Carry your own grain of sand
Three years ago, Dad said something to me on a phone call. He was trying to be wise. The line was something like:
It’s enough to carry your own grain of sand. Don’t worry about others.
I re-listened to that call last night. And all I can hear in it now is:
I can’t help you emotionally. I can only help myself.
That’s the whole sentence. Dressed up in a bit of folk wisdom so it sounds like advice instead of an admission. But it’s an admission. He’s telling me, plainly, that he doesn’t have anything for me. That all he’s capable of is carrying his own grain of sand — and the rest of us, his own kids included, are on our own.
It feels like a real fucking moment to me, hearing it back.
He’s always acted like that. I’ve known it in my body for as long as I can remember. But I’d never connected it to his actual words before, because his words usually do the opposite job — they vary in loving, or they try to give the appearance of love without ever quite being it. Soft tone, the right phrases, the performance of a dad who cares. And then nothing underneath when it counts.
But this one slipped through. He said the quiet bit out loud and didn’t even notice. Carry your own grain of sand. You’re on your own team, mate. Always have been.
And the wild thing is — I think he meant it as a gift. Like he was passing down something hard-won. Here son, here’s the wisdom: don’t expect anything from anyone, and you’ll be fine. As if that’s a philosophy and not just a description of his own limits, handed to me with a bow on it.
I don’t want to carry my own grain of sand. I want to help carry other people’s. I want my wife to know I’ve got hers. I want my kids to grow up assuming, without even having to check, that someone is carrying theirs — and that when they’re big enough, they’ll help carry someone else’s too. That’s the whole point. That’s what a family is supposed to be.
The grain-of-sand thing isn’t wisdom. It’s a man explaining why he was never going to show up for me, and hoping I’d mistake it for a lesson.
I’m not mistaking it anymore.
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” — Simone Weil
That’s what he couldn’t give. That’s what I want to.