May 5, 2026
Dear Leland and Everett,
I’m somewhat horrified to look back and realize my last letter came in September. Almost an entire school year has elapsed since then.
Not that nothing has happened in the last year; indeed, many small but wonderful events occurred that I wish I captured with letters in real time. Oddly, the gap in writing itself became something of an impediment to writing: after not writing for many weeks or months, somehow I felt as if my next letter should be sufficiently worthy as to justify the gap.
Of course, that logic is patently silly, particularly when you won’t be reading these letters for many years. When you consume these letters, you will only notice the gap insofar as you are curious to see whether and how I captured memories of your childhood. I offer this anecdote as a simple admission for how distorted my thinking became when it came to writing.
I still feel the need to justify the gap in letters by writing something profound today. What I’ve realized is that I need to give myself some permission and grace to publish something uninteresting, if only to remove the barrier to writing. My hope is that the act of writing today will enable more writing. We shall see. But I’ll admit to feeling a relative lack of inspiration in writing today, and so genuinely need some permission to write a bad letter today, in hopes that I unlock better letters in the coming days and weeks.
I’m reminded of a concept I learned from, I think, John Mayer and Ed Sheeran. If memory serves, both think of creativity as something that flows through a sort of pipe. That pipe gets clogged over time, and so needs to get unclogged in order to allow creative energy to properly flow. Their solution is to just sit and write music, fully expecting the first several efforts to be of poor quality. But by lowering the expectations (and thus the resistance), they find they are able to clear the pipe by getting out all the bad ideas. Eventually, once enough bad ideas get cleared, genuinely creative ideas begin to flow through the pipe. Let’s hope I’m doing some version of this act today.
Indeed, part of the inspiration for writing today comes from a conversation I had after church on Sunday. I was talking with a close friend, and found myself saying (to my own surprise as I was articulating the thought, as I hadn’t observed it until I said it) that I felt something of a backlog of ideas cluttering my mind, and that I felt a need to start expressing myself, just to let the ideas out and declutter my mind a bit.
You might be wondering what ideas have been cluttering up my mind. I myself found myself wondering the same. Alas, my mind doesn’t work that way. Imagine walking into a cluttered room with the express intention of decluttering. For me, anyway, at first all I see is the clutter in the aggregate. Only after beginning the process do I begin to see the individual elements of clutter, and find the awareness to identify and address each of them appropriately. So, much like how I would address a cluttered room, for this session I intend to address only those items most noticeable.
In my last letter I observed how I experienced last summer as something chaotic. Unfortunately, the pervading sense of chaos hasn’t diminished; if anything it’s grown, at least in salience.
Elements of the chaos seem positive, or at least innocent enough. The two of you have gotten more busy with extracurriculars over the last year. As a result, more and more of my time has gone into shuttling the two of you from activity to activity. Well, and not just shuttling: I’ve participated in coaching the two of you in basketball (Leland) and baseball (Everett). To be very clear: I have thoroughly enjoyed coaching both of you. Through the act of coaching I feel our relationships deepening, as I learn more about you and you learn more about me and the world.
One thing I’ve noticed about coaching: it’s an inherently emotional act. Or, at least, it is when I do it. I love basketball and baseball, and so the act of coaching stirs pretty deep emotions in me. Spiritual Stew stirs similarly deep emotion in me, and in the early days I found myself needing the entire two weeks between meetings to recover from the act of holding the meeting.
As an aside: recently I’ve thought a lot about artists, and particularly musicians. The act of creating powerful music, I’m starting to realize, is a deeply emotional/spiritual act. The artist, I strongly suspect, feels a need to ‘recover’ from the creative act: at the end, one feels deeply exposed, vulnerable, and raw. Reintegrating into the everyday world, which by comparison feels like a battleground requiring armor and weaponry, is a challenging process. I’m convinced this is one reason why so many artists struggle with addiction: alcohol or drugs serve as a way to numb the raw emotions, effectively putting the armor back on before the artist experiences too much pain in the state of vulnerability.
Anyway, the net result of all the activities, and perhaps especially the coaching, has been something of a tension: on the one hand, I’ve genuinely loved spending the time with you guys and watching you grow through your various activities; on the other hand, I’m struggling with a sense that I’m getting too sucked into your lives, and not creating enough boundaries and space to live and experience my own.
Of course, this is also something of a copout. Even after moving you guys around a lot, there are still lots and lots of hours in the day available to other pursuits. And while I’ve used much of that time for healthy activities like exercise or reading, I’m embarrassed to confront how much of that time has been spent on social media. As I write this, I’m realizing that I use social media to numb myself in much the same way I suggested an artist might use alcohol or drugs: it’s something of a defense mechanism, or an attempt to reintegrate into the world after putting some armor back on.
The irony of spending copious amounts of time numbing myself is that I feel drawn in precisely the other direction. For the last few months I’ve felt this invitation to carry that sense of expansiveness and vulnerability out into the world and into everyday situations. My experience tells me that holding and carrying that space of expansiveness is like exercising a muscle: with practice one can increase how much expansiveness one can hold, and for how long, and decrease the recovery time needed in between. On some level I suspect the goal of life is to be able to hold that state of expansiveness continuously, or at least nearly so. As I write this I wonder if coaching has served as an opportunity to practice, even if I didn’t realize I was doing it at the time. Said differently: I’ve been looking for ways to practice expansiveness out in the world, not realizing I was already doing so. That discovery doesn’t negate my desire to carry that state into other social settings, but it does enable me to celebrate a win and more accurately see the situation I’ve been living over the last few months.
Let me see if I can synthesize my frustration into one paragraph. Over the last year I’ve spent a lot of time coaching and shuttling the two of you from activity to activity. Coaching has been an act of expression and expansion, and the combination of coaching and shuttling has consumed a lot of my energy. I’ve not been entirely healthy about how I replenished that energy, spending too many numbing myself with social media. All the while I’ve felt creative energies wanting to flow, but getting stuck without an outlet for expression. And so, now, I’m feeling a bit cluttered and deeply wanting to express. Yes, I think that’s mostly right.
To be fair to myself, I’ve made some efforts toward expression. I approached a friend about creating a podcast, going so far as to test out recording equipment to prove out what tools and setting we would use for recording. I approached the minister at my church about potentially using the church on Sundays, in response to some inspiration I felt. Sadly, I positioned my plea to the minister as hypothetical, because I was not ready to really put that idea into action. Fortunately, the minister responded positively, in a way that suggests the church will support my idea if and when I decide to see it through. And far more trivially, I have started engaging on social media. The social media engagement, though trivial, helped me realize a few things. First off, I am reminded that some posts I genuinely like don’t get seen by anyone, and the resulting feeling of rejection is probably inherent in the act of creation. Second, and relatedly, creation is something of a numbers game: one needs reps getting over the disappointment of having their creations ignored, but one also needs reps in order to create the type of content that will find its audience. And finally, it’s easy to get too precious, worrying too much about how content will be consumed and not enough about creating content worthy of consumption.
Interesting. This is not where I expected today’s letter to go. To be fair, unlike most letters, today I began without a sense of what I wanted to say. But, like most days, the act of writing has helped me articulate and identify some stuff, clarifying where I am and what I should do next.
My overarching sense, having written the above, is that my goal should be to err on the side of creation for the near future. If writing the two of you is the lowest friction way to create, I should do that. If I feel an impulse to podcast or launch a Sunday event at my church, I should do that. And while my ego (e.g. my fears) will almost certainly attempt to overcomplicate any attempts to try something new, I should simplify and aim for the shortest path toward creation. Like with this letter, I should grant myself some permission and grace to produce some not great work, understanding that the reps matter more than the quality of any individual output.
And what is the topic that inspires me? Ah, identifying that is its own challenge. Tempted though I am to define it today, I’m realizing I should resist the urge to overcomplicate, and grant myself a starting point for the next letter. Hemingway, I believe, used to stop writing mid-sentence as a way to facilitate starting the next writing session. Perhaps this is my version of attempting the same idea.
Thank you for your help today. You helped me work through some ideas that had been cluttering my head and thus my life. There is more decluttering to do, but today was a good start.
I love you,
Dad
Letters to Leland 