Oh My Darling

“Yea, I [loved] all my labour which I had taken under the sun: because I should leave it unto the man that shall be after me."

I write my first draft as my newborn daughter coos and gurgles near my feet, fussing about in her jungle gym (the only thing which I am sure that she truly adores).  It’s 6:24am and I have taken her out of our bedroom and into the living room in an attempt to give mom a window of more restful sleep.

After my daughter’s birth, I have often struggled with the near-daily routine of heading into work and limiting my time with her to the mornings and evenings.  Sometimes it feels as though my daughter and I are not bonding as much as we could be, and I feel a twinge of guilt for my work.  When that happens, I must remind myself that I cannot approach life with the goal of maximizing time spent in any one relationship; to do so would end up suffocating my daughter.

As I consider my daughter, my thoughts move to the world outside our front door.  Growing up, it was common to hear adults tell me and other school children that we are “the future” and that we are going to go out and “change the world”.  This is all true, in a technical sense, but the logical conclusions that a young boy or girl can draw from such a statement are terrifyingly large and generally inappropriate.  Who am I to go out and change something so large as the world?  Even if I could, would such change be to the Good?  Should I be using the resources given to me to benefit my neighborhood directly, or to “change the world”?  Economic theory would say that if I place my wealth in an index fund, my dollars are more likely to be leveraged by firms that will use them for the best overall good, because they will improve the GDP and therefore increase the total amount of utility derived from our modern economy.  But that doesn’t really involve me doing anything in particular, there’s no work worth doing for me, only speculative pecuniary benefit.

I don’t know, and I really can’t know, anything about “the world”.  I can hardly know what’s going on outside my front door. In a small town, news travels fast.  For instance, a mere week after Emma and I discovered that she was pregnant, the owner of the local pub called me to congratulate me.  I was living in North Dakota at the time, but he managed to hear the news all the way in Michigan from some local gossip.  But even in a small town, you can’t always trust the news that you’re hearing.  The margin for error regarding knowledge of things within driving distance is surprisingly high.  Despite the large margin for error in understanding the happenings just outside my door, at least I have the possibility of understanding.  As far as I can tell, “the world” is only so large as I can comprehend it to be.  I cannot reasonably take much responsibility for any activity that goes on beyond my comprehension.

I know my wife pretty well, and I’m beginning to know my daughter.  I think I have good ideas regarding what will benefit them.  Learning to understand them better and learning to benefit them truly is my first responsibility, and that practice will help me to understand how to adapt to and benefit my neighbors, and eventually my neighborhood.  Perhaps that will change the world, but I’ll never know.

As I finish my first draft, my daughter has fallen asleep, wearied from her imagined labors.  Apparently, being a baby is hard work.  My labors for the day are about to begin, as I try to make this neighborhood a better place for her.  Perhaps I’ll fail, or perhaps she’ll never appreciate the work that I am doing on her behalf, and all will be to my own vanity, but so it goes.  Either way, it’s work that has been given to me and is worth doing.