Some reflections on life upon the occasion of my daughter's first month

My daughter is almost one month old. During this month, many of my thoughts about life have been challenged. Sleeplessness and frustration are a crucible that quickly burn away facile assumptions such as: life is
fun; or even cynical reflections like: life is boring. What remains of my most basic beliefs about life? Here are few nuggets.


Life is surprising. It probably doesn't come as a shock that I did a bit of reading to better plan for being a father. Though I'm glad I had some weathered parents to give some advice, nothing adequately prepared me for my first encounter with my daughter.

This is what Levinas and his postmodern disciples mean when they speak of the human other, always partially hidden, never totalized by the gaze. No amount of theorizing can replace experience, as this is the horizon where one can escape oneself (though not entirely); this is where one must live.

Let me make clear that I have no romantic delusions about surprises: not all are pleasant or desired. Some surprises interrupt our plans, and they always add uncertainty when we forecast the future. Nevertheless, the uncertainty of surprise holds the only promise that something might exceed our expectations, which are more often lower than they ought to be. As the possibility for testing ourselves and (im)proving our character, I relish surprises as a necessary experience in life.

Life is messy. I don't just mean that life sometimes involves messes. Based on my experience and reflection, I mean to say that life is (essentially) messy, so that where one sees life, one finds a mess. If life then mess. And for you logicians, let me state the modus tollens: No mess, no life. To escape all messiness would be nihilistic, or at least inhuman. Which reminds me. What did the nihilist say to the hypochondriac? "The ontological void may be terrifying, but hey, it's clean."

Perhaps I should clarify this a bit since 'mess' is not a very technical term. When I connect mess and life essentially, I do not mean to exclude order from the relationship. To my understanding, a mess is not contrary to order; rather, a mess is what results when an order meets with what I described above: surprise. A mess is an untotalized order; an unexpected experience; an unforeseen change; an uncontrolled and nonprogrammable organization.

In this sense, a mess is not chaos, which would be contrary to the unity and good of any being. Likewise, messiness is not some evil necessity of being. Instead, messes are the way that life allows for growth; they are the imprints of the past and the inchoate future. What I'm talking about here is what physicists call entropy: In order to have life here, there must be disarray somewhere else. Or, more crudely, for my daughter to continue developing, she must go on pooping.

Even the creation account in Genesis implies something like this. God created a garden and placed man in it, but He didn't create self-trimming hedges with pre-arranged landscaping. Man's task was to cultivate God's beautiful, but messy, work. Still, the relative disorder of messes is always overshadowed by the wondrous order of life.

Tears are good. It was Gandalf the wizard who reassured the hobbits, "I will not tell you not to cry, for not all tears are evil." We all know about tears of joy, and most would agree that these are welcome if rare swells of emotion. And I've seen a lot of these in recent weeks. But what about tears of sorrow? I have come to think these are good, too.

Simply put, my daughter could not communicate her needs without the aid of a few cries of pain. Though she knows no human language, she can still reach out for help. Amazingly, sometimes our bodies can communicate for themselves what our souls are unable to express. And there are times when even the best poet couldn't capture our pain any better than a few well-earned tears.

Silence is also good. St. Augustine of Hippo taught that the universe is a cosmic poem set to divine music. From this point of view, noise is never merely random sounds. Everything is either in harmony or dissonant. And the Christian belief is that all dissonance resolves in the melodic theme of Christ's death and resurrection.

These are nice ideas, but music seems an unfit analogy for life with an infant dominating the scene. She is just so noisy. It will take some perspective on my part to hear her screams as harmonic pulses in the song of life. But I will say this, if life is musical then the silences between tones really are just as important and necessary as the sounded notes. (Also, decrescendo is probably my favorite dynamic at the moment.) So the next time you find yourself in the quiet, and you're tempted to feel bored or antsy, try to absorb the silence, if only for my sake. Don't mistake silence for dullness.

Sleep is precious. A rare gem, really. Why do children hate to sleep? Doubtless, the world is full of wonder and one is loath to miss some new experience. But let us never forget, in our go-go yuppie lives, that rest is truly good. Slowing down is difficult in our caffeinated culture. Yet, we gain more from days lived on a good night's sleep. So, if you tend to be hyperactive, try to remember this: sleep is an important activity; it is not the opposite of activity.

Pain is not evil. I'm not much for theodicy, mostly because I think it is unnecessary, and problematic, to try to justify God's actions. At any rate, when it comes to the existence of pain, I believe that it is good and that God created annoying bodily aches and fatigue for our benefit. Though etymologically the word pain is derived from the Latin for punishment, I prefer to view physical pains as prelapsarian. As I see it, fleshly weaknesses are not a punishment for sin or some unfortunate oversight in God's plan. Imagine the world without pain. I don't mean spiritual or emotional pain (these almost always coincide with real evil), but regular bodily pain. Anyone who has studied medicine will tell you that a world without pain would soon be a world without life.

For example, suppose my daughter learned how to roll over one day, but she found herself laying face down on a couch and couldn't roll back. As she suffocated, she would feel burning pain and scream, hopefully loud enough to attract attention. Now, if she didn't feel that pain, she might have died.

Pain is our bodies' way of teaching us our own limits. We can often be fooled about how smart or good-looking we are, but it is much harder to think that you have extreme physical prowess when you can't lift the suitcase in front of you. As I watch my daughter struggle with many pains of her own, I am learning to appreciate pain as a great tutor in my own weakness and dependency.

And finally, most of all this past month, I have learned that life is a gift. Some philosophies try to reduce life to a given, or at least the result of determinate, albeit accidental, cosmic laws. Contrary to this, I maintain that even the supposedly immutable laws of the universe are gifts, not givens, and that the very existence of continuity (if not of material, then of process) in the cosmos attests to an immutable First Being. And somehow, all of this has led to the gratuitous birth of my beautiful daughter. Some days life may not feel like a gift, but I will never again fall prey to the poisonous falsehood that existence is a given, or worse, that it is a burden.