Unbidden
To take up where you left off!
without a breath of separation
your new movement is begun.
- Frank O’Hara, “Attacca”
It is the end of the day, and we go walking.
My son Ari rides against my chest in the leopard-print carrier, facing out now that he can hold his head up and wants to see. We take the path behind the house, out into the rice fields, where the light has gone low and gold and the heat of the day is finally loosening its grip. This is jalan-jalan: to go walking, to wander with nowhere particular to be. The doubled word turns going into something leisurely, a walk for its own sake.
Above the fields, the sky is filled with kites.
Dozens of them, more than I can count, hanging in the wind over the paddies, high and small and steady. The strings are too fine to see from where we walk, so the kites seem to hold themselves up in the gold air by nothing at all. Somewhere below each one, a kid on a dike is holding the string. I feel Ari go still against me. He has found a kite, and he watches it the way he watches everything now, with his whole self, like it is the only thing.
Most evenings someone stops us. A scooter slows, a smile for Ari in the front-facing carrier, his arms flung out to the wind. The shopkeepers know him now. Some evenings the neighbors call to him, and once in a while an old woman reaches out to touch his foot. He gives his attention back to whoever offers it, the baby carried through the fields each evening, and he collects their warmth the way the kites collect the wind.
Some warm evenings we don’t get further than five minutes before Ari falls asleep, the heat and the sway of my walking taking him, his head going heavy over the front of the carrier. Other evenings he stays awake the whole way, wide open, taking it all in: the kites, the green, the water in the paddies holding the last light of the sky. I can tell now which kind of evening it will be by the way he settles in the first few steps. I did not use to know things like that.
That is the part I want to talk about. Not the kites. The not-used-to-knowing.
Because somewhere in these last eight months, without my deciding it, I have become someone I was not.
For most of my adult life I was a person organized around motion: the next country, the next role, the next crossing. And here I am now, content, more than content, to walk the same field at the same hour every single evening, and to find it somehow larger than the old life. I have a patience I never had. I did not train for it. It arrived. A tolerance for the slow, the repeated, the unspectacular, that the man I was five years ago would not have recognized in me.
There is a particular disorientation in this, and it is worth naming because we so rarely do. We are used to the disorientation of loss, the ground giving way beneath a life. But there is another kind, quieter and almost never spoken of: the disorientation of arrival. Of catching yourself, mid-gesture, being a person you have not yet met. Of reaching for who you used to be and finding someone slightly different has taken up the space.
I kept wondering where the patience came from. It turns out there is an answer, and it is written in the body.
For a long time we only studied what happens to mothers. Half of all parents are fathers, and until recently almost none of the research looked at them, as though the transformation ran one way only. It does not.
When a man becomes an involved father, his body changes to meet the child. His testosterone falls, and not by accident: the anthropologist Lee Gettler, tracking hundreds of men over years, found that the fathers who spend the most hours in the actual care of their infants show the steepest declines. His oxytocin rises, the same chemistry of attachment we once thought belonged to mothers alone.
Nothing is lost in this. The hormone is a setting, tuned by what a life is being spent on. A falling number is a body reallocating: away from competing and roaming, toward the one small person who cannot survive without him.
A mother’s brain is primed by pregnancy and flooded by birth. A father’s brain has no such switch. It is built another way. It is built by doing. The neuroscientist Ruth Feldman, who has spent two decades studying the parental brain, found that in fathers raising infants on their own, the brain reorganizes in response to the caregiving itself: the holding, the feeding, the soothing, the scanning, the worrying, the responding, done again and again. And the degree of the change tracked the hours. The more a father cared for his child, the more his brain reshaped itself around the child. The change followed the repetition.
Which means that when I say the patience arrived, I have it slightly wrong. It did not arrive. I built it, without noticing I was building it, in small acts too ordinary to feel like choices at all: the morning feed, the midday reading, the carrying, the singing, the evening walks through the rice fields. That is why it felt unbidden. No decision was ever large enough to notice. It was only the hours, accumulating. The showing up came first.
I read to Ari twice a day. He does not have the words yet, but he has the shape of it. Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see? — and in the pause before the answer he cranes his neck up to find my face, waiting, because he knows by now that something comes next. I do the voices. Somewhere in there I learned eight nursery rhymes by heart, and they run in my head at odd hours like a second pulse. A month into solid food we are working through every allergen there is, one new thing at a time, watching his face for the verdict. He gobbles the avocado cream with a seriousness that gets me every time.
I used to think of these as the small chores of keeping a baby alive. Feedings and milestones. I know now they are something else. They are the reps. They are the repeated acts by which a father’s brain is built and a child’s world is laid down. Not the milestones, the repetitions. The ninety-ninth reading of the same book matters more than the first. It is the one that lays the track down deeper.
We tell people, when they are becoming something new, to decide it. To envision it, commit to it, step into it. But you cannot think your way into who you are becoming. It is practiced into being, one ordinary act at a time, until you look up one day and you already are the thing.
Every transformation has a final stage, and it is the one we understand least. The rupture, the freefall, the reckoning announce themselves; there is crisis, loss, drama to mark them. What comes after arrives without any of that: the long, unglamorous work of settling into a self you have only just become.
I have watched leaders reach a role they have plainly earned and still not feel like the person their own record proves them to be. The one whose CV is unarguable, whose track record is long, who has done the work for twenty years, and who stands in the title still waiting to feel equal to it. Reassurance does nothing. Neither does insight, however hard-won. You can read their accomplishments back to them and they will nod, and know each one is true, and still not feel it. The feeling comes the way it came for me, walking a baby through the rice fields: through the plain daily work of doing the job, again and again, until they notice they have stopped auditioning for their own life and have simply been living it. The doing closes the distance between what they are and what they feel themselves to be.
The new self is a structure you build by repetition, and then inhabit. The rhythm is the sanctuary. The repeated ordinary act is the making of the person.
The poem at the top of this essay is called “Attacca”: the mark a composer writes to begin the next movement without a pause. No rest, no silence between. That is how this happened. The old life did not end and wait for me to choose the new one. It carried straight on, without a breath of separation, into a movement already begun.
Mine began in a rice field at dusk, with a baby against my chest.
What new self are you already becoming, one ordinary evening at a time?