Wholehearted Cooperation with the Inevitable
Wholehearted Cooperation with the Inevitable
On good luck, bad luck, and cultivating a sense of "deep okayness"
This isn’t going to be about Bluey, is it?1
Here’s the thing: it always has been.
It’s Bandit all the way down.
The sooner you realise it, the easier this whole thing will be.
You might see Bluey as an opportunity for twenty minutes of peace and the chance to get something—anything—done. You may see the Heeler family as four emotional support animals, gently resting their heads on your lap and looking up with loving eyes when times get hard. You could be one of those dads who email with an angry tirade whenever I raise the topic of Bluey, mad because Bandit sets unrealistic expectations for dads and raises the bar somewhere unreachable. My reply? Thank fuck someone is raising it, even if all we have is a cartoon dog from Australia.
During the final few episodes of the latest season, Bandit became preoccupied. He was on the beach with his family, but mentally somewhere else. It soon transpired that a huge change was on the cards—a new role, with more money, but one that required the Heeler pack to pack up and move out.
In the penultimate episode, “The Sign,” Bluey finds out—of course—and arrives at school telling her friends they’re moving away. Bluey’s teacher, Calypso, reaches for a book titled “The Farmer” and begins to read it to them. (This is where I usually embed a clip from YouTube, or when I can’t find one, to upload my own. But there’s no way I want the House of Mouse legal team chasing me down. Watch the episode on Disney+ here.)
There was a farmer who owned a beautiful horse, but one day, his horse ran away.
Upon hearing the news, his neighbours came to visit.
“That's such bad luck,” they said.
“We'll see,” replied the farmer.
The very next morning, his horse came back and brought three wild horses with it.
“Wow,” said the neighbours, “that's such good luck.”
“We'll see,” replied the farmer.
The next day, his son tried riding one of the wild horses, but it threw him off and he hurt his leg. The neighbours said, “That's bad luck.”
“We'll see,” said the farmer.
The next day, soldiers came to the village and made all the young men join the army, but they didn't take the farmer's son because his leg was hurt.
“That's such good luck,” said the neighbours.
“We'll see,” said the farmer.
The kids look at their teacher and pepper her with an accurate set of young kid questions: “Is that it?” “What happens next?” “What were the horses’ names?” For any kid watching, they might wonder the same. Any adults paying attention were left with more existential questions.
As great as Bluey’s writers are, they didn’t create this story. Maybe you’d rather hear it from one of our generation’s finest actors, Shia Lebouf2 Phillip Seymour Hoffman, telling it to Tom Hanks in Charlie Wilson’s War:
Of course, this story is older than these recent retellings. It goes back—way back—two thousand and two hundred years, at least. It is a Chinese parable called The Old Man Who Lost His Horse (But It Turned Out For The Best).3 The parable is rooted in Taoist thinking, a school of philosophy encouraging followers to exist in harmony with the universe through passivity, calmness, and non-strife.
Like any good parable, it houses multiple meanings. The initial read is a familiar idea: “Every cloud has a silver lining.” But on deeper inspection, that idea doesn’t hold: the horse returns with three more—becoming more of a silver cloud with a grey lining—and still, the farmer withholds judgement. It is more than a teaching of “a blessing in disguise.” It is a lesson on the constant flow between what we perceive to be good and bad, and the liberating choice when we move beyond these binary options.
Bandit wonders how this career move will alter the trajectory of his life and that of his family. How can he know whether it’s the right move to make or not? What if he makes the wrong decision? Such moments are fraught with tension as we agonise over the fork in the road, trying to minimise regret whilst maximising our chance of happiness.
But what if, instead of obsessing about the outcome, we said, “We’ll see”?
Humans excel at pattern recognition. Over centuries, our brains have developed ways to efficiently and effectively identify relationships, categorise information, and infer predictions based on past experiences and data. Humanity has pushed itself forward by doing this in the fields of mathematics, art, and science, and we push ourselves forward by doing the same.
Anthony De Mello was a Jesuit priest born in Mumbai, briefly studying philosophy in Barcelona before returning to India. His somewhat unorthodox background of growing up Indian and Catholic in what was then British-ruled Bombay influenced his worldview and led to writings that intertwined Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism. These writings caused consternation amongst the church, with Pope Benedict XVI posthumously decreeing that some of De Mello’s views “are incompatible with the Catholic faith and can cause grave harm.”
So, of course, I hunted those books down. It was page 22 in his 1992 book One Minute Nonsense that stopped me in my tracks:
I immediately wrote that last line on a Post-It Note and stuck it on the speaker beside my desk. It has remained there since. “Wholehearted cooperation with the inevitable” is another way of seeing the world through the farmer's eyes: whatever happens will happen, what will be will be, and the more you fight it, the more turmoil you will put yourself through. These five words became a mantra, a daily reminder to live a life less affected by Lady Luck’s capricious twists and value acceptance over resistance.
It was part of a pattern I’ve noticed repeating in the years since.
Cormac McCarthy took a (very on-brand) pessimistic viewpoint in No Country for Old Men when Uncle Ellis tells Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, “You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.” In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius famously wrote, “The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.” Lena Horne, an American singer and actress popular in the 1940s, once said, “It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it." French writer Anaïs Nin suggested, “We don't see things as they are; we see them as we are.” And in Dune, Paul Atreides shares a Fremen saying he has learned: “Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.”
“I don't mind what happens.”
So why am I sharing this somewhat haphazard collection of Bluey transcriptions, YouTube videos and book highlights with you today?
They’re cultural touchstones I’ve collected over the years that have shaped my worldview; a series of artefacts that act as mental mile markers, pointing me back towards what I know will help me live a more peaceful life. From my conversations with dads over the years, I know I’m not the only one searching for a port of calm in the storm of fatherhood. We tend to look at our troubles in one of two ways: externally-caused, where any misfortunes are due to the actions of others—because that manager screwed me over, because my kids wouldn’t put their bloody clothes on this morning, because that close friend or family member did “the thing,” yet again, just like I knew they would. On the other end of the scale are the internally-caused sources of strife, where we place the blame entirely at our own door, ruminating on decisions we shouldn’t have made or opportunities that passed us by.
A few years back, I read Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita. It was a book that, like The Tibetan Book of the Dead, loomed large in the internet rabbit holes I regularly fell into. Marrying into a Hindu family only further fed my curiosity, emboldened by the knowledge that close family members had followed its teaching their whole lives.
It’s a book I’ve recommended consistently since. You can open it to almost any page and find a passage that will rip you out of your current river of thinking and deposit you on the banks of somewhere new. There was a conversation in The Dadscord earlier this month about how we think about time, success, and the feeling of being defined by our output, and I shared one such passage:
You have the right to work, but for the work's sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work. Desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working.
It led other dads to share some of their own touchstones, dots ripe for connection. Anton shared a story he regularly returned to:
A monk decides to meditate alone. Away from his monastery, he takes a boat and goes to the middle of the lake, closes his eyes and begins to meditate. After a few hours of unperturbed silence, he suddenly feels the blow of another boat hitting his.
With his eyes still closed, he notices the sensation of anger arising in his body and, when he opens his eyes, he is ready to shout at the boatman who dared to disturb his meditation.
But when he opened his eyes, he saw that it was an empty boat, not tied up, floating in the middle of the lake…
At that moment, the monk achieves self-realization and understands that anger is something that occurs within his body when provoked by an external object.
Ivor offered a passage from an Eckhart Tolle book:
J. Krishnamurti, the great Indian philosopher and spiritual teacher, spoke and traveled almost continuously all over the world for more than fifty years attempting to convey through words - which are content - that which is beyond words, beyond content. At one of his talks in the later part of his life, he surprised his audience by saying, "Do you want to know my secret?" Everyone became very alert. Many people in the audience had been coming to listen to him for twenty or thirty years and still failed to grasp the essence of his teaching. Finally, after all these years, the master would give them the key to understanding. "This is my secret," he said. "I don't mind what happens."
In the weeks since, I’ve reflected on being part of this group of dads, all doing our best to attain a sense of what writer Sasha Chapin called a sense of “Deep Okayness:”
Deep Okayness is not the feeling that I am awesome all the time. Instead, it is the total banishment of self-loathing. It is the deactivation of the part of my mind that used to attack itself. It’s the closure of the self as an attack surface. It’s the intuitive understanding that I am merely one of the apertures through which the universe expresses itself, so why would I hate that? It’s the sense that, while I might fuck up, my basic worth is beyond question—I have no essential damage, I am not polluted, I am fine.
The battles aren’t happening out there; the call is coming from inside the house. In a theme consistent over the years I’ve been writing TNF, it’s what you read and the places and people you spend your time with that will most influence how you feel about yourself and the people you love.
Bluey is fun, sure. But it’s something more. It’s one of many clues out there, offering curious parents another path. These clues that, seen collectively, pinned to a board and linked with red string, point towards something bigger—dots to be connected to live a happier, more fulfilled life.
The puzzle is there to be solved. All you need is the right pieces.
3 things to read this week
“Roblox’s Pedophile Problem” by Olivia Carville and Cecilia D’Anastasio in Bloomberg Businessweek. A few weeks back, my wife asked, “Shall we let the kids start playing something like Minecraft or Roblox?” I offered to do a bit of research beforehand and found a whole host of horror stories related to the treacherous waters of Roblox, like the two dozen US arrests over the last six years where adults have abducted or abused victims they’d met or groomed using Roblox. Yikes. (FYI: I ended up buying Minecraft for our Xbox, which we let them play in offline mode.)
“Leaving ‘Mr. Mom’ Behind” by Kelly Marie Coyne in The New York Times. The stigma of the stay-at-home dad remains strong, but things seem to be shifting, ever-so-slowly, in the right direction. 1 in 5 stay-at-home parents in the US are fathers, a 64% increase from 1989. The NYT talks to dads across America who are making it work.
“Campaigners Tie Baby Slings to Statues in Call for Better UK Paternity Leave” by Amelia Gentleman in The Guardian. If you’re a dad in the UK, you almost certainly saw this earlier in the week. Taking down statues has a powerful history. But this week, a UK group called Dad Shift showed us how adding, rather than removing, something can illuminate an urgent need. They transformed some of history's greatest men into modern dads, showing how men like Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Laurence Olivier and Thierry Henry might carry the physical and mental load of parenting today. If you're a dad in the UK reading this, you can do something to help: sign the action letter calling on Keir Starmer to back a new paternity leave policy fit for the 21st century.
One thing to watch with the kids this week
I am watching X-Men 97 with my two. It's fantastic. A few parts were too much for the five-year-old. I’m sure he’ll be fine. There’s nothing like that feeling of looking down at your kid and thinking, “Hmm, we should probably fast-forward this bit.”
Anyhow. The whole thing is like one massive bong rip of nostalgia—get a load of this new (whilst still very old) intro:
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Yes, I am, of course, referencing that Simpsons bit.
Worth watching that Shia LeBouf clip just to hear him telling Jon Bernthal how “THE HORSE JUST FUCKS OFF!”
Album title, calling it.
"There’s nothing like that feeling of looking down at your kid and thinking, 'Hmm, we should probably fast-forward this bit.'"
When your 3 y/o asks to watch a docu about crocodiles...
As a man rereading Alex Kerr’s book on the Heart Sutra for a third consecutive time (and now memorizing it) this post was right up my alley - and my favorite of your posts so far señor. Good work.