, next to the facial tissue, is a construction Bo described as, “it’s something you make that has super powers. It’s called a power-punch.” It is kind of cool that he’s making his own sort of art with household objects. Kind of looks like a caterpillar. But damn kid, why you makin’ me do even more dishes?

Finally, you’ll notice a lightsaber all the way to the right. That’s right…Bo brought his lightsaber over and was cuddled up next to me as I fell asleep, which rarely happens anymore. I was so happy to have him right beside me, but now he’s somewhere else in the house. Bittersweet.

I hadn’t thought about how complex the experience of “bittersweet” was until I started reading Atlas of the Heart. In it, Brené Brown describes the science and theory behind several dozen of the most impactful human emotions and experiences. 

Her premise for writing the book is that we can’t emote or process our life properly if we don’t have emotional granularity. Not everything is happy, sad, angry, or tired and we need to have a grasp of the right words and concepts to describe what’re we’re feeling.

Apparently “bittersweet” is a cognitively complex phenomenon that develops gradually. Children don’t report simultaneously feeling happiness and sadness until they reach age seven or eight.

And damn, so many moments of parenting are bittersweet. Now that I better understand what bittersweet means, I feel it and see it everywhere. So many things happen where I’m so proud or so in awe of how my sons have grown, acted with courage or shown maturation. But in those moments, I also feel this remorse. Because with every demonstration of growth, they are closer to being grown.

So when I say something like, “wow, they just grow up so fast” I realized that what I’m actually feeling is bittersweet.

As I’ve thought about it more, there’s so much complexity to the statement, “they just grow up so fast” beneath the surface. I want so badly for my kids to be mine and belong to me, but I’ve come to accept that they don’t and they never have.

Yes, on the one hand I can pretend that my kids are mine and they belong to Robyn and me. We love them so dearly. We pour so much time into them. We have sacrificed so much for them. We are their parents. They are our responsibility. They are our children. They have to belong to us.

What makes this so bittersweet is even though we think it so, they do not actually belong to us. These sons of ours are growing and they’re going to keep growing. And as they grow, they’re going to affect the world around them. There are friends they’re going to help out of tough times. There are strangers they might touch the lives of without even knowing it. There are neighborhoods they’ll live in, companies they’ll work for, and causes bigger themselves they will progress forward. There are other children out there, somewhere in this world that they will marry and god-willing start families with someday. 

And if I’m being really honest with myself, if all goes to plan, our sons will outlive us and spend a significant amount of time on this earth while we’re not here. They’ll end up belonging to who they chose to spend their lives with and who they choose to devote their lives to. Not us.

So even though we raise our kids and it’s true that we’re their parents, they’re not ours. Our role is to help them grow so they can give themselves to others. Our role is to give them the gift of being good parents, and all the nourishment that good parents bring to a child. We’re merely stewards of this part of their journey on the earth. They don’t belong to us and they never really did.

What I pray for though, is that if we do right by them, and give them the gift of a good, strong, character-based upbringing they’ll want us to stick around. I pray that we do this right so that after they’re grown, they’ll choose to have us be part of their lives, even though don’t have to. They might choose us among the people they belong to. That would be a gift to Robyn and I.

Part of the unresolved grief of losing my father is rooted in this gift. When he died, I was fully grown, but just barely. I was getting to the point in life where I could choose, freely, to spend time with my parents. I realize now, that’s a gift children can give to their parents, not an obligation. I become sad when I realize that it’s a gift I always wanted to give back to my father, but I’ll never get a chance to.

There is, however, a silver lining that I try to remember. As I shared earlier, every moment where I think or say “wow, they just grow up so fast” it’s because there’s an example in front of me that our sons are growing. But even though I feel such joy to see them grow, I feel sadness that because I remember time is passing.

Those moments where they’re “growing up so fast” are also moments that show how much Robyn and I have grown.

Because along the way, our sons are helping us grow. By being parents to them, we are becoming more patient, more caring, and more selfless. By letting us parent them, they are pushing our hearts to open wider and to be more grateful for the lessons that come from suffering. They, too, are strengthening Robyn and I’s marriage by giving us a common purpose to work together on.

I feel an almost divine gratitude for the gifts our sons are giving us and the lessons they are teaching us. Even though every moment I notice their growth I feel a deflating sadness for the fleeting sands of time, I also feel so grateful that they are teaching my soul to be purer and more virtuous. It’s truly bittersweet.

Finding peace with the starved twenties

I noticed something odd this week.

Most of my dreams, which are unfortunately always stressful, take place in my early to mid twenties. I don’t think I’ve dreamt about my kids, maybe ever. I hadn’t noticed the pattern until a few days ago.

Why oh why would my twenties be hiding and lurking in my mind?

Upon reflection, my twenties were a lot like this year. I went days, sometimes weeks, without giving a hug because I traveled for work and rolled by myself most of the time. I had fun hanging out with friends at the bar every weekend, but that rarely led to conversations requiring emotional intimacy.

I always thought my twenties were lonely. And they were, but they were more than that. They were starved. Not of nourishment, but of emotion and spiritual depth. And love.

Upon reflection, my twenties were a lot like this year.

It struck me though that lots of people have to live like it’s 2020, but every year. Can you imagine?

I think it was enough to just see the past clearly and more honestly. The moment I connected the dots, and understood the difference between alone and starved I seriously felt it in my abdomen, right below my sternum; a tension released.

Two nights later I had a dream, and my sons were in it. Imagine that.