Fatherhood has changed a lot of things for me. I don’t seem to need as much sleep as I did before. I don’t seem to worry about having another human pooping on me. Some of the little things that used to bother me and keep me up at night now seem to float away as wholly unimportant.
Like I mentioned last week, it has also inspired me to more consider closely what I must have in my life, what is essential and what is non-essential. With my time so much more limited, what stays and what goes?
When I ask myself this, I realize that for a year or two now I have felt called to write a book. It’s a book that tells the story of why this work at Kindling means so much to me. It’s a book that pulls together everything I’m working on here, from the good news articles, to the Next Systems pieces, to the Timeline of Human Genius, into a coherent narrative and way of imagining the world and our place in it. It’s about human genius and emergence, our incredible ability to create and innovate, and how the best of what humanity has to offer is yet to come. It’s something that I realize has been growing inside of me for a few years and needs to find a way to be expressed.
On some level, this realization is pretty inconvenient. This is not really the right time in my life to write a book or take on any kind of major endeavor. I have a wife and kid, a full-time job, friends, family – plenty of things to occupy my time, not to mention a commitment to not being constantly in a state of stress or overwhelm. But when I’m honest with myself and truly allow myself to listen to what life is asking of me, finding a way to express this story feels essential. It feels like what needs to happen for me to step more fully into who I am and the world I want to help create for my son and his generation.
So I’ve made a decision to allow that, to find a way to accommodate that calling into my life.
For a while now, I’ve had a goal of writing at least one piece a week and posting it on Kindling. It’s been my way of fostering my own developing in writing and grappling with whatever problems or ideas are floating through my head that week.
Moving forward, I am going to keep doing one piece, but every piece will be a small excerpt from this book of mine. While I can’t make any promises on when I’ll be finished or that every excerpt will make its way into the final product, maybe now I can feel content in slowly chipping away at it bit by bit every week.
Stay tuned!
