
Gravy — and why to love fate.
(Some backstory: Tom Goodwin asked me to talk about ‘false nostalgia’ for the second meeting of Interesting People in Interesting Times. The themes were “everything changes” and “fear about life’s modern uncertainties.” He told me not to talk about advertising, which was very good advice.)
You don’t really understand what “everything changes” or “fear about life’s modern uncertainties” means until you drive your daughter to a routine doctor’s appointment and what you talk about on the way there is the tattoo you want to get in your late 40s… and what you don’t talk about on the way home is the cancer she’s likely just been diagnosed with.
After that, what you realize is — as Raymond Carver wrote in one of his last poems — that every bit of our time here is all “gravy. No other word will do.”

Let me back up. I think one of the most important things we can have in life is curiosity. And, to me, curiosity means making connections. So I want to try and connect a few things:
1. thinking about getting a tattoo I didn’t really want
2. staying optimistic during our current political shit-show
3. my daughter’s diagnosis
And, through it all, how a Latin phrase helped me learn to embrace fate. In other words, I’m going to talk about parenthood.
Many of us are afraid by everything surrounding us right now. Well, being a parent is pretty much all about being scared. Scared you won’t do things right. Scared the years will fly by too fast (and they will.) And, above all, being scared that something bad could happen at any moment to your kids.
Our first real scare happened almost exactly ten years ago to the day, the summer our daughter was eight. She was in a car with my mother, coming down to meet us to swim at the town pool, when my mom swerved to avoid an accident and, instead, ran off the road. The SUV they were in flipped three times. It happened so close to where we were that we could hear the sirens, and when I ran to the scene, still in my bathing suit, the highway patrol officer, shaking her head, told me, “These kinds of crashes? We see them all the time. Nobody survives.”
But they had. Both of them, without a scratch. It was beyond luck and we knew we should consider every day after that with our daughter to be our kind of “gravy” — borrowed time. But it’s hard to live that way. Pretty soon, you go back to normal. You forget that in an instant everything changes.
Until seven years later, when you’re taking that same girl to see her doctor. Yes, an endocrinologist, because she has a thyroid issue, Hashimoto’s Disease, but, still, it’s a routine checkup. So you’re just driving and telling her about an idea you’re excited about and have latched onto recently. You read an essay by Oliver Burkeman in which he railed against the phrase Carpe Diem, “seize the day.” Now, instead of that mantra, you’re embracing the alternate one he was pushing: amor fati. Two different Latin words that are like Stoic Buddhism, advising you to “love your fate”.

Instead of the pressure of having to grab each moment and make the most of it, you can accept that all things are part of one, specific journey. A single path you’re on. Accept that, and understand that you only have the power to change what you can. Oh, and then you tell her — this 17-year-old — that you want to get that, amor fati, inked as a tattoo running down your arm.
She freaks out. Her uncensored, immediate reaction is, literally, “No. No way! You’re… old.” But when she calms down, she gives you some advice: “Make it a poster first. And if you still love it in a while, like a couple years, get the tattoo then.”
It’s that tattoo you aren’t thinking about after the doctor calls you in and says she’s concerned.
When you’re driving home next to your teenager who has cancer.
But you deal with it. You — really your wife, to be honest — attack it. And your daughter, your little girl, has the surgery and they get it all, every single bit of the disease. She’s okay, totally fine. Everything has changed, but she’s gotten through it. And, unbelievably, she’s headed to college. What else could possibly go wrong?
Three months later, Trump gets elected. Your daughter misses her eighteenth birthday and being able to vote him out by one week and is a total wreck. How’s she supposed to “amor fati” that particular path? You don’t have an answer.
Until you fly back from LA one night. And when you land at JFK, the airport is wall-to-wall with people protesting our new president’s Travel Ban. You’re curious. So you go over to the main terminal to see that instead of getting straight into a car to go to your suburban home.
When you get there you see a magnificent mass of people who have taken time out of their lives to stand up and fight back, and you have an honest-to-God epiphany. You realize there’s nothing this infant of a man can do — in the long run — to stop good. Or immigration. Or gay marriage. Or trans rights. Or women’s empowerment. People will no longer come to a country built on a foundation of opportunity? Two men aren’t ever going to fall in love again? Your daughter will suddenly stop pushing and give up? After a car wreck? After cancer?
No. Fucking. Way.
But you also realize that this doesn’t mean things are easy. Everything will change. Life is going to blindside you. It is going to be scary.
Crashes. Cancer. Even Trump.
And maybe life is stranger now, more than ever. Harder. Scarier. But maybe that’s just same as it ever was.
Maybe what we need to do is stay curious. Make even more connections. Break out of our bubbles of false security. And realize what parenthood teaches us — what we’ve learned from our daughter:
Life isn’t short. If you’re lucky, it is really, really long. So embrace it. Amor Fati.
Which can be the tattoo you show to the world —or the poster you live for a while with first.
