Dealing with Discontentment

Plus camping with kids, encouragement, my novella, and good tunes.

One of the more popular stories on this Substack is called “An Afternoon in the Park,” which I published in October 2022 before revising and recording it in audio form for the four-story album I released in January.

That story reflects on the lessons I’ve been slowly learning as a father of young children. Besides ignoring the clock constantly ticking in my head pointing me toward the next task or obligation, these lessons have included being curious again about ordinary things, being imaginative, and maximizing time outside away from screens and other distractions of modern, sedentary life.

Now that spring is here, with summer just around the corner, I’m eager to watch my kids play at the park again, riding their bikes, searching for crawdads in creeks, and pretending to be explorers, like they were this past Saturday when I took the two older ones, Alba and Enzo, camping for the first time.

My friend Bob, not the old man you picture when you hear the name Bob but a 30-something-year-old Marine and lawyer (not the personal injury kind, thank God), booked a campsite at Cade’s Cove for Saturday night. He has two daughters who, with Alba, share the unusual bond of being the only children bitten by Enzo, the sleepless terrorizer. I was less nervous of that recurring than of my children freaking out in the woods (possibly fearing axe murderers, as I do), so I bought them boxes of chocolate-covered raisins, mini brownies, fruity trail mix, apple juices topped with their favorite PAW Patrol characters, and a “special camping pillow” (a plush one with a Minnie Mouse design for Alba, and the same kind but with a Spider-Man design for Enzo).

I bribed them in vain because my fears went unrealized. They loved walking in the woods collecting sticks and communicating via pink Walkie Talkies, eating hot dogs and S'mores cooked on whittled-down branches suspended over an open fire, and even sleeping in tents as it rained, with temps hovering just above 40 degrees, through the night. Enzo slept better than he does at home, 11 hours uninterrupted, justifying my belief that he should sleep permanently in a custom-built toddler home in the backyard. This morning, he screamed out at 4:31 a.m., a minute after my alarm went off.

In the campsite beside us at the cove was a couple staying in a luxury camper—a Storyteller Overland van, if any of you know the brand. They were from Colorado and had a 1-year-old son and a dog the kids wanted to pet, so we moseyed over and got to gabbing. They told us they work remote jobs—the dad, a high-paying one for Wells Fargo—that free them up to spend consecutive months on the road. Their current trip saw them travel down to Texas and across the Southeast, where they’ll stop in Charlotte before moving south to Miami, hopping on a cruise ship, and then doing the second leg of their camper tour in reverse.

Many of you know I have trouble with envy, which I quickly started to feel for the freedom and fearlessness of our new friends. For the past month, I’ve also had escapism on the brain, as evidenced by my conversation with Clay, the journalist turned Alaskan fisherman, for Monday’s column.

Haley and I have had hard conversations about how stuck I feel this week. I’ve described it to her as being down a road I don’t belong on but can’t get off without causing significant damage, primarily to our savings accounts. After my discontentment peaked Tuesday night, I came down and figured I should try to be, if not reasonable, at least a Christian about this. I turned to the Book of Ecclesiastes, where the author laments about the vanity and purposelessness of our labor. “I took a good look at everything I’d done, looked at all the sweat and hard work,” he writes. “But when I looked, I saw nothing but smoke. Smoke and spitting into the wind. There was nothing to any of it. Nothing.” I got out my notebook and wrote out my 10 be-gratefultudes—the list I make every other day of things I’m grateful for.

I felt better by Wednesday when a bank in Texas called to tell me I’d taken out a personal loan I needed to pay back. Someone had stolen my Social Security number and applied remotely using a fake license. I went through the bureaucracy of freezing my credit, setting up fraud alerts, and filing a report with the government. I was glad to have the flexibility at work to deal with it and knowledge of how to do so on the internet instead of having to spend hours on hold. On Thursday, I punctured the rear driver-side tire of the minivan with a drywall nail. Again, I was grateful that there was enough air left to get it to Halls Service Center, where they patched it up as I answered emails on my laptop using their WiFi.

I’m still sad that I haven’t seen the Andes Mountains or Angkor Wat and that my choice of career requires me to stare through a laptop screen for hours instead of being with people or in beautiful places. But just like when I got stuck in a crappy Philly hotel thanks to the incompetence of American Airlines, I am reminding myself of how good I still have it. And even if the road doesn’t feel like the right one, based on all the roads I imagined taking years ago when it was easier to dream, who knows what exits are up next? I still might get to San Martín de los Andes someday to chase monstrous fish in the remote rivers of my parents’ homeland.