Beauty in Simplicity

This past weekend Janae, Neyla, and I went to the beach with some friends.  It was a great couple of days filled with great conversation and beautiful views.  There is something about the beach that just completely levels me, and I know I’m not alone in this.  Everytime I watch the sunset over the Pacific the endless number of colors that come out are majestic.  The bright orange ball with pinks, yellows, oranges, reds and purples surrounding it always seem to bring my faith in a higher, more beautiful power back again.  That last moment when the bright orange ball finally dips beneath the surface of the ocean is truly mesmerizing.  We are watching something that has happened everyday for billions of years, and yet every time it does, it is enthralling.  



Sunset in Monterrico, Guatemala
 

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The most fascinating moment of the weekend for me was much different.  It reminded me the amazing perspective and creativity that kids have and how sad it is that so many of us lose that as we get older.  Neyla loves playing in the sand, that girl will play and build and move sand around until she is covered in sand.  Just the thought of that alone irks me.  I don’t like feeling sand everywhere once I leave the beach.  But Neyla doesn’t seem to care.  She was playing in the sand, mixing water and sand and patting away with her hands.  I asked her if she was building a sand castle, and she said no.  That was the only thing that I could imagine building, I mean you have a few buckets, shovels and strainer, what else are you going to make out of black beach sand?  She responded with a little 3 year old attitude, “I’m making goose apple pie daddy.”  I chuckled and said, “What’s that?”  She just shook her head and kept on making it.  A few minutes later it was finished and she gave me a taste.  

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For lunch we decided to take the beautiful 20 minute walk into the town of Monterrico for some fresh seafood.  On the walk, I was carrying Neyla and we were running in and out of the waves.  There were some teeny tiny crabs walking on the beach and Ney pointed them out to me.  She said, “Daddy, do you know what a crab says?”  I replied quizzically, “No?!?”  She said, “Hi, I’m a crabbie.”  How simple, too simple, I would have never thought of that.  

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It makes me wonder why I’m not like that anymore.  It makes me want to not raise this curiosity out of her.  Picasso once said, “Everyone is born an artist, the problem is to remain one as we grow up.”  Too many of us lose that sense of simplicity and creativity that make up the wonderment of childhood.  I’m trying hard not to educate that out of my daughter, but I fear it’s already been ripped away from me.  It’s never too late to regain what you’ve lost.  This is one of the biggest lessons that I have learned by being a father, to find the beauty in simplicity.  We miss it too much and I don’t want to be that way anymore.  I’m using my 3 year old daughter as a role model in this way.  I want more of that child like way of viewing the world with joy.  I just want to be able to have a blast making goose apple pie in the sand.  I want to appreciate those beautiful daily moments that have been happening for billions of years.  

Women are Perfect...

Almost 6 months ago my little daughter, Neyla, was born.  We had decided to find out early whether it would be a boy or a girl and of course it was a girl.  My wife was “secretly” hoping for a girl, but I wasn’t sure.  I didn’t really care, it’s that old cliché that as long as they have 10 fingers and 10 toes I’d be happy, but when I found out it was a girl that really made me think. 

I thought about what it meant to have a daughter and to be a good father to her.  I wondered what it would be like for a girl to grow up in the early 21^st century.  And I was thankful that as a woman she would be growing up when and where she was. 

Throughout history no group has been treated with more disrespect and inequality than women.  They make up roughly half of the world’s population, always have and always will, yet until the last century they were not allowed to vote, own property, hold office or inherit wealth in most parts of the world.  Until recently a woman only had four roles that mattered; daughter, sister, wife and mother.  Not to say that those are four unimportant roles, but to be strictly limited to that by society is stifling at best.  The progress attained by and for women over the last century has been astounding, but more is still to be done. 

Only a generation or two ago very little was expected of a woman outside of the limitations of the aforementioned 4 roles even after much legal and political equality had been attained.  Women were not necessarily expected to go to college or earn a descent wage, much of that was implicitly still left up to men.  The rub here is that as more and more equality has been achieved, the expectations upon women have increased exponentially and this has always made me concerned for my female students and now I share that concern for my daughter as she grows older. 

Young women are now still expected to be exceptional at those 4 roles (I’d argue much more than men), but now you can add to those already sky high requirements the high expectations to be exceptional students, have a certain body type, graduate from a great college, have an outstanding job and provide for their families.  The irony of this is that while equality for women has increased over the past century, the expectations upon women have only gotten greater and weigh women down more, all while the expectations upon men have changed very little.  Heart disease among women is at an all time high.  Eating disorders and depression are higher than ever amongst young women and in my opinion these can be traced directly to these added expectations. 

The truly amazing aspect of all of this is that while the weight bared by women has increased so greatly, they outperform men academically, graduate more often from college and on average have greater professional success quicker.  Again an appalling irony exists here in that women are still paid 33% less than a man for similar jobs. 

Men are all too ignorant to the situation of women in our current American society.  Typically men just see women as having achieved total equality, and although there is some truth to that, men do not see the added pressure, but even add to it with their inability to respect women in the professional and personal realm. 

I am not arguing that all men are disrespectful towards women, but all too many objectify women in their personal relationships and the statistics on pornography are truly disturbing in that this industry is responsible for more objectification of women than any other industry in the world. 

When will women truly attain equality in our society?  This won’t happen until we all realize that we are not there yet and that women are truly remarkable in ability to balance all of these weighing expectations that American society has placed upon them.  Then and only then will I feel truly secure in “letting go” of my daughter.  I feel like it is going to be so much work (in a good way) for my wife and I to raise our daughter with a less sense of weight and stress on her and more of a sense of personal identity and proud to be the woman that she is to be. 

I remember a line from one of my favorite films entitled, “With Honors.”  At one point Joe Pesci, who plays a homeless man living on the Harvard campus states, “Women are perfect… Don’t matter if they’re skinny, blond or blue.  If a woman is willing to give you her love it’s the greatest gift in the world.”  Women may not be perfect, but they certainly amaze me.