One-Way Door

James Turrell, Perfectly Clear, 1991 

A few months back I listened to an interview with American author and journalist Jia Tolentino where she compared becoming a parent to doing acid for the first time. You have no idea what to expect other than this rough cultural understanding that the experience is going to change your perspective. You are a bit nervous, maybe a bit excited, maybe scared. Then you get to the other side and think, oh, this is what this is. In retrospect it feels so obvious. How could it be anything else?

This has held true. At the time of hearing the interview, my wife was pregnant and I had started paying close attention to friends and family, trying to build a map of what was about to happen. But becoming a parent is not following a map. It is walking through a door. At the end of November, I went through one of life’s great one-way doors and became a parent.

Another similarity between entering fatherhood and entering psychedelic experiences is the complete realization of the totally obvious. The things we write pop songs about, the things in parables, proverbs, on fortune cookies, hanging in the National Art Gallery, on gas station fridge magnets. Big truths that sit in plain sight. But it is only during these perspective shifts, when a new door opens and a new way of seeing takes hold, that these capital T truths really settle in. It is not that I have achieved nuanced wisdom. It is that I am feeling what everyone already knows. Love is not a zero-sum game. It expands and multiplies. My capacity for it is so much larger than I imagined. Things that I already knew about family, love, the universe, the interconnectedness of all things and all that mumbo-jumbo crystallizes and moves past a vague knowing and into truth, if only for a brief drip at a time.

The day after coming home from the hospital, I went down to the pharmacy on a solo trip with our list of odds and ends one gets after you bring home a baby. Walking the brightly lit aisles, I realized that my little girl had already been here. She had already touched the small end-of-isle display of cheap watches, the ragged discount table, the vinyl waiting room chairs. Everything carried a thin dusting of her. She has been to every room I will ever step foot in. When we get to Mars, I will find her little palm prints in every red crater and on every mountain peak. Everything in my world has already been visited and altered by her existence.

Like a psychedelic experience, nothing in the physical world has changed. I'm seeing things a bit differently now, and seeing your daughter sneeze for the first time is one hell of a trip. ✌️&💗