Letters to My Future Kids

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. You cannot argue a pudding. Seventeen letters of claims, and at the last door the father admits he cannot prove a word of it from a page. So the last letter is not an argument. It is his playbook, three things his children must do, and a blessing.

There is a movie you have to watch twice. The second time, you see what was standing in every scene. The father says being born again is like that, and the famous puzzle about what Jesus meant was never a puzzle. What was this whole book doing all along?

Say "good works" in a church and the room tenses up. Half hear earning your way, half hear a to-do list. The father comes at it from a door nobody expects: boredom. What does a person who needs nothing and fears nothing actually do with a life?

Everyone knows what Sunday feels like, and the dread that creeps in by evening. To the world, rest is a pit stop between laps. The father goes back to the very first Sunday, when the first people woke up into rest, and asks what that day actually is, and whether it ever ended.

There is a money no country prints, built on one premise: nobody can be trusted. Its makers called it trustless. The father reads that word as a forecast of the world his children will live in, and asks where a person puts their trust when every other address has failed.

An orca born for open ocean, raised in a tank. Nobody watching thinks the whale is bad. It is mis-contained. The father says your will has spent its whole life in a tank, and the word itself is broken. What is the will, really, and what does it look like free?

An astronaut takes hours to get dressed, because where he is going, the unsuited body cannot live a minute. Some places you do not enter as you are. The father says most people have the end of the story backwards. The arrival is not ours. So what were we doing all this time?

Every waiting room has the frantic, the numb, and one person sitting there completely at peace. Same chairs, same clock, same closed door. What does that person know? The father says the whole walk ends in a wait, and the wait is where the power grows.

The board game says whoever retires with the most money wins. Everyone laughs, then plays it for real. The father says it is the wrong game entirely, and the people playing life like chess are the most anxious people you will meet. So what is the real game, and how is it played?

To the world, surrender is a white flag. Hands up, you lost. Then there is a man in the old book who walked his only son up a mountain with wood and a knife, and did not argue. Was he weak? The father says that walk is the strongest thing a human had done, and the door to the power.