One thing that I never realized that I would experience as a parent was the creation of your own personal hype man. This realization came to me this morning. I am an avid soccer fan, and last night I went to one of the bigger games of the season for the Columbus Crew. They were playing Messi's Inter Miami here at home, and the atmosphere was electric. In summary, it was a highly entertaining game, and the Crew (our team) pulled off a win in the final minutes of added time. It was pure sports magic.
This morning, I was still flying high from the win last night when I went to wake up my oldest daughter for school. The room was dark, and she was fully engulfed in the throes of dreamland. I crept in and gently nudged her awake. As she stirred, I whispered, "The Crew won last night!" Her response was precisely what I wanted to hear: "Yaaaay! That's awesome!" As she roused to full wakefulness, she asked me what the score was and what the game was like. I, of course, eagerly obliged in regaling her with all the highs and lows of the game in abbreviated detail because, after all, she did need to get ready for school. Throughout this exchange, her happiness was completely genuine even though she probably didn't care one bit about who or what played the night before. She was excited because I was excited.
Later that morning, I had another epiphany: my kids are always eager to share in my joy, and that is one of the most wonderfully unexpected gifts they have given me as a father.
After further rumination, I realized that it doesn't really matter what I'm excited about; they willfully share in that joy at every opportunity. Whether I'm cheering for the Buckeyes, the Browns, or the Crew, they always get excited and cheer with me. It's incredible. I can also get something as innocuous as an Amazon package that I've been waiting for and receive the same level of fervor that I would receive had I won the lottery. Shoot, they even turned into raving lunatics when I put up exterior Halloween decorations for the first time in their lives. It's been over a week, and they still display the same level of enthusiasm whenever they see them. If you ever need to feel like a hero for doing practically nothing, have kids.
After some careful thought, I came to another question that I thought needed answering: When do we lose this shared enthusiasm and zest for life? Why do we become so subdued about the tiny miracles that we experience each day?
I don't have a good answer as to when the world crushes our souls, but for me, it was probably in my mid-to-late 30s. I know that sounds a little dramatic, but life has a way of grinding us down over time, and I think it's when we become fully cognizant of that fact that our sparkle begins to fade and the patina of life begins to set in. We become jaded, grumpy... we become adults.
I have seen this time and time again with pretty much everyone I've ever known to varying degrees. I also see this insidiously progressing to higher and higher levels as we age. Let's face it, the vast majority of elderly folks aren't known for their sparkling personalities and positive outlooks on life. That's not a dig on old people; if we're lucky, we'll all be there one day. What I'm saying is that it's indicative of the aforementioned loss of life's spark.
My wife often calls me a "dreamer". After today's reflection, I think I'm going to start taking that as a compliment. If being a dreamer means that I'm still expressing even a small modicum of childlike joy about life, I don't ever want to be anything else. My wonder at just about everything in the world has changed, but my excitement for things that I'm passionate about hasn't. I still get giddy about video game releases, and moving further into adulthood, I get stupid excited about things like power tools and finely cut lawns. I remember when I was a kid, just standing outside when the weather turned dismal and just basking in the glory and wonder that was nature. I would close my eyes and feel the cold rain on my skin, listen to the wind push through the leaves of the trees coalescing into an overpowering sensory experience, and just feel ecstatic, the ecstasy of being able to experience something so overpowering.
Do I still have that same feeling? No. If I'm outside now and the weather turns, I curse under my breath and go inside so I don't get wet and cold. When I get inside, I start to internally (and sometimes externally) complain about all the things that I can't get done now that the weather is trash. Oy vey, what a loser I've become!
So how do we combat this lessening of life's zeal? How do we preserve it for as long as possible for ourselves and, again, for our kids?
The honest answer is that we don't.
What?!
Hear me out. I think that's maybe why people have kids. Once we start reaching the point where life's joy begins to fall into a pit of infinite darkness, our kids shine a light and begin to pull us back out. They give us a little reminder of what it felt like to be filled with happiness and awestruck wonder at experiencing the world for the first time. It's not that our children fix us; they just hold the flashlight in the dark to remind us of what we're missing as adults. If we're paying close enough attention, we can move ourselves back to that state of gratitude and joy that our little sherpas are ever leading us towards. Maybe one day, if we do a good job, they won't ever have to lose theirs.
Dad out.