dear friends,
My dad passed away two weeks ago. It was a surprise, and it also wasn’t. I’ve made my life spare right now so that I can let the waves of memory and emotion wash over me without resisting or rushing. I’m crying and laughing, feeling deep grief and bittersweet joy…embracing all of it.
And that is why I didn’t send out a newsletter last week. I wanted to post about my dad, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to write anything about my dad. Instead of listening to the voice that said “rush, rush, rush,” I listened to a gentler voice that counseled me to take time to feel, which is what I did and am doing.
Now, with a happy and broken heart, I’d like to share with you some of the lessons I learned from my remarkable father.
My dad was a complicated person, as we all are. No one can be summed up in words, let alone in three ideas, but as I think about what aspects of my dad’s life I would like to emulate, these are the themes that shine through:
(1) Always be learning something new. My dad started studying Chinese in his 60s. Granted, languages were his thing: he spoke fourteen. But that’s just it. We all have our thing. Most of us have a few things. And it’s pretty clear to me, that we live our lives more skillfully when we keep learning to do our thing or things. If life is growth, then living is learning. I have no idea how much further my dad felt he needed to go to master Chinese, but I love the idea that he was working on it.
(2) Celebrate what makes you different. My dad was eccentric. Like, walk-on-his-own-through-Iraq-in-the-1960s eccentric. The words ‘unique,’ ‘interesting,’ ‘odd’ crossed the mind of anyone who spent time with him. As a kid, I was sometimes uncomfortable having a dad who didn’t fit in, but now I see what a gift it was. In today’s world where trends dictate everything — the music we listen to, the choices politicians make, the clothes we wear, where we travel, what movies we watch, the foods we eat, the entertainers we follow — it’s a radical concept to live without being attached to trends one way or the other. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with trends per se, but I sort of love that my dad gave them no weight.
(3) Stay curious. Not long before my dad retired from teaching, he and his Iñupiat students co-created the Kaktovik numerals, which were added to the Unicode Standard in September of 2022. My dad liked math and languages, but that doesn’t explain how he and his high-school students on the North Slope of Alaska came to create this base-twenty number system. What explains this amazing collaboration was my dad’s and his students’ curiosity. Not for fame or fortune, but for the sheer joy of discovery. There’s something beautiful in that.
That’s it for this week! I wish you all joy in learning something new, reconnecting with the qualities that set you apart, and discovering something you didn’t know before. Thank you for sharing this moment of celebrating the life of one remarkable human.
warmly,
alison
