Most evenings in my house there is music, and most evenings my younger son is dancing. He dances in the kitchen. At every concert he makes his way to the front and dances with a rhythm and a grace that stop people who see him, and sooner or later the bandleader notices and calls attention to him, always in the most joyous way. Nobody has ever minded. At one concert in Los Angeles the band played a song about being a woman and invited the women in the audience up, and there was my son, dancing with about fifty middle-aged women, singing it in front of thousands of people. It is still one of his favorite songs.
I am fifty-six. I have two marriages behind me, a left side that has never worked the way my right does, a company that is still becoming a company, and a son who needs me every day. For a good part of my life I waited for the joy to start once certain conditions were met: once the work paid, once the love arrived, once I was finished. I no longer think that is how it works. This essay is about what I am doing instead.
An evening
Dinner is done and Caden has the iPad. He chooses the music, and he chooses better than anyone I know. He can move through anybody's library, from Mexican ranchera to Michael Bublé, and he knows my taste as well as his own. Tonight it is Johnny Cash, whom he calls Papa, and then his daughter Rosanne, whom he loves. Buddha is on the floor with his bad back legs stretched out, and Pancake, who is short and stout and built for nothing like this, is under the table.
Caden starts to move. He comes alive with music, the way he does at every concert, and he has never once checked who is watching. I am at the sink. I used to spend my own parties in the kitchen, making margaritas or doing the dishes, close to the room and never quite in it. I put the towel down. I am not good at this. My left side seizes when I start thinking about it, and a boy at a school dance told me, a long time ago, what I looked like doing it. My son does not care what I look like. He is delighted, and the delight is catching, and for the length of a song I am just a man dancing badly in his kitchen with his dog watching.
Nothing about that evening is fixed. The money is still uncertain and tomorrow is a school day. I am telling you about it because it is the thing I am building, and it is already here.
The song
Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing.
The song I keep returning to is "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes," from Paul Simon's 1986 album Graceland, recorded with Ladysmith Black Mambazo. It is about a rich girl and a poor boy who shouldn't fit together. He dresses up to cover his ordinary shoes. She asks him to take her dancing. By the end the diamonds that were hers are on his shoes too.
I used to hear it as a story about being rescued. What I hear in that image now is something else: a man who stops measuring himself against what he doesn't have, and starts walking like someone who has decided joy is his to carry. That reading is mine, and the song doesn't promise it. I find it a useful way to hold my own life. A rescue is something that happens to you. This is something you can start doing in your own kitchen.
Reading my own deficits twice
There is a kind of essay that takes everything wrong in a life and announces that it was secretly right. I want to avoid that, and I also want to do something close to it. My shoes are ordinary. My money has been unsteady, in a way that rhymes with my childhood. Two marriages ended. My left side has never worked as the right does. Each of those can be read twice.
The unsteady money is also the cost of choosing to look after my son and to build something. The ordinary shoes are honest ground. The two marriages showed me a template I did not know I was following. The left side did not stop me rowing at Cal. I believe all of that. I also believe the first readings are true. The money has cost me sleep. The marriages ended with real harm to real people, and I did my share of it. The generous reading does not cancel the hard one. Both stand.
Giving easily, receiving badly
People tell me they feel calm and safe around me, and I believe them. I learned to read a room young, because I had to. What I am worse at is the other direction: I give care more easily than I take it. I have written about that elsewhere. Here I'll say only that I no longer treat it as a secret, and that the kitchen is where I practice.
Looking after a person you love is not a burden you carry on top of a life. It can be the life. It can also be exhausting, and some days it is a relief when Caden is settled with his music and I can work. Both are true on the same evening.
What I am building
People ask why I build what I build. I make tools for rowers and clubs, and an assessment layer called SportsFlow, and the honest answer is that they trace back to things I have lived. Being a boy who had to read rooms made me curious about how people read each other. A stroke at ten made me curious about what exercise does for a body. My hyper-independence built the platforms, and it has also made collaboration hard. The same trait can be an engine and a brake.
Whether the tools work is a separate question from whether the story is true. The story can't answer it.
What the longest study on happiness says
The Harvard Study of Adult Development has followed people for more than eighty years. Its current directors, Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, summarized it in The Good Life in 2023, and the finding is plain enough to sound like a platitude: good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Satisfaction in relationships at fifty predicted health at eighty better than cholesterol did. People who were more connected tended to live longer and to keep their minds sharper. Asked at the end what they would change, the oldest participants rarely mentioned money or status. They wished they had put more into the people they loved.
I don't want to turn my son into an illustration for a study. What I can say is what I've learned from being near him. He is entirely present, and you cannot be distracted around him. He makes me a worse multitasker and a better father, and I'm grateful for both.
Dogs and boys
If you asked what has kept me going, in the plain sense of getting out of bed on mornings when money or loneliness would have justified staying in it, I'd say dogs and boys. My sons, Caden especially, and the dogs who have been with me through every apartment where I wondered whether to get the sleeping bag out.
Service and ambition can look like competing claims on my time. I experience them as nearer to one thing. What caring for my son has taught me about what people need is exactly what I try to put into my work.
Butterflies
Clinical writing sometimes treats the feelings of people who had hard childhoods as symptoms. I don't think the butterflies are. The sense of the room shifting when you meet someone, the feeling that she was meant to appear at this moment, are real experiences, and I would rather honor them than distrust them.
What I have learned the hard way is that the feeling is real and incomplete as evidence. For most of my life the only butterflies my body recognized were the ones that came with chaos, the ache of will she stay?, and calm felt like no chemistry. Intensity is not evidence of compatibility. What I hope for is the other combination, excitement and groundedness together. Adventure and home in the same person. I wouldn't trust it on feeling alone. I'd trust it if it kept being true on ordinary Tuesdays.
Two lives, blended
If I'm honest about what I want, it isn't to be completed. I am most alive doing something new beside someone, and the relationships that last, as far as I can tell, are ones in which two whole lives blend and neither absorbs the other. I want that kind of relationship. I have often built another: one where I give and give and quietly keep the books.
The only love I've seen last up close was my grandparents'. They sought refuge in each other and built something out of very little. The question I'd put to any relationship is the one they could have answered: do our lives make each other's lives better? And I don't want anyone to walk through a door feeling that my future depends on whether she stays. That is too much to put on a person. I'd want her to have her own work and friends and traditions and wounds, and I'd want to be someone who can welcome that independence.
Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart.
I am not waiting to be completed. I am building a life with music in it and dogs at my feet and a son who dances, and I have decided the joy doesn't have to wait for any condition to be met. There is a table in this house with room for more people than live in it. If you are waiting for your own life to start, it already has.
Bring your ordinary shoes.
Sources
Waldinger, R. & Schulz, M. (2023). The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. New York: Simon & Schuster. The findings are associations. The study's early samples were Harvard sophomores and boys from poorer Boston neighborhoods, mostly white and mostly male.
Simon, P. (1986). "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes." On Graceland, with Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Records. Lyrics not reproduced.