🔥 🔎 Where we find truth / ⏱️ Dr. Seuss on The Waiting Place (& Antisemitism) / 😌 Albert Camus on happiness / 👦🏼 👶🏻 Taking days off
#64: a weekly 4-item newsletter created to inspire dads to use the challenges of fatherhood as fuel for building an incredible life & an antifragile mind.
Welcome to the 64th edition of the antifragile 4 🔥.
This week we find inspiration from bedtime books, (reluctantly) from self-help & Albert Camus. Plus a surprising tangent on antisemitism.
We end with a reflection on a rough day with the boys.
This week’s was extra fun to write. I hope you enjoy!
With love,
Chris
—
Here’s this week’s antifragile 4 🔥:
a reminder 🔎 about where we find truth & wisdom
Dr. Seuss ⏱️ on The Waiting Place (& antisemitism)
Albert Camus 😌 on happiness
a note 👦🏼 👶🏻 on taking days off
1.) a reminder 🔎 about where we find truth & wisdom
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.
William James
Last week, my wife introduced me to an idea from a self-help book called The Big Leap.
And I’ll be honest…my initial reaction was to poo poo it.
With all the philosophy I’ve been reading of late, the self-help genre—historically my favorite genre—seemed a little, well, quaint.
Was I really going to take advice from a book with jumping goldfish on the cover over the brilliance of Heidegger, Sartre, Nietzsche, or Simone Weil?
Would I really soil my mind with such things?!
Fortunately that little superiority psychosis proved only temporary.
And reminded me of something very important: We’re all just experimenting with how to adjust our conscious experience of the world. And where inspiration for those experiments come from, does not matter.
Be it Sartre or Dr. Seuss or The Big Leap or some random line from The Big Bang Theory—all that matters is that we have our minds open to whatever comes our way.
Because turning up your nose at curiosity only guarantees a duller, dimmer, less colorful life.
And that concept from The Big Leap—the Upper-Limit Theory? I really like it! It’s provided a interesting new filter to catch some of my more unhelpful emotions.
Plus I love self-help. Who am I trying to kid? 🥰
—
And it’s funny, really
How truth wears so many disguises
Some philosophers whisper it,
While a children’s author rhymes it…
2.) Dr. Seuss ⏱️ on The Waiting Place (+ Antisemitism)
…headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.
The Waiting Place…
…for people just waiting.
Waiting for a train to go
or a bus to come, or a plane to go
or the mail to come, or the rain to go
or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow
or waiting around for a Yes or No
or waiting for their hair to grow.
Everyone is just waiting.Waiting for the fish to bite
or waiting for wind to fly a kite
or waiting around for Friday night
or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake
or a pot to boil, or a Better Break
or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants
or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.
Everyone is just waiting.Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Place You’ll Go
Life is about balance.
Work & Play.
Strain & Recovery.
Giving & Receiving.
But there’s one tension that rules the rest; that between Action & Patience.
To be confidently action-oriented—yet self-aware enough to know when to wait—is a rare skill.
It’s what lets you seize opportunity without forcing it.
But here’s what most people miss; Patience is not Waiting.
Waiting is rooted in fear. Patience is rooted in confidence.
Waiting is passive. Patience is active.
And Waiting costs you the chance to take Action.
Actions which will determine whether you look back and say; ’Man, I wish I did that!’ or ‘Man, I’m SO glad I did that!’
One leaves a pit in your stomach. The other a smile on your face.
We’re all in The Waiting Place somewhere in our lives.
At work. With our partners. Within ourselves.
But the door out is never locked. We only perceive it as so.
You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.You’re on your own. You know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.Dr. Seuss
These bedtime books can really hit hard 😮💨 Thank you to Chaz for gifting this one!
—
A Brief Tangent on Dr. Seuss’ History
On three separate occasions, when I brought up Dr. Seuss to friends and family, I got a response of something like, “Yeah, he’s great, but what about his anti-Semitic or Nazi history?”
I faintly remember having heard similar, so I got curious.
Turns out, in relation to the Nazis and anti-Semitism, Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) was vehemently against fascism and anti-Semitism. He created over 400 cartoons in the early years of WWII, many of which blasted Hitler and the Nazis.
What he did do was create some very racist cartoons the first part of his career (1920s-1940s). Overtly racist caricatures accepted by the mainstream of the time. Awful stuff.
But it appears, as his biographer Brian Jay Jones says, that he evolved later in his career:
“As I say in the book, it’s not a great look for him. But he evolves.” By the end of the 1950s, Geisel had written Horton Hears a Who!, which is dedicated to a Japanese friend and is seen by scholars now as an apology for the earlier cartoons. He’d written Yertle the Turtle, an anti-fascist send-up of Hitler, and he’d penned a magazine story that would become the anti-discrimination book The Sneetches. “I don’t think you write a book like The Sneetches if you haven’t evolved,” Jones said.
He was a private guy and never addressed the issue directly, but here’s what I see:
Though not without inconsistencies, his later work shows a clear effort to leave those depictions behind.
Some of the only changes he ever made to his books were to quietly remove racist wording and illustrations—like editing the word “Chinaman” to “a Chinese man,” and softening stereotypical features in Mulberry Street.
In time, his books became vehicles for empathy, fairness, and inclusion—Horton Hears a Who! (“A person’s a person, no matter how small”), Yertle the Turtle (against facism), The Sneetches (against discrimination)—each a rejection of the kind of superiority and dehumanization he once drew.
Was it enough? Make your own decision.
But I personally wouldn’t trade the lessons Dr. Seuss’ books offer my boys for anything. And who knows—once they’re a bit older maybe this backstory provides a bonus lesson in personal evolution, hard conversations…and getting curious about rumors.
3.) Albert Camus 😌 on happiness
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935–1942
4.) a note 👦🏼 👶🏻 on taking days off
I was having a rough day with my boys.
The kind of day when you get a sort of foam-at-the-mouth desperate aching for the moment you close their bedroom door for the night and collapse onto the hallway floor, blessedly alone and for a brief moment—unneeded by anyone.
But then I had a thought. And wrote this to myself:
The boys will only be this young and innocent once. Try not to take days off.
What do we hear from every single older parent?
It goes fast!
Don’t blink, you’ll miss it!
I wish I could go back to those days!
I do my best to listen. Because I know I won’t be any different. It’ll feel like this time flew by.
But if I know I did my best to soak up each moment—even on the rough days—maybe my version will be: It goes fast, but I was there for every minute of it.
Even on the rough days.
Especially on the rough days.
Two last things for you this week:
Where are you in The Waiting Place? How can you get out?
Be fire and wish for the wind 🔥
With love,
Chris
—
Did this edition resonate with you? Sharing is caring. Send to a fellow antifragile dad.
Never disappoints. Another outstanding edition.