My son is back in Seattle with his mom after a week’s visit with me in Atlanta. It was quiet and uneventful. He’s almost eight, and this school break week was very different from last year, when we took the train to San Antonio and then on to New Orleans. Last year he needed more accompaniment, someone to keep him moving, someone to supply things to do. This year, not so much – he has a sense of what he wants to do even when he’s somewhere he doesn’t want to be. There is too much demand for video games, too much demand for television programs (although in his favor, he prefers documentaries), but there’s a growing sense of self-created desire that comes through in him.
This, I think, is one of the intellectual joys of being a parent – the opportunity to see the different nuances of how children develop. Inevitably one compares it to one’s own childhood, although I do my best not to draw simple comparisons. Raising a child seems like it should be an exercise in listening to the child as they are, not as you think you once were, or with their voice filtered through your experience. But we’re human, it’s what we’re going to do, if not constantly than at least from time to time. And at least for my son, he’s awfully interested in what it was like for me at age seven or eight – in second grade anyway.
That leads to some complexity. He understands that I didn’t have much in the way of video games, or at least nothing he’d recognize as such – Atari 2600’s being more like knocking small rocks against one another compared to what he can do on his iPad – but we share a language of board games. I have trouble relating to what he’s reading, so instead I read his books alongside him and just comment on that. Trying to explain that at his age I was reading Art Buchwald collections and my dad’s piloting manuals and The Wall Street Journal doesn’t really resonate, although he does appreciate my ability to describe the mechanical aspects of flight. I think I’ve done a good job of explaining the world I grew up in in terms that allow him to see my youth and his youth as a kind of continuum, even though the world I grew up with him is, in many ways, completely dead.
The one thing I do worry about, however, is giving him some kind of a window into what I can only describe here as the magic of living. This morning, on the way to the airport and before dropping the dog off with the nice lady who takes care of her when I travel, I took my son with me to the dog park for the morning walk. It has been terrifically wet and rainy in Atlanta this winter, in fact for three of the days my son was visiting we really had no choice except to stay inside and watch documentaries and play board games together as it was raining in torrents. But as often happens with winter storms, after the worst of it cleared through on Thursday night, a front moved through and replaced grey and wet with cold and clear. We woke up this morning to a wonderland of frost, waterlogged grass and moss turned crispy by temperatures dipping a few degrees below freezing overnight.
When I first got up and took the dog out for her morning “quick walk” – basically, she pees a bit then comes back inside and gets some more sleep in – my breath hung in great wafts in the windless air, my eyes tearing up a bit in the cold. The sun was low on the horizon off to the east, but it was early enough that the western horizon was still a deep azure blue, the color more of the ocean than of daytime sky, and the light glinted off the skyscrapers of midtown Atlanta. Again, there was no wind, no sound from the trees, and on a Saturday morning after a week of rain and drear no traffic really either. So all of this play of light, and breath, and sky, and crisp earth played out with only the sound of my feet in the grass, of the dog sniffing about the plants and around the side of the house, her collar tags chiming as she bowed her head and poked about.
That’s the magic of living I’m talking about. Stopping and listening to that, or rather, letting the sounds and the light and the pins of cold against your skin and the tears at the edge of your eyelids all swim and play with you. Letting your mind expand beyond the brain and absorb all of your sensory information as if it were one, because it is one, because you are not your mind and the world is not separate from you, you are connected to it. Having moments where you become attuned to that is quite simply magical. It requires, though, putting pause – no, actually, it requires silencing the Enlightenment impulse to deduce, to induct, and to quantify.
My son has what I believe is the misfortune to be born in humankind’s most materialistic age, when we have stretched ourselves ever further from the magic of living. Our quantification of the world and of ourselves has served us well in some ways – vaccines! no famines! – but the intervention of things and quantities with the lived experience of the body and mind together in a world of far greater complexity than we can imagine destroys, on a real level, the reality that that complexity is beyond us. We quantify as a means of controlling, of bringing things – nature, matter – into our realm. This despite the fact that for all of that quantification, the universe keeps showing itself to be beyond any attempt at our control. Sure, we alter our environment – we cut down forests, rechannel rivers, dump lots of plastics into the ocean – but in terms of being able to control it, we’re completely out of our depth.
One of my least favorite regular contributors to The New York Review of Books is an environmentalist named Bill McKibbon. He has been railing about climate change for several decades, with his basic message being “we have to stop polluting the environment and allowing carbon in the atmosphere to increase or else really bad things will happen.” I find the howling to be somewhat off-putting, largely because any basic analysis of humanity’s course in the last two hundred years says one thing and one thing only: we aren’t going to change course. We have willfully, happily, almost gleefully taken the possibilities open to us to make our life more pleasant through science and technology and in every way maxed them out, only stopping or pulling back when we find another, shinier object to play with, or more rarely, when we realize a given object is directly deadly to me – not to us, not to mankind, but to me. We are selfish; we do not care about our fellow humans in Russia or China or Africa who have to deal with the outcomes, and they in Russia or China or Europe do not care about us.
So McKibbon’s premise – we must stop or else – is basically an irrelevancy, but it’s worse than that, because it presumes a degree of control which is non-sensical on a planet and in a universe as complex as ours. We can’t stop consuming carbon fuels at the pace we’re currently on so as to reach his “carbon neutral by 2050” goal. The planet is filled with nearing eight billion fundamentally selfish individuals who, empowered by a sense of individual control born of a materialist weltanschauung, want all their other fellow humans to sacrifice but don’t want to give up their car, or the hope of having a car, or their air conditioning, or for that matter their (extremely non carbon neutral) health care systems and food supply chains. And thinking that we can engineer a response to fix this is just as chimerical.
What we can do, on the other hand, is adopt ourselves to whatever the planet is going to throw at us. We can accept that we’ve already pumped enough carbon in to the atmosphere, on the back end of cycle of ice ages that was already heating up the planet a bit before we discovered how cool it was to burn hydrocarbons, to heat up the atmosphere. What will happen? We don’t know, and it’s hubris to think we will figure it out. More storms? Probably. Less ice? Yep, that seems certain. But once the ice melts and the oceans rise, what next? Not sure! But we probably shouldn’t be making long-term plans for housing in low-lying coastal properties.
Should we burn less hydrocarbons? Of course we should. We can develop other energy sources – I’ve been reading about fusion power since I was nine or ten, not quite my son’s current age but not too far off – and those will be good, along with wind and solar, both of which my son and I learned about on various documentary programs this past week. But we’ve already done the damage, and since the system that we’ve unconsciously tinkered with – the planet – is far, far more complex, and far, far slower to fully incorporate inputs than the lifespan of one of us puny, selfish human beings, we should first and foremost be planning to react. Moreover, the idea that we can “save” the planet is just laughable – not because of timing, but because of the hubristic materialism that lies behind the notion.
McKibbon – like so many environmentalists, actually – is just another scientist, another engineer, another anthropocentric materialist. They believe there is something we can do to change the world, instead of acknowledging that we are of the world and thus everything we do changes it. And moreover, the world changes with us, and around us, and for reasons which have nothing to do with us – and those changes, combined with our own actions, cannot be reduced to a simple “we do X, world does Y” calculus. McKibbon fails to understand – and I’ve been reading him, teeth increasingly gritted, for at least 20 years – that his logic is no different from the logic of oil companies and his other bêtes noires. He believes that “we” can save the world. But we can’t: we can save one another as human beings (by preparing for a world which is changing around us), and we can change our behavior, but saving the world is irrelevant. The world will change, and it may destroy us or it may not. It is not asking to be saved, and would laugh at the notion if laughter was something to which it was given. Get over it.
What we can do, however, is to react to the changes which are underway. We can help one another, although let’s face it, we probably will only help those who are recognizably close to us because we are selfish and we really don’t care at a certain level of separation. But we won’t learn how to react to these changes unless we listen, feel, smell, see the world around us.
That’s not what we do, however.
I could see lots of other backyards this morning on the early break; the dog and I were the only ones sniffing around, feeling the cold air and looking curiously at the steam coming from our nostrils (hers are much more charming than mine). My son was sleeping in, and so were the neighbors. The dog peed, and we went back inside – I fed her, put the coffee on, showered and shaved, switched from pajamas and wool slippers to jeans and hiking shoes. The dog got her extra hour of sleep and I read another few dozen pages of Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad is good in any weather. My son stirred and got up, and with aching reluctance, agreed to follow the dog and I to the park for a proper morning walk.
The off-leash park is a mile away and since we were on the way to the airport, we drove there. We parked a short walk from the entrance, across a trail and through a well-trod shortcut. The sun was a bit higher in the sky but the underbrush – stunted trees, weeds, ground cover, decaying piles of leaves – was a bristly white, covered in the frost that can only form after a week of drenching rain. It was still early though so none of the frost had melted – it was glistening, each branch a fractal maze of crystals and planes and icy fur, and as the dog tugged at her leash and we wandered through the little path maze, glints of sunlight would get focused and create prisms against our jackets. My son is obsessed with only wearing shorts, so I knew he could feel the cold air on his skin directly, just as I could feel my hair – grown long after a few weeks without a hair cut – stand on end and prickle in the morning chill.
The dog caught the scent of the other dogs before we saw them, in fact my son thought the dog park was empty but I knew it wasn’t by the way her ears flattened and she dragged me faster to meet her friends. I couldn’t smell them, but I could smell the damp, the cold damp, the way forest floors smell when they are too waterlogged but also too cold. There was no ice in the flooded basin – the creek bed was under at least six feet of water from the week of heavy rain – but it was still cold enough to make the water smell like a leafy syrup.
My thoughts ran to keeping the dog from running too far ahead, to making sure my son was close enough to me that I wasn’t being unkind to him, but also I was trying to carve those thoughts away from my mind and just let my mind join up to my body, feeling the cold, smelling the damp, snorting and creating clouds of steam from my unlovely nostrils which themselves could feel the damp, and letting the sunlight and the prisms of frost all combine into one.
My son tramped along behind me, talking about video games, asking how long we had to be at the dog park.
We got to the entrance, I let the dog go, she bolted towards her until then unseen compatriots, diving around one another, sniffing, wrestling, chasing, breathing. She would every now and again come running towards me, looking for encouragement and a cuddle, asking if she could stay longer. She attached herself to a Great Dane, and then another cattle dog, and leapt with sheer joy at one point a good two feet into the air, coming down and dashing off. I loved her with everything I had in me, even as I loved my son, knock kneed and walking around the dog park, calling to the dogs and telling them about his video games.
The people at the dog park milled about, looking at their phones, occasionally giving my son a nod. They talked amongst themselves about the weather – how much rain, how chilly it was – and about the dogs and how they were playing together. So much chatter.
My son filled the water bowl at the fountain, and announced loudly to everyone in the park, “fresh water for dogs! Come on dogs, I have fresh water!” They came and drank at the bowl, and then he asked if we could leave.
Well, we can drop off the dog and go to the airport. In that way, yes. But in a deeper way, no, we can’t leave. And we shouldn’t want to. And we should relish the fact that we are here.
“Dad, my feet are cold,” he announced, and I told him it was probably because he was wearing shorts, and because the ground was icy. We could go now, and he’d warm up in the car. The dog was chilly too, and ready to warm up. We walked back, though the frosty underbrush which was starting to melt in the rising sun, our breath still visible but the ground now softening. The dog took the lead easily, not tugging now that she had met her friends and had her morning tussle, her fur sleek, her ears relaxed, her tongue lolled as she panted. She stayed close to me, warm and soft, while my son dashed ahead. The air was still, the sounds – dogs in the park barking, panting, my feet on the trail, my son babbling happily – the smell of the damp getting warmer, the air and the sun mixing in cold and warmth at the same time.
Start with feeling that, son. Absorb that in the same way that you absorb your thoughts of change, of mastery, of quanta and of things. But start with feeling that. It’s magic.