Hold a baby.
***
My brother is 14 years younger than me.
The first time I babysat him alone, when he was just a few years old, he cried for hours.
There was nothing I could do to console him, so I just held him against my chest.
He was so close, I could feel him cry, could feel his body writhe up and down against my chest as he sobbed, and if I held him away from my body for a little, I could see the ugly contortions of his face.
When I say to “hold a baby,” I don’t mean take your favorite toddler niece into your arms, sigh at how cute she is, then hand her off to the nearest adult.
The thing about actions – there can be so much more to them, below the surface.
When Daniel Day-Lewis wields a blade in Gangs of New York, he’s not acting. It’s real.
He took lessons as an apprentice butcher. He dressed as a butcher would, and refused to wear warmer clothing or take medicine after being diagnosed with pneumonia during filming. I imagine he let himself and pushed himself to become a butcher for months and months before they started filming. By the time we get to see him hold a knife on screen, he’s holding it not as an actor, but as Bill the Butcher in the 1800s. He’s considered every possible circumstance in order to understand why he’s holding that knife.
When I say to “hold a baby,” I’m asking you to do the same.
Look at the baby, not as if it were a cute “thing,” but as if he or she were a human. As if he or she could one day be the future President of the United States of America.
In my mind, when I see young children, when I hold a baby – that’s the kind of thought that runs through my mind.
There is no single human being, dead or alive, that inspires me more than my six-year-old brother.
Because he represents the future, and to me that is greater than anything that exists now, or that ever existed before.
***
I am a very ambitious person. To the point of lunacy, even.
Sometimes, when I look at my current situation – I have no money, no credentials, no real set path to follow that will lead me to success – I briefly remember that all my visions for my future are in my head, and my head only.
All I have are my hopes and my ideas. And a few cloudy notions of how I can put them into action.
And yet I intend to do extraordinary things with my life. Revolutionary things.
There's a good chance I "fail." But even if all of my deepest hopes and desires, and a lifetime of sweat and guts and pure unrelenting work – even if all that comes to bear fruit, they will never compare with the hopes, and promise, and possibility of future generations.
I hope with all my heart that my brother surpasses me in every possible way.
And that future generations surpass him.
There’s an eternal comfort I take in knowing how truly small I am in the scheme of things. In knowing that one day not too far from now I’ll clear out to make way for the new – that I’ll pass on the torch.
“I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no "brief candle" for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
-George Bernard Shaw
We hold the splendid torch for only a moment, and no matter what we do with it – whether we sweat or bleed or even die for it, or whether we sit back, relax, and take it for granted – we still hand it off in the end.
All this reminds me that any failure is temporary, as is any success. In the end, the world moves on.
So don’t impart any sort of cosmic significance to your situation, no matter how dire it is (or how fabulous).
Remember that no matter how much pain you face, you can and must endure, and having endured, you will one day pass the torch on to the young.
***
When my brother finally ceased crying that night – ceased from pure exhaustion – I experienced a momentous calm in the room.
I was changed.
Changed in the subtlest of ways, so subtle that there was no way I ever could have articulated it back then, years ago.
But this powerful memory stuck with me until this day, and it helped me to appreciate the gravity and the beauty and the sacred promise of the young, and to put things into perspective in light of that appreciation.
Hold a baby, and approach the task as if every moment in history has culminated to lead up to the action you are about to take.
Let it change you.
-David
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