A WEEK AGO I was at the outdoor track in Nakano, my neighborhood in Tokyo. The early morning was humid and green. Runners were up and at ’em, as well as groups scattered around the park doing what looked like tai chi in perfect unison.

As I’m running, I see this man and a little girl, probably around six or seven years old, getting ready to run together. The dad looked fit, and the girl had long socks up to her knees, pink shoes, and long black hair chopped in front in a cool cut.

The man started stretching, moving his hips in an around-the-world motion; the girl — I imagine his daughter — did the same. It was possibly the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.

Then, they started trotting around the track.

The Simple Things Mean the Most

It was Sunday morning at around 6 a.m. That means the man — I gotta think — wasn’t out partying the night before. He wasn’t perfect; no human being is. But he was there.

As a kid, an experience like that weaves into the fabric of your childhood, creating memories that last a lifetime. It’s simple — Sunday morning at the park.

A simple thing they share.

The simple things mean the most.

There’s nothing wrong with quality time between parents and kids spent at an amusement park, or on a trip, or any other more significant event. Of course, these create valuable memories, too.

But there’s something deeper in what I saw and what I know from my own childhood: It’s not the quality time that means the most between parents and kids, not the words I love you or the more extravagant displays of affection.

It’s love conveyed implicitly — a consistent, ambient togetherness — simply being there together to experience the more mundane nature of life.

Perhaps this father and daughter run at the same time every week. He’s not focusing solely on the girl. Rather, he’s showing her through his actions who he is, and that she is an important part of his world.

He’s a man who gets up early on a Sunday and runs. And she could be a girl who does the same.

A six-year-old girl is pretty damn smart.

The way she gazed at him as she spun her hips around-the-world told me that this meant something to her — something she can’t yet fully understand — a feeling that will forever remain within her heart.

Her dad was there.

There’s a lot out there about the challenges that the next generations face. The more connected the world becomes through social media and technology, the more alone — separate — it seems we feel.

This is a generalization, but it’s a strange and uniquely challenging time we live in. This moment gave me hope.

Connection with others derives from how in touch we feel with ourselves; that tree grows from the roots of love instilled in us by our parents, whether explicitly or implicitly.

No childhood is perfect. It doesn’t have to be. Kids don’t need the devoted attention of their parents all the time.

What matters most is growing up with a feeling of safety and imperfect love; if that’s not something we had, it’s something we can create.

We’re not lost. A brighter future starts right here with us. It can be simple. Be there as much as you can for the people you love.

Unpacking Primal Wounds

In the past couple of months, I’ve been thinking about my childhood more deeply than ever before.

I’ve realized that the chronic pain that I’ve dealt with for the past six years derives from emotional wounds, not physical ones. This back pain — what has controlled my adult life — is a small, yet vital component of a much bigger story.

But now, I’m finally coming to understand how that story begins.

My parents divorced at a young age, and throughout my childhood we dealt with the vicissitudes of making it work: a new stepmom from whom many of my wonderful childhood memories come from; new schools, cities and houses; relationships and friends; parents whom by some miracle tried their best, and succeeded, in getting along through it all.

I have incredible memories from childhood, but painful ones, too. My family was figuring it out on the fly. We still are. I wouldn’t trade my childhood for anything, but it wasn’t easy.

In therapy, I recently came to understand that I’ve never truly accepted that it wasn’t easy. It’s taken twenty-eight years for me to look at the situation objectively and say, you were just doing your best, Vinny. You were a kid.

My parents, stepparents, and siblings were just doing their best, too. Writer and educator Alain de Botton writes in one of my favorite books, The School of Life:

“Even if we were sensationally cared for and lovingly handled, even if parental figures approached their tasks with the highest care and commitment, we can be counted upon not to have passed through our young years without sustaining some form of deep psychological injury — what we can term a set of ‘primal wounds’… Everyone around us may have been trying to do their best, and yet we end up now, as adults, nursing certain major hurts which ensure that we are so much less than we might be.”

If it weren’t for this back pain, I really don’t know if I’d ever have started unpacking my life like this.

This pain has brought me to my lowest lows, and often throughout my twenties, I’ve felt robbed of my youth. But now I see that there’s always been a much greater plan in store.

This pain has been an absolute gift.

It Ain’t Supposed To Be Easy

Whatever you’re feeling is for a reason. Be it physical pain, physiological disharmony, or otherwise.

We are incredibly intuitive and brilliant creatures. Instead of numbing what we feel, it takes courage and a willingness to want to know what our bodies, our hearts, and our souls are saying.

Alain de Botton says in a presentation about his upcoming book, A Therapeutic Journey:

“What are certain kinds of bodily symptoms other than messages from the mind that haven’t found a verbal conscious mechanism of expression? When you’re doubled up with back pain, what’s your back trying to tell you? What are your shoulders trying to tell you? What is your stomach trying to tell you? Our organs are very often the emissaries of messages we haven’t found a conscious way of addressing. So the body starts to be an organ through which we are having to speak to ourselves in a kind of code. It’s very painful, doctors can’t work it out. Because for a doctor, what is lower back pain other than a physiological event, when of course, it is a psychological event that hasn’t had a chance to understand itself.”

Why did it take me six painful years to understand this? I was blind to the information; it was out there, but I couldn’t see it. The pain being emotional just didn’t feel like an option.

I don’t blame myself. I truly think I wasn’t ready for this odyssey that I embarked on two months ago.

I wasn’t ready to change fundamentally.

There were experiences that needed to be had in the past six years, lessons to be learned about pain and about myself. It’s sort of strange to accept, but maybe I needed to be on the other side of the world from my family — as I’m living in Tokyo now — to sift through my upbringing like this with a therapist (maybe I didn’t need to be literally across the world, but removed in a way).

It’s all coming full circle. I’m out here for a reason. This journey is truly beyond me, as it’s all happened exactly as it’s meant to.

That’s often hard to see when we’re in the throes of a difficult situation, but have faith; we are resilient creatures who can find the light in any darkness, perhaps especially, a tough childhood.

“Importantly, in an emotionally healthy childhood plenty goes wrong,” writes de Botton in The School of Life.

“No one has staked their reputation on rendering the whole story perfect. The carer does not see it as their role to remove every frustration. They intuit that a lot of good comes from having the right, manageable kind of friction, through which the child develops their own resources and individuality. In contact with bearable disappointment, the child is prompted to create their own internal world, in which they can dream, hatch fresh plans and build their own resources.”

Despite Our Difficulties, My Parents Were There

We’ve all been through shit; parents are people, too. People are deeply flawed. We break, we crash, we burn, we rebuild, we try again, and again, and again, because it’s worth it, it’s messy, and that’s what makes the adventure beautiful.

Life provides a never ending reason to get up and try again.

And maybe that reason is kids.

Kids don’t know what they need.

What I thought I wanted as a kid was probably complete freedom: no school, endless bowls of ice cream, and video games all hours of the day.

But if that was our childhood, we’d pay the price as an adult, not having learned the lessons which set us up to be decent human beings. Some lessons we need our parents to teach us, and some we need to learn on our own.

As de Botton says, kids need some friction and freedom to develop an identity. A helicopter parent who’s with the kid all hours of the day, dictating every aspect of their life, presents its own set of problems.

My parents let me be, more or less. My best childhood memories are of my friends and I exploring, getting into mischief, creating, imagining, and hanging out.

But many other nostalgic emotions involve my parents in the picture of my memory. Yet, the picture is sort of blurry.

My parents are just there, in the periphery. It’s my mom’s voice coming from her bedroom or the car; my stepmom’s voice calling that dinner’s ready from the kitchen; the sound of football playing on Sunday night in my dad’s office.

Despite our difficulties, like the father on the track, my parents were there. I’d come into my dad’s office, likely procrastinating from doing my homework, and I’d sit down and we’d watch the game together, not having to say much.

The memory’s not specific, as I don’t really remember one night of watching football with my dad. It’s a feeling. The smell of his cologne intermingled with sports gear; the sound of the announcers on T.V.; my dad’s sleepy smile, watching the game from behind his desk.

Presence Means More Than Quality Time

My parents — all three of them — were there, as much as they could be while navigating their own journeys. It wasn’t always about me. I had to fend for myself a lot, and I’m glad I did. But at the end of the day, I felt safe.

I was inspired by this idea by Matthew McConaughey on Ryan Holiday’s podcast.

McConaughey and Holiday are two human beings whom I look up to immensely, not necessarily because of what they’ve accomplished, but because of who they are as people. Holiday is a prolific writer whose work on Stoicism has shaped my life.

And, well, McConaughey is one hell of an actor. Yet, it was his books Greenlights which made me such a big fan. Since reading that book, I’ve listened to him on countless podcasts. He’s become one of my greatest inspirations as an authentic, good, and fun-loving human being.

I feel like I can sit down for a coffee with either of these guys and hash it up for hours. I don’t see them as stars, but as regular dudes with endless life wisdom.

On the podcast, McConaughey and Holiday discuss how, as parents, it’s assumed that two hours of devoted attention will fit the bill of quality time. A parent might expect that’s what the kid wants. But that’s a lot of pressure for both parties.

Kids want to be on their iPad, their phone, or with their friends. I was obsessed with video games as a kid and I turned out alright, so who am I to judge?

But even if I was gaming with my friends, I could hear my mom, stepmom, or dad’s voice in the other room on the phone, making dinner, doing whatever they were doing.

That brought me comfort. Kids feel that presence. Maybe the parent is working in the evening, but they’re home.

As a kid, I could barge into my parent’s room and it would smell like my parents; it felt like life; like protection. That’s all that really matters.

Perfection Isn’t the Goal

No season of life is perfect, not the one of adventure I crave now, not falling in love and starting a family, not middle age or old age. Each is beautiful; each is distinct; each is rife with problems and battles and victories and wonder.

I don’t think you ever get to that point when it’s like okay, things are perfect, I’m ready to have kids, or, I’m ready for my kids to grow up, or, I’m ready to say goodbye to this season of life.

It just happens.

Life happens.

Parents continue learning just as much as kids. That was my childhood — the simultaneous discovery of just who the hell we are. That’s what’s happening now, and it’s honestly hard to wrap my head around sometimes.

My parents aren’t perfect; I’m not perfect; life definitely isn’t perfect. What we be the fun in that?

“In an emotionally healthy childhood,” writes de Botton, “the child can see that the good carer isn’t either entirely good or wholly bad and so isn’t worthy of either idealization or denigration. The child accepts the faults and virtues of the carer with melancholy maturity and gratitude — and in doing so, by extension, becomes ready to accept that everyone they like will be a mixture of the positive and the negative. They won’t as adults fall deeply in love and then grow furious at the first moment of let down. They will have a realistic sense of what can be expected of life alongside another flawed, good enough human.”

I’m speaking as somebody without kids, although I’m excited to have my own one day. I’m still the kid in this equation.

I’m not saying that as a parent, you should work from home and always be around your kid. Far from it. Kids need space and trust to figure shit out on their own. Kids need freedom.

But I think it’s important to be around when it counts. Go through life together.

Cherish that ambient time on Saturday morning being in the same room, not talking, but just hanging out as the coffee boils on the stove, or you’re checking your emails, or your kid is doing their homework at the table.

It’s not so much the events which convey love, but presence, even from another room, a feeling of safety that tells a kid, my dad, my mom, is right there if I need them.

Even from the other side of the world, that feeling’s never left me.