The child-like awe of a child-free trip
The child-like awe of a child-free trip
Thoughts from 11,000 meters above sea level
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Flying solo. If there’s a sharper reminder of the simplicity of kid-free life, I’m yet to find it. I’m writing this on Tuesday’s first flight from Barcelona to London, Ryanair’s garish yellow headrests screaming in my tired face, having successfully completed a early morning egress without waking a soul
.It’s all so different. It’s all so quiet. I make my way to the airport in a taxi, relishing the joy of doing nothing; phone staunchly remaining in pocket, staring out the window, watching the sun rise on another day. The thoughtful taxi driver enquires about his music, ensuring I don’t have a problem—esto es molesto?—the volume is low, “I’m fine,” I tell him, as I perform my best Depeche Mode impression and enjoy the silence of a thirty-minute airport run customarily spent keeping duelling children from destroying each other.
At the airport I sail through the shops; nary a scant “I WANT ONE OF THOSE,” arms raised towards whatever toy has been strategically placed to drain my wallet whilst attempting an any% duty-free speedrun. I shoot through security in record time—minimal effort, zero stress, no tears—freed from the need to shepherd two kids through the X-ray gauntlet; the neurons in my brain that usually work overtime to power a persistent child-location radar mercifully given a day off. Just me and my trusty grey Eastpak carry-on, my worldwide travel companion, ready for any adventure, coming along for the ride for the low, low cost of 23 additional euros each way (includes priority boarding, hurry, limited numbers available).
Our kids are great travellers. Padme had no choice in the matter—by the time she was two she’d spent more time in California than I had in Ireland by the same age—she was born on a plane, moulded by it. We hadn’t even moved to the US. I was taking that long-ass flight, London to SF, fairly regularly in the before times: before I was working for myself, before I left Google, before a global pandemic completely reconfigured what it meant to work on one side of the world with a team who worked on the other; before clients beliefs began to shift in what they willing to accept from remote partners, before they too realised how sweet life could be when you can roll out of bed and join a 9 am daily standup in your pyjama bottoms, and then nip away for a shower and a workout before lunch.
I stepped into the great unknown of working from home, and working for myself, at the end of 2018. I was out of lockstep with the world for a handful of unsure months, until it clipped back into place when millions of us were required to do the same. Some remain. Others are back in the office, many against their will. A lot of what constitutes work today can be done just as efficiently (maybe even more so) over Zoom. But several things cannot. This week is a “press the flesh” trip: meeting promising new clients, potential TNF collaborators, and allowing the briefest taste of London to cross my lips, to plug into the city’s pace and vibrancy for a few days before I inevitably yearn for the peace and tranquillity—if you can call it that—of life back home.
Meetings that once required us to be in the office, on the other side of the city, or half a world away, now happen from the comfort of our casa. This makes it easier for us to be the parents we’d like to be—switching seamlessly from a cross-country brainstorm to picking our kid up from the school gates. But like our temporary reprieve from the daily commute, whilst much is gained, something is still lost.
“I miss missing my kids,” a close friend shared, a year into the pandemic. Even these first few hours away from my kids has gifted me the headspace to tap into a childlike curiosity that can’t exist when they’re nearby. To gaze out of a window as time passes by, to open my laptop on a plane and write this essay without worrying about sticky fingers fumbling towards a dock full of apps that remain stubbornly resistant to their attempted manipulation.
Without two kids next to me fighting over what to watch on the iPad, I can sit peacefully, admiring the beauty of the breaking day, marvelling at the miracle of flight; 11,000 metres high, a sea of white cotton insulating me from the world underneath: a world where I’m a parent, and like all parents I’m waking up, running the kids to school, starting work, trying to squeeze a bucket full of necessities into a thimble of time. This separation implores you, for the briefest moment, to admire the awe of the world, and soak up its natural wonders; a small distance—a few hours of silence, a few thousand metres up, a few thousand miles away—that provide just enough space to be reminded of the beauty all around us. It will be easy to forget this feeling when I land, when my phone connects to 4G again, when the notifications begin rolling in—the Whatsapps must flow—and life resumes its regular pace. It’s a feeling I’ll try to bottle up, and bring back to my little crew, as I spend a few days sending fatherly love in remote bursts through a glowing rectangle until we’re together for movie night.
I’ll be back before bedtime, Friday night. I miss you all, too x
3 things to read this week
“Four-day Week: ‘Major Breakthrough’ as Most UK Firms in Trial Extend Changes” by Heather Stewart in The Guardian. Could the five-day workweek soon be a thing of the past? If the data from this UK trial is anything to go by, then maybe so. 61 companies participated in a six-month trial, reducing their workweek to four days. 92% have opted to continue the experiment, with 18 companies making it permanent. “2,900 employees across the UK have taken part in the pilot. Surveys of staff taken before and after found that 39% said they were less stressed, 40% were sleeping better and 54% said it was easier to balance work and home responsibilities. The number of sick days taken during the trial fell by about two-thirds and 57% fewer staff left the firms taking part compared with the same period a year earlier.”
“The Work is Not Enough” by Anne-Helen Petersen in Culture Study. Ever had one of those weeks where you’re just constantly on the backfoot? Of course. Anne-Helen Petersen is having one too and has thankfully turned in a very relatable essay about just how it feels to be overwhelmed to the point where you want to fuck it all off and get in the sea. “The work would’ve been done. But I’ve already tried that whittled-down version of a life, and it’s not a life at all. It’s a burnout trap, a suffocation, a flattening of self. Sure, I’d have completed all the work, done all the tasks, finished all the laundry. But to what end? And to what future? The next weekend would come, and I’d feel some semblance of control, which I may or may not have been able to care over into the week. But achieving control is not the same as achieving happiness.”
"It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive” by Freddie deBoer. Nostalgia: it’s a helluva drug! Not strictly fatherhood related, but one of the best things I read this week, a look back on the decade many of us came of age, and pining for a cultural highpoint receding as rapidly as our collective hairlines. Pairs nicely with Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties. Thanks to Zac who shared this in our community. “What I would grant to the youth of today is the ability to see things as new. Older people have always wanted to be able to do that. What’s different now is that this feeling is denied to the young. We have adolescents without adolescence.”
Good Dadvice
Upcoming TNF Events
This newsletter will always be free. But subscribers get access to loads of perks. Here are a few online events we’ve got coming up in the community:
Talking Business: Job, Work, Career, Purpose. How is work? How are you tracking in your career? How does it all fit around being a dad? Done with it all? Or ready for your second mountain? 28th February
TNF Men’s Circle. Come one, come all, come to talk, come to listen. A safe space to talk about the highs and lows of fatherhood. 28th February + 7th March
TNF Movie Club: Aftersun. No, I haven’t seen it yet. But every dad who has is still reeling from it, and Mubi has it available with a free seven-day trial. Excited to watch it, be emotionally destroyed, and talk with you all about it. 14th March
These regular online events are supplemented with semi-regular real-world ones. A bunch of us met for dinner in London this week, and there’s something planned for Barcelona next month. The 2023 plan is to scale them wider, with the help of other dads in the community. Our community is a safe space to talk about anything, a belief that has been sorely tested this week as folks have been sharing their “anti-lists” of movies and TV shows they’ve never seen. Trying my hardest to allow this to remain a judgement-free zone … but how have some of you STILL not seen The Sopranos?
Want more dads in your life—even if they haven’t watched Star Wars?
Come one, come all.
One thing to watch with the kids this week
Jon Klassen can do no wrong in our house. His Hat Trilogy is a close to perfection as a series of children’s books can be, and his Triangle, Square and Circle books have now been magically recreated in three dimensions as Shape Island. We’ve been powering through this in an attempt to extract all the joy and whimsy before my three month Apple TV+ series trial ends.
Here’s Robin Williams on raising tiny humans
“My son is three years old. It’s an amazing time.… It’s an outrageous time, when they ask you about everything. It’s like, [child voice] ‘Why is the sky blue?’ Well, because of the atmosphere. ‘Why is there atmosphere?’ Well, because we need to breathe. ‘Why do we breathe?’ WHY THE FUCK DO YOU WANT TO KNOW? A year ago, you were sitting in your own shit—now you’re Carl Sagan?”
— Taken from Dave Itzkoff’s stunning biography Robin
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On landing, I later learned that this wasn’t the case, and that I did, in fact, wake up the whole house.
Great read, thank you Kevin! I’m interviewing for a global role next week at the same time as my wife is pregnant with our second child. It feels like a conflicting position but at the same time it just wouldn’t have been possibly without the pandemic. However I very much miss business travel and will still be crowbarring in a few trips whenever I can justify not substituting them for online versions
Reading this sat in Singapore airport, halfway through a 30 hour trip from Auckland to Manchester (with my 4 y/o and 1 y/o) with the wheels starting to come off and tempers frayed all round, the contrast could not be more pronounced!!