Last week, while we were out for a walk, my dad asked my favorite question—the one he used to always ask.
“What’s on your mind?” He said.
“Which part?” I asked.
“The heavy part,” he said.
When I was a teenager and trying to navigate young love and define my life’s purpose and was searching for meaning and acceptance and belonging, we would take walks together up our favorite hill.
It would usually happen that finally, by the time we got to the top of the hill, I’d be able say out loud the thing he knew was hiding under all of the other, smaller things.
This time, I didn’t have anything.
“Oh, come on!” He teased me.
For a moment, I savored the feeling of having frozen legs and chilled cheeks. Being cold and comfortable and smiling was one of the things that I was wishing for, not too long ago.
“I was actually smiling, right before you asked me that,” I poked back.
“Well,” he resigned, “if you don’t have anything, that’s fine. But if you do, that’s okay, too.”
My dad has always been my quietest confidante, so I braced myself to tell him the truth. The sky before us and all around us was expansive and ever-changing. We were walking a road in a straight line to nowhere, so I figured I had time.
“I was just thinking how nice it was to just have a thought that made me smile. It seems like lately, so much of my brain has been filled up with trying to calculate my way through the heavy stuff, I haven’t really felt like I have any energy left over to be happy about things. So, it was pretty nice, it felt pretty good to just be able to smile at the thought of something.”
“And what was the thought that made you smile?” He asked.
“I can’t tell you that!” I teased. Quickly, I thought better of keeping secrets from my dad. “But it starts with N and ends with -orway!”
“Noooorrr-way! Norway? No, way! You know, your great-grandparents were Norwegian.”
As our conversation went on, we talked about Swedish versus Norwegian (as my father is the resident expert in the Swedish language and in his prime has successfully facilitated conversations in elementary Swedish with native speakers of Norwegian). We stopped and turned to marvel at the sky, we looked for badgers, and jabbered away about faith and politics and influence, shouting to rival the howling wind as we walked the long straight road, back home.
By the time we arrived home, it was cold and dark, and we decided that if I really want to go viral, I need to change the name of my blog to Socially Martyred so I can brag online about being kicked out of Facebook groups for laugh-reacting at the wrong time.
I’m not changing the name of the blog, but I will tell you that since that conversation, I’ve been feeling much lighter. There’s something about being able to speak, to understand and to be understood, and to laugh without penalty, that makes me feel so sparkly—like I could almost forget how cold and dark and flat and void, the night is.