Dear PiePie,
8 months into this experiment of trying to write a weekly letter to you, and it’s quite obvious that such a cadence is simply not possible. The time I’m taking to write these letters come on the margins of work, “adulting” (managing personal finance, home improvement) and falls squarely into the leisure/hobby bucket of time, which is not much to begin with. And so, I’ll be targeting a reduced cadence of one letter per month, which should still make 200 letters by the time you go to college, if college is still a thing young people go to 20 years from now.
One interesting contradiction I’ve come to experience is that sometimes, I find myself having to decide between taking the couple of hours to write these letters or spending those couple of hours with you “in the moment”. It’s a weird choice, because in some way, I am choosing between interacting with the present you, or chatting with the future you. And this does not have a right answer or obvious choice.
There is a greater permanence in these letters that I’m writing, and perhaps this is what you’ll eventually remember me by. And yet, the present moment is so precious in its impermanence. These current moments – of you jumping off my calves, of you bringing a book to us to read to you, of you babbling to yourself as you walk aimlessly around the house – feel like sand sifting through the fingers. That if we are not careful to consciously experience it, we will soon be left with no sand with our grasps and wondering what the sand had felt like.
In the age we’re in, it is so easy to live life through the lens of a camera. When you see fireworks, will you simply stare in awe, or whip out your phone to record the moment while viewing the spectacle through your screen?
I find myself leaning towards experiencing the moments in the present – my excuse for why the letters are so far and few between! – but I do appreciate that when I take videos of you or write these letters, they remind me of moments I would otherwise have forgotten and lose to the ether of space. The conscious documentation of the present also helps remind me to treasure this impermanence.
So, as is typical in life, it seems the answer is to find a middle ground between the two modes, but beyond that incredibly generic statement, I’m not able to offer any definitive answers as to the ideal path to take or balance to strike. Regardless, whether I’m experiencing those moments with you in the present or recording them down to savour in the future, I’m grateful that those moments exist.
Love, Dad