“The universe is a child at play with Aeons." - Terence McKenna I owe a debt of gratitude to my son Noah for this New Year’s resolution. He celebrates his first birthday in February, and I celebrate my first year as a parent. Thinking back, I can’t remember making New Years resolutions as a kid. Are traditional resolutions the exclusive province of adults and parents? Because the life of a child is so full of promise, because their futures so unimaginable to them, rationalization is a nuisance; resolve would be a squandering of precious youth. In children’s eyes, resolution and strategy look like an affectation; the opposite of spontaneity. Children don’t court change. As a force, change is often beaten back, usually by a sound temper tantrum. Resolutions to me meant squeezing my eyes shut, dreaming hard about something I thought I wanted, and that it had better come true. It’s probably true that I whined for a new dirt bike for a few months. I may have resolved to date a school-yard sweetheart, who was quickly forgotten in favor of another. I might have sworn to land on the moon before the age of 12, and fiercely believed it at the time. But, come the first sunny day, I would renounce space travel as sissy work, and instead go in desperate search of a fishing rod. Drowning worms, then, would mean more to me that day than anything that came before it. Grand schemes hold sway over children’s imagination; big dreams that vanish, forgotten in a vacuum just as large, to fill again and again. They have no time for forecasting. If a child’s worst vice is industrial nasal excavation or a steady diet of Pop-tarts, adults work in stark realities; addictions, financial problems, failed relationships, or worse. In my case, I dragged my childhood behind me like a dirty teddy bear into adolescence and, to hear my mother tell it, fairly into adulthood. After college, I left a well-paying career in I.T. to pursue a romanticized Grizzly Adams experiment. I would live off the land in a tarpaper shack of my own design. My mother encouraged my exploration, but shook her head at my choice. Attempting to find balance there turned out to be only the opposite side of the same coin. The experience was great in many ways, and lacking in many others. Notably, an income. When I returned to the city five years later, mom reminded me, “I told you so.” Back and working in I.T. again I was well paid, but equally unsatisfied, as when I had first left. The pendulum of my well-being seemed always to swing to extremes. Money vs. Lifestyle became a rematch, then a trilogy. Drunken resolutions made once on a winter night could never hold water. And then, Noah came along. And, along with him came resolve. All my previous attempts at forcing my nature were, as D.T. Suzuki said, “like trying to flatten waves with a tire iron.” When my son arrived, a stillness I have never known settled over me. I surrendered my fight against time and age. My temper tantrum had finally ended. When I watch him being a little human, I am transported back to that realm of childhood joy. I see now that my life could have only grown so much without him; we are co-conspirators now. And soon, when I get to say to him “I told you so”, I will really, finally mean it.

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