You Have to See This
why life is too beautiful to notice alone
When you travel with the same three people for long enough… in this case: my wife, son, daughter… you really start to realize that the whole point of seeing the world is so you can keep turning to each other and say the same five words:
“You have to see this.”
It’s said in other variations, of course:
“WHOA!”
“LOOK AT THAT!”
“YOU ARE MISSING IT! LOOK NOW! AAAAAAA!!!”
or my personal favorite, delivered with full-body urgency:
“DAAAAD!!!”
What follows is always different. In recent weeks it’s been odd looking squirrels in Amsterdam, a costumed street performer in Vegas counting his money while wearing a mask meant to look like Woody from Toy Story but not succeeding, a food we can’t pronounce but bought anyway while waiting in an Iceland airport terminal purely out of curiosity and low blood sugar, and the sky above home turning a color we don’t have a name for.
Sometimes it’s whispered, like our daughter does when she finds a tiny thing most adults would miss or sees a dog being walked and becomes briefly incapable of human speech because cuteness has overwhelmed her vocabulary.
Sometimes it’s said said from the depths of your soul, like when my wife hands me some pastry she’s discovered. And sometimes it’s shouted in full technicolor wonder, as our son does when he encounters the wild, unregulated world of chip flavors in different countries. Shouting about ketchup chips as if he has uncovered buried treasure.
And each time, I’m reminded that this is one of the quietest ways we love each other. We say it like a command: LOOK! WATCH! CHECK THIS OUT! But it’s never really a command, is it? It’s an invitation… Share this moment with me. Let’s experience this together. Be in wonder with me.
This delighted me. I want it to delight you too.
Honestly, that’s why I started this newsletter in the first place. As a small, sturdy practice, The Enthusiast, is a personal reminder to pay attention to the things that make me feel alive. A focus on things that spark and surprise, enchant and confuse. Then I try to offer those things up, open-handed (and possibly loaded with grammatical errors) to friends like you who might need the reminder too.
More than 15,000 of you are now here.
This little gathering of Enthusiasts. Stubborn Optimists. Joy Rebels. Good people on the look out for good things. Folks who spotlight wonder and celebrate it like it’s a sport. A community who helps me remember that noticing is a form of hope.
Meanwhile, my work has accelerated over this year in ways I never saw coming. Because of that, we’ve been homeschooling and traveling together as a family. Learning together, improvising together, trying (and often failing) to find rhythms that work together.
In the last few weeks alone, speaking and workshops and creative projects have carried me from Canada to Colorado to the Netherlands. From West Virginia, Oklahoma, Austin to Idaho and Vegas and then back across the ocean again.
Next month begins my largest tour yet: 13 cities across Asia, New Zealand, and Australia. (More on that soon).
And I will be very real with you: the pressures of parenting, working, and creating while traveling this much have been … stretching me. Expanding me. Humbling me. Joy? Yes. Jet lag? Also yes. Doubting myself constantly? yes yes yes.
Through all of this, the practice stays the same: Notice something beautiful, offer it to someone else, share the wonder so none of us has to go through this world alone.
Maybe this is what love is after all, the daily offering of shared astonishment. The stunned awe we experience together at the sheer ridiculous enormity of being here together. We hand each other tiny glowing shards of the world and say: here, look, taste, smell, be wowed with me.
With each new year I seem to keep learning just how much I do not know. But I do know this: the world is better tasted together, and the heart is better lived in when someone else keeps knocking on the door saying “Hey, come out! There’s something happening you must see and if you do not see it we will all be diminished.”
When I grow tired or the luggage is heavy or the crowds are thick or the ‘DAD I NEED YOU RIGHT NOW’ is too much, I want to remember what a gift it is to be a person who sees and is seen in return by the small tribe wandering with me.
So, I look.
Thank you for also being someone who notices. Someone who shares in the astonishment. Let us hand each other the world again and again until we are old and stooped and laughing and at a loss for words for the cuteness of that dog, the taste of that snack, or the wild wonder of just being here. Together.
Because this handing, sharing, here-look-taste-hear…
this is how we love.
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Thank you again for a beautiful offering. It makes me think of my two-year-old grandson who was walking with me in a beautiful fall day this last week with colored leaves all around and geese flying overhead. His interest was completely in a very tiny brown leaf that was about half an inch long. He was so enthralled with it and wanted me to look at it with him and sit down on the sidewalk and really look carefully at it. He carried it home in his little sweaty palm and it's still there sitting in his car seat because he wants to see it every time he rides with me in the car. I was looking up and looking at bigger things but he reminded me that the small things are very important.
After reading this, I took my dog on a little stroll and intentionally left my phone / podcast habit behind... saw a rainbow and a hawk and a cloud shaped like a giant bear paw! <3 Thanks for the reminder