my dear son,
i am Enough years have passed to watch the world rush by to know this much: Most people mistake speed for money and noise for life. They build their days like a man stacking wet wood, always adding more, never noticing that the fire is already out. I did the same.
I spent years thinking that I had to earn my place by keeping busy, by looking useful, by staying ahead of everything that was already slipping away from me. I was wrong. I was wrong in the way older men can be, because when they see it clearly, the damage is already done.
I am still writing this to you when I can. Not because I think I’ve discovered some great truth that no one else has, but because I’ve lived long enough to know how easy it is to lose your life trying to keep up with it.
A man can make himself hollow and call it discipline. He could be delusional for decades and call it ambition. He can fill every silence with work, obligations, and the words of his own thoughts and still have nothing at the end of the day. I’ve done it all. I’ve seen days slip away without being touched.
This is not a complaint. It’s just the truth.
There was a time when I believed that if I could just get things going, I would finally feel settled. One more job. Another plan. One more proof that I’m not wasting my life. The difficulty is that life does not wait to be understood. It goes away while you are busy arranging it. It happens in the middle of ordinary things, in one breath and the next, and if you’re not paying attention, you’ll miss almost all of it.
I know the world is telling you otherwise. It tells you to push harder, move faster, earn more, be more, prove more. It makes a man feel guilty for sitting still. It regards relaxation as a weakness and depression as an honor. It’s a cruel system, and it’s broken more people than it’s helped. I wish I had understood sooner.
I spent many years trying to be a machine with a pulse. I thought that if I could endure long enough, I might deserve peace. But peace was never hard-earned. The peace was always there, waiting in the simple little moments I was too impatient to notice.
I now remember your childhood in bits and pieces, the way memories bring me back. Not in a neat line, but in flashes. Your little hand is wrapped around my finger. The sound of your laughter from the backyard. The day you sat on the balcony and watched the rain with all seriousness, as if the sky was just talking to you. Those moments were never great. They did not declare themselves important. That is what made them holy.
I wish I had lived more attentively to them.
There is no need to make a life of constant effort. You don’t need to turn into a proving ground every day. The body is not for endless stress, and the soul is not for endless stress. At some point a man has to stop pretending that he can overcome his own hunger to stay sober. He had to sit down and admit that all his moves were sometimes just fear in a suit.
Fear of being ordinary.
fear of being forgotten
The fear of finding out that the life he wanted was not the life he was actually living.
If I sound serious, it’s only because I no longer have a taste for pretty lies. I have seen enough that honesty is the most gracious thing we can give each other.
So let me put it bluntly.
Your value does not increase when you are tired. Your value does not depend on how much you carry. You are not made more worthy by excluding sleep or by burdening yourself without question. You deserve to rest because you are alive. That alone is enough. You deserve kindness because you are human. That is enough. No ledger required.
There are men who spend their whole lives trying to be impressive and never come true. I don’t want it for you. I want you to be real.
Be real enough to admit when you’re tired.
Real enough to leave a room that is draining your life.
Real enough to sit with your own thoughts without reaching for a screen, a drink, a task, or some other trick to distance yourself from hearing what’s inside you.
Silence can be harsh. Might as well be the first honest thing you’ve heard all day.
When I was younger, I believed that silence meant I was regressing. Now I know better. Constancy is where a man learns what he has become. It is here that he meets his own life size without decoration. And sometimes that perspective is painful.
It can show you all the years you’ve wasted trying to be someone else.
It can show you how much you have waited for the future of your life that is slipping away from you.
But it can also show what remains when the noise is gone. A face of your love. A house in the evening. A song that leaves you undone for no reason that can be explained. A moment of laughter so suddenly feels like pity.
You have to learn to trust those moments. They are not secondary. The world likes to call them small because it cannot measure them accurately. But one small moment can take a man farther than a lifetime of ambition. A hand on your shoulder. The smell of rain on concrete. Evening light flickers across the kitchen walls. A conversation that wants nothing but your attention. These things keep us human. These things prevent us from exhausting ourselves.
I don’t want to practice religion in silence. Life can be hard. There is a way to take it without asking. There will be bills, grief, frustration, and work no matter how tired you are. There will be days when everything in you wants to lie down and disappear into sleep. i know Been there more times than I can count. But even then, in the midst of all that pressure, you still have a choice about how you fill the day. You can meet it like a prisoner. Or you can meet it as a person who realizes that even the hardest days are still part of his only life.
People forget that part. There is no second edition waiting in the wings. There are no extra lives hidden somewhere for later use. There is only this one, and it is disappearing even as we speak. This is not to scare you. It’s meant to wake you up.
So slow down when you can. In a lazy way people don’t blame each other, but in a serious way a man slows down when he finally realizes that he has run away from his own life.
look around
Notice the common things before they’re gone.
The sound of someone laughing in the next room.
The tired comfort of an old chair.
The evening sky is getting dark without showing itself.
How a hug can calm a nervous body better than a hundred explanations.
These are not distractions from living. they are living
I want you to know that it’s okay to sit still and do nothing for a while.
It is all right to let a day pass without extracting something useful from it.
It’s all right to be unproductive and still loveable.
The world may not reward such honesty, but you are not of the world as such. You are not a tool. You are not a machine. You are a human being, and a human being is allowed to be tired, uncertain, grateful and unfinished.
There was a time when I thought the goal was to reach somewhere. Some of my better versions. Some ultimate position where I will no longer feel the pain of wanting more. I see now that the pain doesn’t go away completely. What changes is whether you can side with it without ruining everything else.
Learn to bear your hunger without worshiping you.
You learn to ask for things without trusting that they will save you.
You learn slowly and painfully that a full life is not one where there is no pain, but one where the pain doesn’t erase the beauty.
And there’s beauty, boy. You will know more if you keep your head down all the time. There is beauty in the most modest places. A clean glass of water on a hot day. Pause before someone says your name. After you’ve held yourself for a long time, take a deep breath. What doesn’t solve anything in music still gives the air a different feel. In the simple comfort of being with someone who doesn’t ask you to perform.
I learned belatedly and imperfectly that the soul does not thrive under constant demand. It needs room. It needs air. It needs those little human things that no calendar can save and no campaign can replace. It requires communication. It needs sleep. It needs to be reminded that it exists beyond utility.
So if I have any final advice for you, it’s this. Don’t spend your life trying to convince the world that you deserve to be here. You already are. Don’t measure your days by what you’ve accomplished. Measure them by what you noticed, what you felt, who you loved, and how honestly you lived in your own skin. There will be enough people asking you to do more. Few will tell you that being here, fully here, is already a form of courage.
I am an old man now, and old men grow dull because time takes away ornaments. I no longer believe in appearances too much.
I believe in cool things.
A steady hand.
Truthful silence.
Soft face in relief.
A moment of laughter that comes without warning.
A boy who can still learn to stop running long enough to feel the ground beneath him. These are the last.
If you don’t remember anything else, remember this. You do not have to prove your right to rest. You don’t have to earn the right to breathe. You don’t have to set yourself on fire to convince someone you’re hot.
Not in the way people applaud live, but in the fuller way that tells you to notice, to accept, to be human even when the world wants you to be something else.
Let yourself be touched by the little things.
Let yourself be changed by them.
Let yourself be ordinary in the best sense of the word. current Open shameless.
The days will go about their business whether you are anxious or calm. Can’t change that much. But how you meet them is up to you. Take your time with it. A man does not grow by rushing to his own demise.
I love you it never depends on what you produce, what you achieve or how tired you are. It is the oldest of all, and the simplest.
Stay here, son. Stay here when you can.
father
–
This post was Previously published at medium.com.
Love affair? We promise a better stay with your inbox.
Subscribe to get dating and relationship advice 3x weekly.
do you know We have 8 publications on Medium. Join us there!
***
–
Photo credit: Nicola Majconer on Unsplash
