Walden Henry Maxfield
We met our son, Walden Henry Maxfield, on March 2nd, 2024. One day, he'll wonder what his parents were thinking on that day and the days that followed. This note reflects my feelings.
Walden, I've always believed that cliches are usually used for a reason. Across cultures, generations, and people, there is a shared undercurrent called morality that allows specific ideas and moments to resonate regardless of time or place, which gives rise to some of the meaningful cliches. Embracing this reality, the day you were born was among the most special of my life.
Behind every human being there is a mother who, with unmeasured determination, willed them into this world through her budding love and maternal instinct. Your mother was no exception. Meeting you for the first time magnified the love that I have for her. By now you've learned of her immeasurable kindness, a trait you should cultivate more than any other.
Your first mortal experiences was laying on her chest, "skin-to-skin". I sat only feet away, head in hands. The significance of the moment gave me no choice but to stare, speechless. Any effort to speak would have quickly shown the limits of both my vocabulary and of language more generally. I felt closer to reality than nearly ever before.
There you were, my son.
You were and are a being with perfect potential. I remember feeling an intense responsibility to give you circumstances commensurate with that. Not materially as much as mentally. Not physically as much as spiritually. Not secularly as much as religiously.
This incandescent yearning for your well-being, so extreme that I wanted to assume responsibility for ensuring it, is love. As you read this, I hope my intentions and desires never become habituated and are manifested through our relationship. I hope you're as proud to call me Dad as I was then to call you my son.
Even after you were born, we hadn't decided on your name. Ultimately, your namesake was a book by Thoreau, which catalogs the author's 2-year stint living in complete solitude, which includes themes of self-reliance and spiritual searching, but most poignant to me is his unwillingness to conform to societal norms. There are two trends I hope you'll always avoid.
First, you were born in a time of epistemological chaos, where infinite information and addictive algorithms allow us to rationalize whatever we'd like to believe. Still, that doesn't make it true. I hope you have the curiosity to seek out all secular knowledge but also genuinely explore realities that, for the time, transcend our perfect understanding. Mobs can rule and crowds follow, but remember that it's "by the power of the Holy Ghost ye can know the truth of all things".
Secondly, in one of the most famous lines in the book, Thoreau penned, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," mainly because our efforts are misaligned with our ultimate desired end. Relatedly, Clayton Christensen once counseled, "Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success." I can promise you that metric won't reflect wealth or status. Don't be afraid to live a life radically different than what is seen as typical. Christ didn't, why should we?
Philosophers have contemplated how much of a child's character and eventual circumstance comes from nature vs nurture. As you can tell, my obsessive personality casts aside any thought of "nature" by my mistaken conviction that your future worldview would rest on my shoulders. You didn't arrive with a tabula rasa, nor were you a fully baked cake. Madelyn has taught me that. Our premortal existences gave way to mortal diversity, yet our malleability allowed for God's ultimate design: change. That is a truth I hope I've taught you convincingly.
Walden, I love you. I'm sure I'll have much more to say in the future. For now, I'll leave you with a quote by the excellent Marilynne Robinson, "I'm writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you've done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle."
