881 Days

[Sitting in my airbnb in Thailand]

At two years old, my daughter still wakes up every morning at 5:30am.

I thought by now she would be sleeping in, and I would be getting back to my regular sleeping routine. That has not happened. And you know what... I am kind of happy it hasn’t.

For the last 881 days, my entire life has changed. I thought I was going to be raising and teaching a little human how to live. I failed at that in the first seven days as she began dismantling that illusion.

I tried to show her what time we go to sleep and what time we wake up... and she revolted against my teaching. I proceeded to teach her how to be polite, how not to be disruptive and loud... and she ignored the entire practice and yelled at the top of her lungs. I began to show her how to be patient while I prepared her milk... and she demanded that her needs be met immediately..

Somewhere in those first few months I came to an honest conclusion. The way of life as a baby might be the best life ever.

So one day, during one of her naps, I sat back and asked myself a question. I began to wonder whether I had misunderstood the entire relationship between her and I. So, I started to ask questions like:

What if she didn’t just come here to be raised by me?

What if she had also come to raise something in me?

And that is when I started paying closer attention.

Here is what my daughter has taught me over the last two years... these are things I have now built into my life as a forty-year-old man.

1. Move your body every day... for no reason at all.

I noticed something that instantly put my daughter in a better mood. Whenever she started jumping up and down, or spinning in circles, everything about her changed. More smiles. More joy. More energy.

So one day I started mimicking her. Whenever she jumped, I jumped. Whenever she spun, I spun... even when I was tired, even when I was not in the mood.

And I instantly felt different. It felt like a rush of dopamine hit me. Energy running all through my body. It almost felt like I was high on something. Don’t laugh at me.

It felt different than a gym workout.

It felt like life.

You know, somewhere along the way, adults stopped moving for joy. We only move to lose weight, count steps or fix something we dislike about ourselves. My daughter does not jump because she hates her body. She jumps because she is inside one. We exercise to correct ourselves. She moves to express herself. Somewhere between her age and mine, movement stopped being a celebration and I think it started feeling more like punishment.

Now, most days you can find me jumping and spinning in circles for no reason at all. Because joy has to go somewhere.

2. Take naps.

Yes. Naps.

There was not a day that went by that my daughter did not take her nap. And when she missed one, I could tell... her whole mood shifted. This little human would go down at the same time every day, like clockwork, without me initiating anything. Her naps were just as important as her nights.

I used to treat her nap time as my free time. Then one day I laid down when she laid down. And I had almost forgotten how a nap felt, because I had not taken one in years. Maybe decades.

Listen to me when I tell you. A fifteen, thirty, sixty minute nap will change your mood, your patience, and even your decision making.

It is part of my life now. I do not catch one every day. But most days, you will find me napping like a baby.

Because I learned through watching her that children do not consider exhaustion a badge of honor. They do not brag about running on four hours of sleep. And they don’t equate depletion as ambition. When their bodies ask for rest, they surrender to that notion. It is a rhythm she lives inside.

Adulthood taught me to rest only after I had earned it. My daughter taught me that rest is not a reward for finishing life. Rest is part of how life is sustained.

3. Have conversations about absolutely nothing.

This was a strange one.

Even after she learned to talk, my daughter would hold full conversations with her dolls and her stuffed animals... about things that made no sense to me at all. And I noticed it would shift her whole mood. She could be two minutes past crying, start talking to them about nothing, and end up laughing and whispering like the tears never happened.

So one day I joined the conversation. I just started talking about nothing with her, in a language I am not sure either of us was speaking.

And my whole mood shifted. What started as playing ended with me feeling pure joy... laughing with my daughter about absolutely nothing.

Now we do it a few times a week, on purpose. And I will confess something. I started doing it with my close friends too. I get on the phone and just start talking nonstop about nothing, and they say... Marquise, what are you talking about... and then they start laughing.

It works. Try it.

Here is what I saw in her. Not one of her conversations is a transaction. Nothing has to be accomplished for it to be worth having.

Think about your last ten conversations. How many of them had an agenda? A goal? A point? Adults have forgotten how to communicate without an agenda. Every conversation has to solve something now, sell something, explain something, network with someone or move something forward. My daughter reminded me that sometimes language does not need to take you anywhere. Sometimes the laughter is the destination that day.

4. Feel it, then release it/ Get Over it

This one was big for me.

My daughter would get upset... genuinely upset... for a few minutes. And then she moved on. I am not saying she forgot. I am saying she did not let it consume her day, and she did not let it change how she felt about herself. She does not deny what she feels. When she is angry, the entire room knows. When she is hurt, she cries with her whole body. But once the feeling has moved through her, she does not live in it forever.

This blew me away because she would be upset with me for a minute... and five minutes later she would climb into my lap like nothing happened.

She taught me that you can feel a thing all the way through without carrying it for days. Now I let myself feel whatever disappoints me, in the moment it happens. And then I practice what she practices. I put it down and release it.

The biggest thing I noticed about her in reference to this practice is she feels everything and files nothing.

We are the opposite as adults. We keep records. We carry Tuesday’s offense into Friday’s dinner. She has no storage system... I had spent years either suppressing my emotions or allowing them to become my identity. She taught me another way: feel it honestly, express it fully and then give yourself permission to return to love.

Nobody has taught her yet to build an identity out of a wound.

5. Ask for what you want... without apologizing for wanting it.

This might be the deepest one.

When my daughter wants something, she asks for it. That is the entire process. There is no justification or working up the courage. She does not say sorry to bother you. She has a need, she names the need, and she fully expects the need to matter. And it doesn’t matter what time of day it is

She has never once apologized for being thirsty.

And when I noticed that, it stopped me in my tracks. Because I know grown, accomplished, impressive people... people running companies, leading families... who rehearse a simple request five times before they say it. And they attach an apology to every need.

Somewhere, a long time ago, somebody taught us that our needs were an inconvenience. That the polite thing... the safe thing... was to need as little as possible, and to apologize for the rest.

She has not learned that.

My daughter taught me that an unspoken need does not become less real. It often becomes resentment.

And I need you to know there is nothing shameful about saying, “I need help. I need rest. I need reassurance. I need you to sit with me.”

Jesus said something I have read my whole life in ministry and only now I can truly say I understand after 881 days of watching her.

Unless you become like a little child... you will never enter the kingdom.

I always thought that verse was more so about innocence. But now I have a revelation that it is more about recovery. The recovery of our original state.

Because everything my daughter does naturally is everything I have spent forty years trying to get back. The moving for joy. The resting without earning it. The talking without an agenda. The feeling without filing. The asking without apologizing.

She is not learning how to live.

She already knows how to live.

The world will try to teach it out of her. The same world that taught it out of you and I. Little by little, it will hand her the same lessons it handed us... that rest must be earned, that needs are a burden, that feelings should be filed and stored in our memory, that every conversation needs a point, that her body is a project to manage instead of a joy to live in.

And I have realized my real job as her father is not to teach her how to live. But my job is to protect what she already knows... for as long as I possibly can.

And to let her teach it back to me, before I forget again.

Because we spend the first years of a child’s life trying to civilize them.

Stop jumping.

Sit down.

Be quiet.

Don’t cry.

Wait patiently.

Stop asking so many questions.

Do not interrupt.

Do not make a mess.

And then, decades later, we pay people to teach us how to move again, speak again, feel again, rest again, become curious again and reconnect with ourselves.

Maybe children are not incomplete adults. Maybe adults are children who have forgotten something.

---

So why I am telling you all of this?

You knew everything on this list once.

The jumping. The resting. The nonsense and the laughter. The letting go. The asking without apology. You did every single one of these things, every day, without being taught.

Which means none of this was ever missing from you.

It was not untaught to you... it was taught out of you.

And anything that was taught out of you.. is not gone.

So maybe the work of becoming yourself is not what we thought it was. Maybe you do not have to learn how to live.

Maybe you just have to remember.

I’ll write you next Sunday.

Gold

p.s. leave a comment with your thoughts about this letter.