This morning, on my way over here, I passed a man standing in his yard with a baby strapped to him, pacing, bouncing slightly. No matter how normalized, a still very incongruent thing to see in the dark of the very early morning.
Quite likely, the man was at a major crux of experience in life. An inflection point that, like most of them—except maybe high school graduation—we are ignorant of how profound and irreversible it is.
It is difficult to catch the signs of a baby’s nascent personality, traits that will later solidify into something we recognize as a unique human being, with a unique orientation to the world. As a baby, they seem only a packet of demands, the fulfillment of which becomes duty and, in turn, shapes our unique orientation to the world.
In high school, I discovered my capacity for creativity was greater at night when the house was quiet, and I had space to explore my thoughts. Back then, I roamed through future possibilities, sandwiched, as I was, between a Stephen King novel and the Michigan winter outside. What I never intended to go beyond indulgent reading, mere resolution of conflict, gradually grew into musings on maturity. King’s teenage protagonists ventured into a world in which they were alone, and I followed eagerly in my mind, seeking a better understanding of my own burgeoning independence.
Eventually, I discovered that I could intensify the experience by manipulating words in another way: before reading each evening, and exploring new emotional scenarios of independence, I would write, usually focusing on a single emotion and expanding on it as much as possible. In a way, I was priming myself to read, checking in with who I felt myself to be, before spending hours with imagined characters and trying to extract something personal from their experiences.
I built a cult of this routine, spending hours each night in words, trading the ephemeral daytime experiences of human interaction, of sight, and sound, for the solid, but mutable experience of writing and reading surrounding by the sleeping world.
Turned out the routine was a great primer for college. The bulk of what I was expected to do as a student was to sit with words, ideas strung out in paragraphs and entire books, and make something of them, understand them and comment on them. Now, on my own, I built a temple for my cult of words, as a student, I was to be their acolyte.
Long before I was a morning coffee drinker, I was an evening coffee drinker. I still can’t help but to associate the dark, earthy flavor and warmth more with twilight than with dawn; a way to cross over into the quiet period, to hone the focus on the page, while the world grows still, abstracted only by the occasional set of roving headlights, passing the café on the road outside. Inside, I was using the words I was reading to construct what I was writing through quoting. Moving them from one pile to another, sifting them through my fingers, using them to examine the radical present I was living in, on my own, with all the roads leading to the horizon seemingly open.
But unable to construct much foresight, I eventually began to impetuously follow these roads. No longer imagining them, glancing over the top of a book, but setting the book down and going out to walk them. Once I had begun, I found it difficult to stop.
I read less and walked more. With less of a routine to hold me to the nightly exploration of words, they lost their magnetism, and I wandered larger and larger circles in the night. The night would begin with reading, but I was no longer anchored in it by assignments and due dates, and, closing the book, I’d walk to the ocean, through the mountains that were just outside my constantly changing windows. Why read about what was, after all, right there?
I found other people out in that night, and I realized that I had been alone in my books, with my words. I followed these people, sometimes, and other times, they followed me. We went new places together, had conversations which reflected the writings I had done, it was another way of playing with the words, one that left no trace, and suited my itinerant lifestyle.
Until all this foraging and this ranging through words and experience leads you to the experience of creating another life. For me, this transition came in the same way that moving from words to experience did. Gradually, I explored this idea further and further. Leaving the book face down on the coffee table, and shuffling out into the night for a walk that led to three hours halfway across town.
And then I found myself in the position of the man walking through the neighborhood streets very early in the morning, bouncing a wide-eyed baby, resigning myself to being awake at a previously unknown time, and knowing that if I sat still and read, the baby would cry, and being tired of hearing crying. Being very tired of hearing crying.
Before having a baby, dawn was the bleariest time of the clock. It was the punishing treasure at the end of the night, the exhausted sunrise before collapse. When reading, it was the time when you realize you have passed the entire time the world has been resting following someone else’s thoughts. When wandering, it was the time when you finally made it back home, having crossed over the night like a bridge. It was when the spell broke and you had to come back, or get risk getting seriously lost.
My son slept beautifully, but he woke up around five or six am every day, and I gradually adapted my orientation to suit him. I went to sleep early, walking only to the mailbox, reading only a paragraph or two, knowing I would be awakened before the dawn for a new kind of exploration.
Having known the world of words, and the world of wandering, I slept through the night, and woke to the experience of holding another world against my chest while I strapped the carrier on, and made my pre-dawn coffee, and together we would step out into the precise place on the earth rolling over into the sun shining through the darkness of space. The same point that once signaled the end, now signaled the beginning.
No amount of reading, or wandering, or baby-soothing ever prepared me for the next stage in life, but it has always been fulfilling to know that I devoted myself so entirely to each one while I lived it.
And just the other day, my daughter expressed regret at not being able to stay up late, explaining that she felt much more creative at that time. God knows what late stage I will be in when she begins to take my books of the shelf after we have gone to sleep, ready to create her own world of words and follow it where she will.
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