All Joy and No Fun

And you realize that all the love you showed along the way, all the lectures you gave about compassion and grace and respect—it has somehow all managed to stick

Think of Nancy Darling staring at her son playing the violin, or Gayle, from the previous chapter, marveling at her daughter actually knowing who Erik Erikson was. “That’s the kind of thing you live for,” she’d said. “You want them to be better than you.”

McAdams says he frequently hears from fathers, “If it hadn’t been for my child, I’d still be unfocused and running around.”

Especially things like reading books to them,” he said, “and seeing them pay attention, getting interested in things.”

Marveling this time. “So it just seems to me,” says Paul, “that when I’m in the moment, it can be chaotic. But if I can be shaken out of that moment, even if it’s just for like a split second, it’s like, you know what? This is a cool thing.”

Why do we put so much weight on memory relative to the weight we put on experiences?” he asked the audience. “This is a bit hard to justify, I think.”

we enshrine things in memory very differently from how we experience them in real time. The

The group debates this for a while.

“But here’s the thing,” says Paul. “I would bet that if someone did a study and asked, ‘Okay, your kid’s three, rank these aspects of your life in terms of enjoyment,’ and then, five years later, asked, ‘Tell me what your life was like when your kid was three,’ you’d have totally different responses.”

And it could be raising a child—my “best piece of poetrie,” as Ben Jonson said in his elegy for his seven-year-old son

Therapists handling despairing patients, he therefore counsels, should “not be afraid to create a sound amount of tension through a reorientation toward the meaning of one’s life.”