A Better Man Read online

  Last night we had a family dinner out on the patio. Grilled salmon and salad. Mom had you running in and out of the house for plates and platters and silverware and the big glass water pitcher. Finally, after about a dozen trips, we were ready to eat. You sat down and jokingly muttered, “Here I am,” as if the trips back and forth from the kitchen had left you disoriented. It made me laugh because I know the feeling of not knowing how you ended up anyplace at all. Here you are. Dig in.

  fifteen

  A Better Man

  Breathe

  If you think if I’m starting to get a little woo-woo on you, don’t worry—it’s about to get worse. It’s impossible to talk about your full life as a man without touching on your spiritual life.

  As you know, I don’t practice any religion and I don’t believe in God, or at least I’ve never found a satisfactory definition of God in which to believe. At the same time, I’m uncomfortable describing myself as either an agnostic, which sounds too wishy-washy, or as an atheist, which sounds too definitive. Sometimes I jokingly refer to myself as a “praytheist,” which I define as someone who prays to a god in which he does not believe, hoping to find evidence for God’s existence, which he will then dismiss.

  My faith in a higher power may be limited, but I am not without belief in the ineffable. I believe in the spirit, which I’ll define as a person’s animating force. Some people might use the words “spirit” and “soul” interchangeably when they talk about this stuff, but I’m going to stick with “spirit,” because I think “soul” has some unnecessary moral weight that sits aside from what I’m going to tell you.

  God, I think, is a creation of the spirit rather than the other way around.

  Saying a higher power is necessary for me to believe in spirit is like saying I need God to believe in my own stomach. Not really. I have a stomach and I have a spirit. Questioning the existence of either seems pointless to me, as does the debate about how either of them got there. What’s important to me is that I have a responsibility to keep both in good working order. Depriving either of nourishment will kill you just the same.

  Just as we describe our want of food as hunger, we describe our want of spiritual food as “spiritual hunger,” which we feed in service of our “spiritual needs.” Both of those terms feel accurate to me because they carry the same imperative as food. We don’t even have a phrase to describe this work as being optional, which is why there’s no such thing as “spiritual wants.”

  I wonder if those needs get more pronounced as we age. I used to think people have a tendency to get more religious as they get older because they’re hedging their bets with God as they get closer to death, but maybe that’s not the case. Instead, maybe it’s just part of our human design that the spirit grows louder as the body begins to quiet. Or maybe the spirit runs at the same volume throughout our lives, but we hear it more acutely once the noise of our lives has settled enough for us to finally listen to the forever questions of life and loss. How do we tune in to that voice?

  Religion is often the nearest tool at hand.

  Most people just kind of go along with whichever religion they are born into, the same way some people become Red Sox fans because that’s the team their family rooted for. It always seems kind of funny to me, though, when people born into a particular religion believe that theirs is the “correct” one. To say that one religion is the one true religion is exactly the same as saying the Red Sox are the one true baseball team. It’s absurd, especially since everybody knows that honor belongs to the Yankees.

  You were born into two faiths, Catholicism and Judaism. At the moment, you don’t identify with either of them very strongly, which is fine. Maybe you never will. Maybe you’ll try out one or the other in adulthood. Or another still. To me, religions are more or less equal. I have attended services in several, and found myself inspired and moved by all. I would even consider joining a religion myself if it demanded neither a faith in God nor participatory singing.

  If you do find religion one day, great. If you don’t, also great. I would caution you, though, that your religious life and your spiritual life are related, but different, subjects. Becoming a member of a religion may guide your spiritual life, but it won’t, by itself, solve whatever spiritual problems you encounter. Religion provides a framework, but you still have to do the work. It’s like going to the gym. They give you the equipment, but it won’t do you any good if you never break a sweat.

  So what is that work? What feeds our spiritual hunger? To me, the work of the spirit is twofold. The first is discovering meaning and purpose: what inspires you, excites you, moves you, prods you to look more deeply into yourself? The answers to these questions will probably change over time. Spending a childhood building Thomas the Tank Engine train tracks can be just as spiritual as an adulthood poring over the Torah. Whatever connects you to yourself and inspires you is spiritual work.

  The second, critical, part of your spiritual work is passing your inspiration on to others. A full spirit wants to be shared. The word “spirit” is a word for air, originating from the Latin spiritus, which means “breath.” You can’t hold your spirit any more than you can hold a lungful of air. Eventually, it has to be released. If you look at it that way, the machinery of the spirit seems simple enough: we inhale inspiration and exhale it back into the world.

  Why don’t most of us place a higher priority on our spiritual needs? Turn on the TV and you’ll see pills for restless leg syndrome but nothing for a restless spirit, except the occasional commercial for Scientology. (Don’t join Scientology.) Or maybe the better way to put it is that everything is being peddled as a cure for a restless spirit. We rarely frame consumerism as a spiritual pursuit, but that’s exactly what it is, a faith that accumulating enough stuff will eventually quiet the jackhammer in our head.

  Here’s a bit of copy from the website for an air freshener: “Take a drive with the soothing scent of a Febreze One Bamboo Car Vent Clip. It’ll make any commute a little calmer.” How hollowed out by life do you have to be in order to believe that plugging a cartridge of hydroxypropyl beta-cyclodextrin into the air-conditioning vent is going to help anything?

  Everybody already understands consumerism’s empty promise, yet we can’t rid ourselves of the habit of accumulation, just like most of us can’t wean ourselves off sugar. And yes, you would be right to point out my own hypocrisy on this subject. One look around our house will confirm I’m as addicted to stuff as anybody else. I have three sets of silverware. Six nearly identical gray sweaters. Hundreds of books I will almost certainly never read. I am forever preaching to everybody in our household that we all need less. Yet I’m telling you right now: if I see a cool new gray sweater on sale at Banana Republic, I’m buying it. Why? Because that’s the gray sweater purchase that will absolutely, definitely, 100 percent finally make me happy.

  Why do we persist in this delusion? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just our primitive brains telling us to hoard sweaters in case of a sweater shortage. Maybe we’re just dumb.

  I’m not suggesting you live an ascetic life, only that you follow a practice of consideration. You’re not always going to make good decisions one way or the other. Nobody does. If you get into the habit of consideration, hopefully you’ll improve your average a little bit.

  What do I mean by a “habit of consideration”? Just that. Taking a breath to consider. A check-in with yourself. How am I? What’s going on with me? What am I doing right now, and why? Who or what am I serving? Little moments of deliberation that will hopefully lead you to sound decisions about the choices you make day to day, moment to moment.

  What does all of this have to do with masculinity? A lot, I think. Men and women are no different when it comes to spiritual matters. Every person feeds their spirit in different ways, but I suspect that women, on average, have greater access to their inner lives for the same reasons that they have greater access to their emotional lives. Not because they are naturally more open to their inner
selves, but because we men are unnaturally closed off from our own. Men often end up stifling the best parts of our selves—our joy, our wonder, our empathy—to maintain our place in a pecking order that serves no purpose.

  Your life will be immeasurably better if you can receive the gifts of the world: beauty, wonder, delight (I might also throw in “pizza”). It will be better still if you can accept those gifts and then pass them on. When we talk about traditional masculinity, we talk about strength, courage, aggression, independence. As I’ve said, there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of those traits, but they’ll prove meaningless to you if they aren’t in the service of something greater.

  Life, a good life, demands constant self-interrogation. Who am I? What do I value? Where do I devote my time? What deserves my attention? Be a relentless interrogator of yourself. Discover your own assumptions and question them. Question everything. Follow those lines of inquiry. Educate yourself. Find viewpoints that challenge your own and treat them with the seriousness that you would expect others to treat yours. Pick up books (yes, actual books). Read about other people’s experiences moving through this life; they may be radically different from yours, which may bring them to radically different conclusions than the ones you’ve reached. You may agree with them, you may not, but at least consider that you might be wrong. Consider that you might be wrong about almost everything. Don’t become complacent because complacency can quickly turn to the spiritually destructive apathy.

  It may be tempting to turn your back on the world at times. That’s fine: take sabbaticals when you need them. But always come back. There are too many things worth fighting for to give yourself a permanent pass. When I started thinking about all of this, for example, I had to really force myself into an uncomfortable space. But I did it. Not because I wanted to, but because once I started questioning why boys are shooting up schools, it forced me to think about why boys and men are the way they are, which led me to question the way I am as a guy, which led to the inevitable realization that I have a son who might benefit from these inquiries, and other people’s sons might benefit from the same. In exploring these questions for myself, I’m also trying to serve other people. Why? Because I, too, would like to be a useful engine.

  Above all, to whom do I give my love?

  The simple secret of manhood is love. It’s almost embarrassing to write that down. Not because it sounds so hokey, but because, deep down, it’s something all of us already knows. And yet . . . we men have an especially hard time admitting it to ourselves. For all of our bravado, for all of our sweat, our chest pounding, we still strive for that same, simple place. Just love. That moment of finding ourselves flailing in the world for the first time, breathing new air, and being held by our mothers and fathers. We begin our days seeking love and it pretty much stays the same. Everything we do and everything we are is in service of that love. But we forget. And so it becomes almost like a secret that each of us has to uncover on our own. The message of love is everywhere you care to look, as ubiquitous as commercials for air fresheners. Just quieter. And, no matter what anybody tells you, I think you have to uncover it for yourself. It’s a secret I keep rediscovering. I learned it when I married Mom. When you were born. Three days later, when I made a right turn out of the hospital parking lot to bring you home, I learned it again. Rocking you in the middle of the night when you would not stop crying. When you first toddled to me on shaky legs. And then all of it all over again when your sister was born. On the first day of kindergarten when I put you on a school bus alone and trusted you would get home safe. A few years later, when both of you came home from school on a day when so many of our neighbors did not. It’s a lesson I learn and relearn every day. I said that the machinery of the spirit lets inspiration in and breathes it out. Another word for that process is love.

  There’s a moment in The Empire Strikes Back when Darth Vader has captured Han Solo and is about to flash-freeze him like a trout. Right before his end, Princess Leia finally confesses the depth of her feelings for him:

  “I love you,” says Leia.

  “I know,” he replies.

  It’s one of the best lines in film history because it’s so true to character. In his moment of greatest peril, Han’s wrung-out heart doesn’t allow him to return her love in full. Even in a galaxy far, far away, men are unable to express themselves. If I were Leia in that moment, I’d be glad they were freezing his self-absorbed ass.

  “Be a man.”

  “Man up.”

  “Act like a man.”

  Traditional masculinity goes round and round expressing only itself: it’s a language that contracts as it expands. The more it tries to define what it means to be a man, the fewer options it gives men for how to be. As it calcifies, it reduces everything to a binary—either something is masculine or it is not. The result is what we see, the retreat of some men into an ever-tighter shell. The Real Man’s exploits and adventures are celebrated while his tenderness goes unremarked or mocked. It rewards a father working long hours in the city and taking graduate classes at night so that he can earn more money for his family, but it doesn’t give him permission to tell his son he loves him.

  Maybe love sounds corny to you. It’s not. Or overly simplistic. It’s not. If love were simple, it would be easy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Men ache for love but don’t always know what to do with it when we have it. We ignore it, reject it, abuse it, malign it. And why should it be any other way? As men, we live in a paradox. Love demands an openness and vulnerability that traditional manhood opposes. How do we resolve this paradox of masculinity?

  The answer doesn’t lie in abandoning traditional masculinity, only that we broaden and deepen its language as we reorient our place as men. Manhood has always celebrated service to others. It has asked men to pick up rifles and plows and welding torches. We have done so because we understand that the work of men has been to provide and protect, and we have done our work. Now the nature of that work is changing.

  Men are fumbling to find an alternative to our old ways, but we don’t want to abandon everything we understand ourselves to be. We don’t have to. We can preserve the best parts of our masculinity, jettison the stuff that’s hurting us and the people around us, and work on developing the skills that will help us in school, in the workplace, and with our families. Empathy, compassion, understanding. Love.

  Too many men think about love as a soft and passive force. It’s not. Every parent knows the lengths they will go to for their child. We’ll jump in front of bullets for our kids. Martin Luther King Jr. called love “the active outpouring of one’s whole being into the being of another.”

  Does that sound like a soft and passive force?

  Love isn’t something that happens to us. It’s something we do. Whether it’s the love of a child, spouse, friend, community, or even an idea, love communicates itself as an action and a practice. Traditional masculinity teaches us to be strong and tough and brave. Think about how much strength love requires. How much perseverance. How much courage.

  But also: how much empathy, vulnerability, grief.

  Choosing love necessarily means choosing to expose yourself to pain. The two go hand in hand. So to help men love, we have to give ourselves the tools to deal with our pain.

  As men, it’s not enough to love. It’s a lot, but it’s not enough. Just as importantly, we also have to allow ourselves to be loved. For men, this might be the greater struggle. We have a far easier time lifting the heaviest burden we can find than accepting the love somebody gives to us when they offer to share the load.

  Yes, men can go it alone. We can convince ourselves that we are “self-made men.” We can be gunslingers, riding into town and riding out when the job is done. But why would we ever want those things? Why would we ever turn our back on the one thing that makes life worth living? It’s not enough to give love. You also have to open yourself to receive love in return.

  I see that reluctance in you already. I w
orry about it, maybe because I recognize myself in the way you keep the world slightly at bay. When I was your age (and older) I treated nearly everything and everybody with ironic detachment. Somehow, that ironic detachment ended up giving me a career—I could be the funny, sardonic one. The one who could say the most outrageous things without cracking a smile. People seemed to like me when I said cutting things. Would people still like me if I opened up?

  I was dating Mom at the time, and even as our relationship developed, I held some of myself in reserve. We both did. Even after we got engaged, I was still working on giving her my full love and accepting hers. That struggle didn’t end on our wedding day. If anything, it got worse. Yes, we loved each other, but we struggled to understand each other, to hear each other, to be there for each other. A lot of that reluctance came from our personal histories. We fell back on old survival techniques to keep ourselves from getting hurt in our new lives.

  That’s why I say it took me until your birth for me to finally come to terms with what it meant to be a man. Not because I think fatherhood is a necessary component of manhood, but because, for me, fatherhood was the first time I had to learn to love another without condition or expectation. For me to be the kind of dad I wanted to be for you and your sister required a set of skills at odds with the sardonic persona that had served me well for so long. That guy didn’t give a shit. This new guy did.

  Also, babies are bad at getting sarcasm.

  Somehow the soft skills of parenting—changing diapers, learning to swaddle you like a little burrito, giving you baths, rocking you back to sleep at three o’clock in the morning—those “feminine” nurturing skills wound up making me feel like more of a man than anything I’d ever done before. The work of parenting felt as much like man’s work as spending the day chopping down trees. (Admittedly, I’ve never spent the day chopping down trees.) I didn’t have to do traditional dad stuff to feel like a man. I just had to be your dad.