The Essence of Things
I’ve written an open birthday letter every year for the last ten years, and it’s always been about my birthday, because — with all due respect to those dear readers and friends who have birthdays of their own — my birthday has always been the most important birthday to me.
Until this year.
This year we had a baby, and her birthday is far far far more important to me than my own.
Essence Louise Baron Rechtman was born on April 22, 2021, and her birth — true to all cliches — immediately, utterly, and irrevocably changed my life for the better.
Last year, I was a guy. Now, I’m a father. It is the ultimate upgrade.
Now all day every day I hang out with my two best friends: a beautiful woman and a beautiful little girl. I feel like the luckiest man alive.
It is also a big time commitment. In past years I would spend hours — sometimes dozens of hours — writing ponderous long-form birthday letters on life and death and the general nature of things.
But for all its joys, fatherhood has left me far less time for waxing philosophical; between all the baths, bottles, and burping, the annual birthday opus somehow took a back seat, which is why this year’s letter is over a month late and quite a bit less structured than prior editions.
Please take the words below then not as a treatise, but as notes (and I’ll spare us all a digression into how life itself might best be marked by the same distinction).
Deal?
Let’s go.
We named her Essence to evoke something simple, natural, eternal. The ‘essence’ of something is fundamental; however something grows and iterates and evolves, its essence remains — it is the constant.
Her Chinese name, 张盈若 (Zhang Yingruo) , is derived from a passage in the Tao Te Ching (大盈若冲，用其不穷), which suggests that great abundance lies not in accumulation, but in flow; that the infinite can be achieved not through permanence, but through flux.
Together, the two names point to a beloved truth: that some things change; and some things never do.
When she was born, I gave her a bismuth crystal.
I had never seen bismuth before — never even heard of it, though its apparently one of the elements, #83 on the periodic table.
Honestly I had never imagined such an object existed — never imagined such an object could exist organically in nature, so intricate and colourful and complex.
I got it as a birthday gift for Essence because it is beautiful, and because it looked so fractal-y, with its countless paths folding endlessly and recursively into one another. Countless paths in the palm of your hand — infinite potential contained within a finite space.
I want Essence to know that her life, while finite in its mortality, is infinite in its potential; that while her years on earth are numbered, the paths that run through them are innumerable.
And I want her to know that she is beautiful, so unimaginably beautiful to her father; that even as a tiny baby she is already so much more intricate and colorful and complex than I ever imagined could exist organically in nature — no less sprung from somewhere deep within her mother and me.
On her first night out of the womb, with her mother sleeping an angel’s sleep beside us, I cradled Essence in my arms, counting each breath like a blessing.
One breath, two breath, three… with each inhale, I’d zoom in to examine her substance: her tiny hands, her squeaky mouth, her wrinkled nose, her matted hair. With each exhale, I’d zoom out to reflect on her context: where she was, how she got here, who we became in her presence, what it all meant.
In the blurry days and weeks after bringing her home from the hospital, I forced myself to slow down my breathing and to savour every moment of fussy bliss. I slowed my breath to try to slow down time — even as her infancy unfolded around us, I wanted to cling to it, to experience every detail in the highest resolution possible.
I developed a ritual of counting ten breathes, fully filling and emptying my lungs each time, three times a day at morning, noon, and night. I figured if I kept it up, by the time Essence was one year old, I’d have counted 10,000 breathes, frozen 10,000 moments in time.
It didn’t work. Turns out you can’t freeze time.
The truth is that no one — no monk on no mountain, no mystic in no cave — can teach you anything about ‘presence’ and ‘non-attachment’ and ‘mindful being’ with even a fraction of the illustrative power of a newborn baby.
Marcus Aurelius, for example, has been reminding me since my freshman year of college that: “man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant; that all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed.”
And yet for all the stern reminders, I’ve never seen anyone truly able to live in the present, unbothered by memory or anticipation — any adult, that is.
And then you see your baby, scrutinizing some feature of a toy or grasping at the wooden arm of a chair or staring slack-jawed at the one cloud in the sky that looks like absolutely nothing — just a big white cloud in the shape of a cloud with no possible association to any other thing; just pure cloud all the way through — and you realize that this little clump of a human is more focused on this meaningless moment than you have ever focused on anything in your entire adult life; that for all your credos and your practice, for all your yoga and Headspace and for all the TED Talks and School of Life, for all the fads you went through and all the Taoist/Buddhist/stoic/existentialist thinkers that you quoted, for all your reverence of Thich Nhat Thanh and Steve Jobs, for all the effort you put into optimizing your life, your career, your relationships, for all your journey-ing and processing and meditative being, you have somehow never focused on anything with even a fraction of the presence and attention and that this little girl has brought to bear on her socks, just right now in this moment, just her and her mustard-colored socks and their googly-eyed buttons enjoying a moment of presence so pure it might actually be divine.
Does her focus shift? Of course it does, every goddamn second, she’s a baby, she gets distracted. It’s not the span of her attention, it’s the quality that gets you. It’s how in the instant that she connects with something — however fleeting — she is connected with every fiber of her little body; and in the instances in which the thing she is connecting with is you, when she looks at you and her eyes gleam with recognition and her mouth explodes into a smile so unabashedly joyful you almost cringe… why it’s those moments that we live for now. Those smiles are the only coin I want to count.
So here we are: my best friend, our baby, her bismuth, and me.
For her first six months we giggled and gurgled and learned the ropes of newborn parenting in Sydney, living our best life in a rented house by the sea. It was idyllic, beautiful, boring.
It was also hard. We were completely alone and in lockdown for most of the time, with no real support system in place. Baby-care, cooking and cleaning felt like two full-time jobs, even as I was trying to build a business and my wife was pursuing a masters degree. Feed-and-diaper shifts took place every couple of hours through the middle of each night, and we never learned to take turns. We did it all, together, sometimes on the verge of exhaustion.
But those first months were also so beautiful. We’d tuck Essence into the baby carrier and hike along the coast for hours, or dip her little toes in the ocean to make her squeal, or sit with her quietly and play with grass. Visitors weren’t allowed during the lockdown, but a friend or two would sneak in every once in a while for dinner or a cup of tea and a yarn.
Most importantly, the three of us learned how to be a family in those months, and how to love and admire each other in new ways.
Pregnancy had already opened my eyes in new ways to the miraculousness of my partner’s body and being, but her maternity revealed a whole new dimension of tenderness, beauty, and grace. It goes without saying that none of this great joy in my life today would be possible without her, and that her labours on this journey — physical, mental, emotional — have all dwarfed my own. I owe my wife a debt of gratitude that can never possibly be repaid, but I will strive every day to be worthy of her.
As for Essence, we were delighted to discover that she’s the perfect “culture fit” to join our little family firm. She is easy-going — smiles generously—and is a good communicator, just like her dad. And she’s good at stuff — mostly baby stuff so far—and has virtuous standards, just like her mom. She wakes up every day with her eyes wide and smile wider just raring to get up and go, and for the most part carries about her baby business with humor and courage and grace, and with as much dignity and autonomy as her infant legs can bear.
A few weeks ago we pulled up stakes and packed our bags and flew to Hong Kong. I celebrated a lovely birthday in quarantine, eating chocolate and sushi and cooing with my daughter in a tiny hotel suite.
We’re now footloose and free in the big city… and we love it here, far more than we imagined we would.
Past business trips had left us with an impression of Hong Kong as a giant shopping mall; soulless, dense, and commercial.
But we have found our neighborhood — the quietly funky Tai Hang — to be just the opposite; charming, family-friendly, and lush with nature. We hike in the mountains, we play in the library, we stroll in the park, we swim in the pool — all a few minutes’ walk from our apartment.
Most importantly are the people. Some of our closest friends are here, with babies of their own. Essence’s spirit sister lives next door. I have clients here, and my partner has family nearby. We have a great babysitter. Even the people of Hong Kong, often chilly on the surface, have revealed a cooing warmth far more endearing than we expected. The city itself may not feel like home, but we do feel supported and surrounded by people we love.
We still plan to return to Beijing when we can, but in the meantime we are having the adventure of our lives. Our primary objective is presence. Our first-born baby will only be a baby for such a precious short time, and we want to really be here for every minute of it.
All the rest of it — what comes next, what we do, where we go, how we live, who we become—it will all come in due course.
There are countless paths before us… and yet wherever we go, here we are.
Thank you for being here, too.
Love,
Jonathan
