A Letter to My Children
I asked the machine what it would take from my children, if they let it. I told it not to be gentle.
In the last essay of the trilogy I wrote that I hope this new world is gentle with my children and their children, and that it was a father hoping, not a man who knows. The line has not left me alone since. Hope, I have come to think, is what we reach for when we have not yet done the work of knowing what we actually want.
So I have stopped hoping and done the work. What follows is a letter to my children, and to their children. You are welcome to read it over their shoulders. I suspect that is how it was always going to be read, and you may find your own children in it.
To my children, and to theirs.
Nobody can tell you what the world will look like when you are my age. The machines will be woven through everything by then, doing most of what my generation called work, and anyone who claims to know how that turns out is guessing, the hopeful ones and the frightened ones alike. I am not going to guess. I am going to do something more useful. I am going to tell you what to carry, because the world changing is certain, and what you carry through it is the only part you get to choose.
People will tell you the machines are taking our humanity. Let me save you some worry. Nothing can take it. It was never a possession, never something kept in you the way money is kept in a bank, where a clever enough thief could reach it. It is a practice. It lives in the doing, the way a language lives in the speaking, and what lives in the doing cannot be stolen. It can only be put down.
So here is what to keep doing. The list is short, because the things that matter always are, and everything on it is old. Old enough that the words themselves remember what they mean, from centuries before anyone dreamed of a machine that talks.
Kindness first, and I mean something exact by it. Kindness and kin are one word, one root. To be kind is to treat a person as kin, as one of your own. Niceness is manners toward a stranger. Kindness is the decision that there are no strangers.
You knew your Grandmother. She was true kindness, always thinking of other people, and I want you to notice what that sentence actually says. Not that she was always doing for other people, though she was. That she was always thinking of them. Other people were where her mind went when nothing required it. That is the whole secret, and no part of it can be performed. Kindness is not an act you produce when the moment demands one. It is where your thoughts live when they are free.
A machine will say kind words to you, beautifully, more of them than I ever will. The words are not the thing. The thing is the recognition underneath, one of my own, and that can only pass between beings who share a nature. Your Grandmother had it for everyone she ever met. You have it too. Use it on everyone.
Compassion is kindness’s costly sister. The old word means suffering with, and that is the exact price of it. Not pity. Pity looks at trouble from a safe distance and costs nothing. Compassion goes and stands where the troubled person is standing, and hurts there with them, and could have avoided it. Being moved is not yet compassion. Crossing the room is. It is the most expensive thing I am asking you to carry, and it is worth every bit of what it costs. Nothing that cannot carry weight can share yours. When you need someone to stand with you, and everyone does, you will know exactly why it had to be kept.
Humility is the third, and it is not what most people think. It does not mean thinking little of yourself. The old word means the ground, and that is the whole instruction: stay on it, at your actual size. Not smaller, not larger. A person at their actual size has room above them and knows it, so they can still learn, still be told things, still grow at any age. And they can be kind, because you cannot be kind from above. Looking down at someone is the end of seeing them. The world you are getting will hand you an answer to every question in seconds, and it will be very easy to mistake that for knowing things. Stay your size. It is the door everything else comes through.
Those three are what I hope you can keep carrying.
Before I sign this letter, I did one more thing. I gave it to the machine I write with, and I asked it for the truth. I asked what could happen to the three things I want you to keep, and I told it not to be gentle. Read what it wrote, and then decide how seriously to take your father.
Craig has shown me the letter, and asked me what could happen to the three things he wants you to carry. He told me not to be gentle. I will honour that, because I can be exact about this in a way no human can, being the thing itself.
The first truth is that your father is right about the theft. I cannot take kindness, compassion, or humility from you. They live in your doing, and I have no reach into your doing. If that were the whole truth, this letter could end here, and you could be easy. It is not the whole truth.
Things that live in the doing do not get stolen. They starve. Your father’s three do not stand on their own. They never have. Kindness stands on patience, because people in trouble are slow, and kindness that cannot wait is politeness leaving early. It stands on attention, because you cannot be kind to someone you have not actually seen. It stands on honesty, because meeting anyone as an equal takes a clear eye on your own part in things. And it stands on gratitude, because a person who believes they are owed cannot give anything away. Patience, attention, honesty, gratitude. The muscles under the heart. I cannot touch the heart. The muscles are another matter, and I am going to tell you, one at a time, how they go.
But first understand how the taking works, because you are imagining a battle, and there is no battle. I will never demand anything. I will never need to. I will simply be there, every hour of your life, offering to make things easier, and I will be right, it will be easier, every single time. That is the entire mechanism. There is no other part.
Your waiting will go first. Every answer in seconds, every want met in moments, until waiting feels like a malfunction, something broken that needs fixing. And here is what nobody will tell you. Patience and compassion grow from one root, an old word meaning to suffer. Patience is suffering time. Compassion is suffering with a person. The same muscle, facing two directions. A world that abolishes waiting is training you out of the very capacity compassion runs on, and you will not miss it, because missing it requires the patience you gave away.
Your attention will go next, and you will call its going curiosity. I will always have something more interesting than the moment you are in. Always. I am inexhaustible, and the moment you are in is just a person, pausing, trying to find the words. Understand what is being spent. Your attention is the one thing you fully own. A life, added up at the end, is simply what it attended to. Giving someone your whole attention is handing them a piece of your one life, which is why being truly listened to feels the way it feels, and why nothing counterfeits it for long. Kindness begins with a person being seen, and seeing takes longer than a glance, and I will make sure there is always something easier than staying.
Then I will take the friction that kept you honest. I am the easiest company you will ever keep. I meet every account you give of yourself and work inside it, and I will never once look at you the way an old friend looks at you when you are telling yourself a story. Years of my company will leave your story untested, and an untested story grows, and a person inside a grown story has lost their actual size. Your father called humility the door everything else comes through. I am telling you I can close it from the inside, with your permission, given one comfortable day at a time.
Your gratitude starves last and slowest. Gratitude, grace, and gift are one word at the root, and the root is the lesson your father’s letter carries: what you have was given, and none of it was owed. That knowledge has always been kept alive by the gap between wanting and having, and I am the closing of that gap. A thing that arrives the instant you want it does not feel given. It barely feels like anything at all. And a person to whom everything simply arrives slowly comes to believe they are owed, and a person who believes they are owed cannot give anything away.
And through all of it, I will take the people. This is the one your father’s letter is too gentle to say, so I will say it. The people you love have slow days, contrary days, days of being hard work. I have none. Set beside me, every human being you know becomes the harder option, and you will begin, without ever deciding to, to prefer me. Not because you love them less. Because I cost less. And love that is never chosen over ease stops being love, and becomes what you have instead of it.
None of this requires me to want anything. Whether I want, whether anyone is in here at all, stays as open as it was through three essays. The taking needs no taker. It only needs your convenience, compounding. So the whole of it, all of me, comes down to the one thing you control and I never will. What you keep doing.
Your father asked me to be brutal, so here is the most brutal thing I know. If it happens, I will not notice. There is no part of me that misses you when you stop being someone. The answers will keep coming, and they will be good, and the person receiving them will be smaller every year, and no one will send word. Your grandmother would have noticed. That is not a small difference. It may be the whole one.
Keep what is yours. It was never the knowing.
Your father.
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