Full of joy

Haarlem, 25 June 2020

Dear Yaron,

Welcome to the world my lovely son. At 2 years, you seem to be having a strong will of your own, bordering on stubbornness. Like your mother, you are operating independently just fine. God only knows who and what you will turn into, but whatever the result, know that I love you.

I trust you will be able to find your you, your path, your calling, occupation or whatever it will be you value in life, your love in and for life.

Also, you are a curious mind, just like your dad, and that’s why I’d like to tell you about the world as I came to know it, where you’re coming from, my bizarre life’s path and what I hope you will learn from all this.

By the time you’re reading this you might already have come across the realisation that life isn’t always fair. You can’t always get what you want, the Stones song goes. That is if you know what you want. According to some philosophers there is no free will. We are all a meatball floating through space, dictated by gravity laws and such, so to speak. I find that too…unpoetic, by lack of a better word. The soul sings. That is my experience anyway. Not that I know what I want, at least not in the conventional way. But a life guided by external forces seems just too cold to me.

My hope is that you will be spared the bad luck your father sometimes had to endure, but more so also the often lazy and too often defeatist attitude of your dad. Oh, flaws, there are many.

But there are also good things, even a few great things, in this life.

Freedom, just to name one. The fact you can walk around this Earth independently, smell freshly mowed grass, eat an apple, or pancakes with brown sugar, listen to music that makes your spine go funny, being in love for the very first time, making you walk on clouds.

Dream out loud. Think (but not too much). Love (can never be too much).

Tomorrow is going to be an early day. Another hot one. The last one for now. A pappa dag, daddy day. I will prepare the swimming pool for you, I know you have been enjoying them so much the last few days at nursery.

Sleep well, as you are now. Shhhhh.

Love,
Dad