Boys^*

The elemental exuberance of boys, their endless fascination and wonder at the world, and the thousands of ways their energy expresses itself in exploration, in play, in times of quiet and stillness, and in moments of anger or despondency offer endless challenges and opportunities for fathers to reconnect with these same elemental energies in ourselves as we nurture our sons emotionally as well as in other ways, and hopefully provide them with examples of embodied male presence as they grow to manhood. We would do well as fathers to remain open to getting to know our sons for who they are, unique beings who may or may not share our temperamental qualities, abilities, and interests. Most important is to be a presence in their lives and to see and accept them for who they actually are, and find imaginative ways to meet them where they are over the expanse of childhood, adolescence, and beyond. This is not easy to do. It requires ongoing caring, commitment, and discernment, as well as a willingness at times to step outside our own comfort zones as they grow and change and come to inhabit their lives more fully. It also requires our physical presence and, even more importantly, our emotional availability and our own willingness to learn and grow.

As a father, a special joy came from the times I spent with my son at different ages, encountering the world together and watching him express the unique qualities of his emerging being day by day. His natural exuberance made everything an adventure. Sharing the world through his eyes opened mine time and again.

When he was fascinated by dinosaurs, we would go to the science museum and stare at the huge tyrannosaurus, so ferocious looking, first at eye level from the second floor, then from the bottom, looking up. Then we would explore the rest of the museum. When I went running, I would sometimes take him along with me when he was little, holding the handle of his small plastic motorcycle as he rode alongside around the big pond where everybody went to run or walk their dogs. Later, on occasion, we ran together. I loved to read to him in the evenings, or on camping trips we took, and to tell him stories that involved him, which I made up as I went along.

We wrestled a lot, rolling around on the living room floor grappling like lions until we were exhausted. We did that for years, until he became a wrestler in high school and the risk of an injury to me got significantly higher.

When he was very young, I trained regularly in Korean Zen sword fighting (Shim Gum Do—the “Mind Sword Path”) and would bring him to the dojo on occasion so he could watch us practice. He loved it, and so did I. I stopped training formally when he was around three, but for years afterward, every once in a while he and I would engage in stylized fighting forms with wooden swords, bowing to each other in appreciation before and after each bout. He had a short sword that he could wield easily. It was exhilarating to block each other’s strikes with our swords, to see that we could protect ourselves from scary blows coming from different directions, and remain calm and stable, grounded in the movement, the rhythm, and the sound of the sticks clashing. He started training in various martial arts when he was seven. He never stopped.

On rare occasions, we clashed in anger, not with swords, but when our strong wills pushed or pulled in different directions. Gradually I learned to recognize and soften my fiery temper and make more room for him, lessons I learned with great difficulty as I struggled to grow beyond the vestiges of my own childhood. It was important to me to be as present as possible when I was with him.

It was made easier by the fact that we loved so many of the same things. Still, it required conscious effort at times, especially when I had a lot on my mind, an occupational hazard of parenting, with the never-ending pull of all the other things in our lives that can so easily subvert presence. The children always notice. Being distracted too much of the time conveys a sense that everything else is always more important.

Depending on their temperaments and interests, different boys will of course have different needs as they are growing up. But one thing they all need a good dose of is psychic space to grow on their own, to find things out away from their parents. As a boy growing up on the streets of New York City, I learned incomparable lessons I could never have learned from my parents by spending countless hours in the streets playing ball, or just hanging out, which we developed into a fine art, watching the underbelly of city life. I was lucky that my family’s life was stable and that I could go home for dinner every night, get off the street, and learn other things from my parents and brothers.

In addition to all their various activities and pursuits, solitary and with their friends, boys have an abiding need for their fathers, their grandfathers, and other men to be present, to put them first, to care about them, to mentor them, show interest and share time with them, to tell them stories and listen to theirs. This is true whether they live with their fathers or not.

Boys can benefit greatly from male guidance in exploring their interests and skills and their power and its limits, and from being encouraged and shown how to use it in positive ways, both for themselves and for the good of others. We can support them in their efforts to explore and come to know their own strength without exaggerating or flaunting it. In a similar way, as fathers we can encourage their play, their creativity, and their sense of belonging, a sense of responsibility and of being needed.

Discoveries of this kind can come about by fathers and sons doing things together, or by spending time together in nondoing, which sometimes looks like fishing, or playing catch, or hanging out in a field looking at the clouds, or going for a walk, or riding the subway, or going to the ballpark or a museum.

Is it possible for us as fathers to commit ourselves, inadequate as we may sometimes feel in the face of such a challenge—hampered as we might be by our jobs, our professional obligations, our various treadmills, distractions, ambitions, and outright addictions—to spend such time with our sons? That nondoing—what in The Wind in the Willows is referred to as “messing around in boats,” but is far more than that—can be a support to our sons in finding meaningful expressions for their agency and interests, and in helping them develop their strengths and a sense of mastery. Equally important, can we nurture an emotional landscape in which feeling things deeply is not only acceptable but also seen as essential to being fully human? Such an orientation is not fundamentally different from what girls need from their fathers as well. The energies may sometimes look different depending on their temperament, but the need for presence and for being seen and met with kindness and recognition are the same.

Our culture can be quite polarizing around the question of what it means to be a man nowadays. Norms are changing rapidly and becoming more inclusive and diverse in this era. Yet huge stereotypes still abound in the media equating fun and being cool with being macho, drinking, risk taking, and womanizing—just watch the beer commercials on TV or the truck ads, or follow in the press the trials of certain high school and college athletes, and of military personnel, and the horrific demeaning and violent behaviors that are often so graphically described. “Boys being boys” no longer has the infallibility it once had to excuse and exonerate harmful behavior, but there are many lessons still to be learned about honoring the sovereignty of others in terms of gender and sexual orientation in so many domains of society. Fathers can help their sons become aware of and interpret the various subtle and not-so-subtle messages and images the culture puts out, many of them demeaning to women and girls—and actually of men as well, when you stop and think about it. Perhaps then our sons will be less likely to get caught up in such stereotypic images and thinking, and the often hurtful behaviors that follow from them. Part of their education as males in this society is to come to understand in the deepest of ways that women and girls are human beings and not objects to be used. This is an enormous and endemic societal issue that is hugely important for us to be cognizant of as fathers and mothers of both boys and girls, and address head-on with awareness when it emerges in their experiences in school, within their social networks, and in their interactions with the broader society. It may require us as fathers to take a look at and acknowledge, challenging as it may be, how we ourselves may harbor and manifest deeply engrained and often unconscious habits in this regard.

Many of the dominant social images of men and women in the United States are products of what Robert Bly rightfully called, decades ago, the “sibling society,” a world in which the father, and increasingly the mother as well, are absent physically or emotionally or both, and where the prevalent role models for both boys and girls are by default provided by the media, by the entertainment industry, and by peers. This phenomenon is increasingly being driven by the Internet and social networking. In today’s world, it is hard for boys to find real-life mentors, and some kind of ceremonial initiation into adulthood and into the collective recognition, knowledge, and wisdom of those who came before. It is a world in which the past is often rejected without even being known. Deep, mutual alienation between the generations can lead teenage boys to attempt to raise and socialize themselves, and in the process, become increasingly at risk and vulnerable. Many aspects of the dominant culture are exploitative and predatory, even as some societal efforts are being made to promote and protect the rights of both children and women.

We might ask ourselves what a boy today will need in order to live wisely in a world that is changing so rapidly that we, the parents, cannot possibly know the challenges he will face in ten or twenty years, or even five. Absent a culture that honors, values, and prioritizes the needs of all its children and takes some societal responsibility for their development and their entry into the world of adults, parents are going to have to do yeoman’s and yeowoman’s work to serve as guides for their children. We know from extensive research that emotional intelligence and emotional balance, an ability to be in relationship with others under a wide range of circumstances, is certainly one capacity that will be needed for a happy and productive life in the future. Mindfulness is another life skill that will prove essential. As fathers, we can value the cultivation of inner strengths of our own for the sake of our boys, qualities such as lovingkindness, compassion, constancy, emotional reliability, flexibility, clear seeing, even wisdom. All these come out of moment-by-moment awareness of relationality, both inner and outer. We can value and draw upon our sovereignty, our truest nature, and the best of our own lineage or lineages, whether Native American, or African, Asian, European, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, “none of the above,” or “other.” The alternative is a kind of rootlessness, that of not knowing who we are, and perhaps not caring, of having no “people,” no community to which we belong and within which we are known and accepted as we are and to which we feel responsible and connected.

This is not to suggest some romantic ideal of fatherhood. Rather, we are talking about a process that we can and need to commit ourselves to because of our love and our caring, and out of our desire to be our best selves for our sons. Part of this process includes our own ongoing growth. Can we pay attention enough to our moment-to-moment experience, both inwardly and outwardly, to learn how to be more comfortable in our own skins, to be comfortable with not knowing at times, to work with our fear when it arises and our impulses to become emotionally closed off or numb? Can we practice bringing a degree of awareness to how we actually feel at moments throughout the day? Can we practice being more empathic, accepting, and playful? Can we be mindful of how totally consumed we may be by our work, and then work at finding a better balance? In essence, these approaches are simply creative applications of mindfulness in our lives and in our parenting.

The presence of a strong, empathic man in the role of father, grandfather, or mentor is always important for young boys, but it is increasingly important as boys move into adolescence. Adolescents desperately need to be seen, listened to, and heard, met and accepted, and encouraged to take responsibility for their own actions. For many boys, it is one of the biggest and most confusing, uncertain, and awkward transitions they will ever make in their lives. The transition from boy to man requires a vision, a new way of seeing, and a new way of being. Adolescent boys can be encouraged to recognize and appreciate mystery and the unknown, including other people and customs. They can be encouraged to learn the dangers of being swept up in a tribal mentality that makes absolute distinctions between us and them, and then, out of fear and prejudice, plunges into war and violence to vanquish “the other,” not realizing that “them is us.” This is the slow development of maturity, of adolescent boys learning to take their places, in Zen teacher Norman Fischer’s phrase, to enter over time with increasing awareness into an ever-evolving and deepening secure relationship with themselves as well as with others.

Of course, boys receive essential sustenance from a loving, nurturing relationship with their mothers as well. Being held in the aura of a mother’s love, without being controlled or having to take care of her emotional needs, creates a foundation of inner security and emotional grounding needed for the separations and adventures into the world that have to come as a boy gets older. But boys need their fathers from their earliest moments, too, as do girls. And the fathers need their sons. If we are not present at key moments in our sons’ lives, we may not know them. If we see them born, hold them when they are little, dream dreams with them as they sleep on our shoulders, walk with them in the world and speak with them of what they see, offer them tools to work with and projects to put their arms and their minds to, get down on the floor with them and play and invent games, tell stories, watch the sun go down and the rain fall, dig in the mud and build castles at the beach, throw rocks in the water and carve sticks, climb mountains and sit by waterfalls, mess around in rowboats and canoes, sing songs, watch them sleeping and wake them gently… we will know them and they will know us in ways that further their flourishing and ours.

Fathers and sons can help each other grow and find beauty and meaning, through the easy times and, as we have been intimating, also through the darkest and most rending periods. Our boys need us to be honest and unwavering in our love and commitment to them. We also need to accord them the space to find their own ways through pain and suffering while being there for them as best we can. At times they will need us to establish certain boundaries in an attempt to keep them safe. At other times, we may have to establish limits just for our own peace of mind and well-being as parents. There is no script for this, but this is what love is all about; we are changed by it, and we learn hard lessons for ourselves, just as our boys learn their own lessons.

For us dads, this is also where mindfulness becomes invaluable. For how things unfold depends to an important degree on our own willingness to become more intimate with the unwanted and learn that, like it or not, at times it is all we are going to have to work with. We can be open to the possibility that the unwanted is itself workable, if we are willing to do a certain kind of interior work of our own. For instance, mindfulness may allow us to see in some moments just how fixated we can be on our own view of things; how attached we can be to thinking that we are right, when in actuality, we may not be; and allow us to see things we may have been unable to see before. It can reveal how easily we at times abandon our own hearts and common sense when we react out of fear or anger in those moments in which we feel frustrated or thwarted by whatever arises that we don’t like and don’t feel is “tolerable.” When we find ourselves contracting in that way, it is an opportunity to catch ourselves and recognize our attachment to the story in our head about what is going on. We can then remind ourselves that it is not the truth—that it cannot be the whole truth, even though we may be convinced that it is. We can remind ourselves that if we can free ourselves from that too small view of things and our own tacit assumptions that remain mostly unexamined but don’t have to be, we can be present and relate and act in far wiser ways. Most of our reactivity comes from the thinking mind, which is usually colored by something left over from our own past or by fear of the future. Reacting mindlessly causes us to lose touch with what might be required in the present moment, especially in the most difficult and trying ones, just when we most need to be in touch and respond rather than react.

As our sons grow into themselves, of course they will find other sons who share their passions and with whom they can form friendships, some of which may be enduring and deeply sustaining. Music and dancing, wilderness and woods and fields, city life, sports, literature and the arts, all beckon through periods of both light and darkness, offering worlds of meaning and value, serving as mirrors in which boys can see themselves and continue discovering who they are and what they love, coming to live their moments fully, trusting in their own power, grounded in their bodies, and becoming full-fledged planetary adults as they participate in the mysteries of generativity and of their new generation, and of assuming their own places in the world.

Growing up in this rapidly changing world, exploring what one’s authentic place in it might be, is a nonlinear process that can be confusing and frightening, even dangerous at times. Ultimately, coming to adulthood is a developmental odyssey. When boys are met on a regular basis with some acceptance and kindness by their fathers and other men, they will resonate with it at some level or other, even if it doesn’t feel that way to us at the time. They will be sustained in ways that will increasingly allow them to find or make their own place in this world. It may take a short time, or it may take a long time, relatively speaking, but that does not matter. The more familiar and confident boys can be with the workings of their own minds and bodies, their thoughts and emotions, desires and longings, the more they can come to trust that capacity for awareness within themselves, the more they can live with an increasingly larger understanding of who they are and be open to the vast range of possibilities and actualities before them.

When they [his boys, Kai and Gen] were four and five we would go over to Bald Mountain on foot and we could look back and see our place. When they were seven and eight, we went up to Grouse Ridge on foot and we could look down from Grouse Ridge and see Bald Mountain from which you can see our place. A few years later we went on up to the High Sierra and got up on 8,000 foot English Mountain from which you can see Grouse Ridge. And then we went on over to Castle Peak which is the highest peak in that range which is 10,000 feet high and climbed that and you can see English Mountain from there. Then we went on north and we climbed Sierra Buttes and Mount Lassen—Mount Lassen is the farthest we’ve been out now. So from Mount Lassen, you can see Castle Peak, you can see English Peak, you can see Grouse Ridge, you can see Bald Mountain and you can see our place. That is the way the world should be learned. It’s an intense geography that is never far removed from your body.

GARY SNYDER