The Rising Sun Project: Inspiration, Failure, and Eternal Light

I was walking my golden retriever, Winni, listening to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, RBG had died three days before, and the sun was rising. During that walk, I decided I was going to start a “project,” not because of any of those things but because my first child was on the way, and those things also happened to be happening.

The Best Idea Ever

My mind was ablaze. If I was a scientist, I’d say something like, “Give me the samples! I’m making a COVID vaccine!” If scientists said things like that, which I’m sure they don’t. As an English teacher, I was thinking about an excerpt from We Learn Nothing, a collection of stories by Tim Kreider about learning nothing, and I was like, he’s got a point (see politician responses to RBG’s death).

Still, there’s got to be a way to not learn nothing, and I’m going to prove it by writing a book about every day leading up to the birth of my first child!

As with all my other great ideas, I told Julie (we’re married) the plan when she got home from the hospital (where she works as a nurse). She pulled the e-brake. “It sounds like a great idea, but right now seems like kind of a weird place to start the book. Why don’t you wait until the ultrasound and use that as your starting point?”

Note to reader: there is always someone smarter than you.

Considering I hadn’t begun writing when we found out about the baby, and the first ultrasound wasn’t for another few weeks (October 13, 2020), I was picking a pretty arbitrary starting point. I didn’t want to write an extended letter that sounded arbitrary, and I definitely didn’t want to write a diary. That lives next to my bed — don’t get any ideas — and I already deleted one years ago on my computer that was called, “Now I Have a Diary.” So dramatic — and if anyone read that after I was dead, it would ruin my afterlife.

So, no surprise, Julie was right. Now, I could move forward with all my enthusiasm and motivation but with a logical beginning. I could create a useful artifact, make however many pages I wrote worth the time it took to read them. I — and I don’t know how many people before and after Simon Sinek — say to start with the why. At the time, I thought my why was electric.

I wanted to give a gift to my firstborn child: an exceptional father. I wanted to defy books like All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership, and How to Not Hate Your Husband After Kids, and Diaper Dude: The Ultimate Dad’s Guide to Surviving the First Two Years. I wanted Julie — a nurse studying to be a nurse practitioner going to work at the hospital and/or our school’s health center all day and then doing grad work at night while growing a child — to know that I was all-in on parenthood.

I realized that all of the above was interconnected. To be a good father is to be a good husband is to be a good man is to be a good person is to be a good me is to be a better world for my kid — and for future kids.

Quick Rewind

In March 2020, I “launched” GoodMenders LLC. My “business plan” was to speak at schools and other organizations about building better culture, with a primary focus on moral masculinity and leadership, then to donate profits to underfunded schools and students in support of educational equity. I was scheduled to visit one of the top prep schools in the country. The master plan of using my experience to give back was unfolding like a free Patagonia. Life was a gold brick.

Then, COVID happened. Maybe that will be a secret side project: “Then, COVID.” No. No one wants anything to do with that. My visit was cancelled, the school I work at full time went remote, and here I was, navigating the high seas with the rest of the world, trying to keep my little building better culture dream alive on life support.

End dramatization.

My sea of problems was an estuary at best. Sure, being a school administrator during COVID was more difficult than being one sans pandemic, and the GoodMenders launch was less than ideal, but complaining about my life is unbecoming. After all, my life was stable enough for Julie and I to decide to have our first child, doomed to be labeled a member of the Quaranteenies, Generation C, the Pangenics (now there’s a band name — but also stem cell therapy in Jacksonville apparently).

Please Tell Me There’s a Point

After the first ultrasound, I began my project, writing to my unborn child every day from October 14 to November 6, 2020. A few weeks and over 40 pages in, I ran the numbers and grew doubtful. I swore I wouldn’t write a diary, but it sounded like one, and it looked like one, except longer. Who would want to read that? I love my dad, but if he handed me a few hundred pages of daily reflections, I’d be skeptical. At the same time, I didn’t want to be a quitter. My daily journaling was making me feel present, and I wrote what I thought was some pretty nice stuff, like when the ultrasound technician said she needed to re-check the heartbeat, and I told her it was 171 beats per minute.

I talked it over with Julie, and though I was still torn, I put the project to rest.

Fast forward to March 1, 2021. I find myself on a surprise spring break from school (short story: COVID). Julie is worried about my mental health as I restructure my vaporized schedule, walk the dog, and squat in the apartment.

Do I write? Can I meditate the time away? Is there a COVID-safe trip I can organize? Over the previous couple of months, I had put together a journal called One, Two, Be: a daily journal for deliberate living. That sounded like something I could use as I counted down the days to our April 26th due date, but it was still a formatting catastrophe — and then I remembered my project! Engage impulsivity. There were about two months to go, and there was a good chance they would go by in a blur if I let them, so I opened my computer.

I quit again about a week later. Holy schnikes, Nick! What’s the point of all this? Please tell me there’s a point!

The Point

Don’t fret. This isn’t a gory horror film with a predictable plot and a suspicious number of wardrobe malfunctions. Here’s the point.

The problem with the project was that it was about me. Yeah, I was writing to my daughter — after much debate, we learned the sex — but I was writing for myself. Though it took a long time to see it, I am convinced that’s why I kept failing. I forgot that the sun was coming up at the start, and the story was supposed to be about the sun, that light that Tim Kreider described so well:

When you break through the cloud cover you realize that above the passing squalls and doldrums there is a realm of eternal sunlight, so keen and brilliant you have to squint against it, a vision to hold on to when you descend once again beneath the clouds, under the oppressive, petty jurisdiction of the local weather.

I wanted to write a book, to satisfy a selfish desire to break ground. In my digging, I lost sight of that eternal light. I ended up being another character in We Learn Nothing, as routine as the sad man’s rain.

We’ve become a people who too often abuse our words. We tweet and post and comment and post. If we’re not prepared with a statement for International Awareness of Everything Day, we’re pariahs. If our social media presence is lacking, our silence is oppression. I doubt that Baldwin wrote The Fire Next Time for likes, though he knew a thing or two about love.

Too many of the words I wrote for my daughter did not come from love. They were rushed to the page to fill the space, like loading the dishwasher. For me to be an exceptional father, I needed to learn that nothing I did will be as important as what I do.

There’s a reason we go faster and farther on a runner’s high, and why the world grows quiet when we play our instruments, and why we smile when we meditate, while we do nothing at all. If I act with love — whether it be building GoodMenders or vacuuming the dog hair or changing a diaper — the light will not leave me.

So, that’s it. That’s the story. Tommy Orange wrote something about the world being made of stories and stories about stories. It’s no Angelou memoir, but it’s a contribution to the puzzle. This is a story that happened one day at a time, a test, a trial, a journey. It’s another window to look through, another specimen to study and, perhaps, to learn from. It is the opportunity to grow, to live and be useful and joyful and honest. It is a letter to everyone, to everything, to the only thing. This is a story that begins and ends with a rising sun.

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Previously Published on medium

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