Ten Things I Learned From My Father

Life lessons from Al(fred) on my 100th post

Ray, Dad and Me (at the UCONN Women’s NCAA Basketball Championship, 2015)

Happy Father’s Day and welcome to new subscribers,

I’m feeling a lot of juice around this newsletter, and have been taking some time to organize my posts — past and upcoming — in preparation to launch as a more comprehensive platform in a few weeks.

Feeling a milestone approaching, I just checked my post stats and, lo and behold, this is my 100th post. (Funny how that happens.) I started this newsletter in 2020, but dropped it for most of 2021 and 2022 while I ran my last startup, a mindfulness platform for the workplace that ran out of gas. So, most of those 99 posts have come in the last two years.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been looking over my past posts, published and drafts, to help me better elaborate my main content pillars. It’s been a challenging project since I cover a lot of ground, talking about integrating traditional Zen practices and principles into modern life, work and society.

“Integrating” isn’t really the right word, since these accelerating modern times require the practices to be adapted and the principles to be re-contextualized. In talking with fellow dharma teachers of my generation, it is clear that many of the forms we were trained in (which were themselves American adaptations of generally Eastern forms) will not persist without further adaptation.

So it’s more like navigating a craft at the merging point of three evolving streams: American society (a few decades old in their relevant forms), Western culture (a few centuries old) and dharma practice (several millennia old).

I’m finding it really interesting and exciting to be alive during this time, to contribute my own voice as part of these organic unfoldings.

There is a lot of misunderstanding around Zen. People either oversimplify it, thinking it is summed up by maxims like “live in the moment,” or they make it overcomplicated and even esoteric, as if Zen gives you special powers.

While both are those things are at some level true, the heart of Zen is unlocked when we learn how paying close and caring attention to things changes those things. They change for the better, by becoming more and more what they are, what they “want” to be, in accord with their true nature. This applies to a flower, a person, a cause, a group.

Most of all, it applies to ourselves.

My motivation in this newsletter has been to explore the various ways we can apply this quality attention to ourselves and transform our lives, especially our work lives.

And with conditions in society changing so rapidly, there are a lot of things that are indisputably happening, that we need to pay quality attention to. These include AI, the breakdown of institutions, the psychedelic revolution, the polycrisis, and the paradigm shift we are in the midst of. It is all relevant, and all fuel for positive transformation. At least, I believe so.

To help me organize my content, I’ve been playing around with several AI platforms (primarily Claude and NotebookLM), and the results have been really interesting. So far, the AI results have been more of a straw man, which I have torn apart and put back together in my own way.

(By the way, not one word of this newsletter has ever been written by AI and I will notify you if that changes. I will likely use something like my friend Nick Whitaker’s AI Content Labels.)

I’ll be writing more on Zen & AI in the coming weeks. I find myself very much in the middle ground between the techno-pessimists and the techno-optimists, with a guiding attitude of “realism” that asks how to make the best of what is happening.

It’s all skillful means, baby.

Today I want to share some things I’ve gleaned from my father over the years. He’ll be 85 this year and still going strong. His name is Alfred, which I had to write out in the subtitle, so you wouldn’t mistake Al for AI. :)

(You lit majors may recognize “Alfred Agostinelli” as the name of Marcel Proust’s driver, crush, and model for the character of Albertine in Remembrance of Things Past. It’s not a common name, so there may be some long ago blood connection, with Proust’s friend part of a French diaspora off the main Agostinelli line rooted in the Italian province of Marche, where my grandfather Guido’s family came from. )

Rambling on here… I don’t believe an AI will ever be able to compose a narrative that has the same effect as Proust. (Or any of our greatest writers, for that matter.) RoTP not only describes the transformation of sensory experience by consciousness but enacts it in the reader. AI can mimic stuff like this — it can do the describing part — but it cannot credibly enact it, since it lacks both sense experience and consciousness.

More to come on this topic.

OK, here are ten things I learned from my Dad. There are many more, but these are most alive for me this morning. Enjoy!

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Ten Things I Learned From My Father

1. Always be curious.

My Dad has always been and still is interested in … everything. People, food, history, science, literature, technology, religion, photography, music, meditation, sports, cars, craft …. When we moved across town in 1970, he had enough space to build a “man cave” in the basement, decades before that was even a term. He soundproofed the ceiling so he could blast his music, and put in a fan so he could smoke the occasional joint (which I and my siblings never knew until many years later!) It had big bean bag chairs for us kids to crash on, listen to music and play games. The basement was a place of wonders, full of finished and half-completed projects, vivid art on the walls, a working darkroom, lots of small electronics in various stages of soldering, games, and books ranging from T.S. Eliot to cosmology to the Bhagavad Gita.

2. You can fix most things.

My Dad was the neighborhood JOAT (Jack of all trades.) People brought him appliances, tools, and electronics that were busted or glitchy. He could help meaningfully with a car or lawnmower. He fixed up old jukeboxes, a classic Coke machine from the 50’s, a pinball machine, and countless smaller electronics devices. And when he couldn’t fix it…..

3. You can make things out of other things.

One day I was around 12 I walked in to the kitchen to find my father crouched in front of the oven peering in. My Mom did most of the cooking in those days, so I wondered what he was doing. He turned his head to me with a huge smile on his face and invited me to take a look: he had put one of his LPs on the rack and was melting it to produce a kind of weird sculpture. He made beautiful mobiles out of old school diodes and capacitors, and a passatelli press out of drilled sheet metal and a piece of 2X4. One summer, Ray and I spent hours competing with each other on the makeshift high jump he created by balancing the ends of a long metal bar across two microphone stands graduated with ruler lines to tell how high the bar was from the ground. We leaped over — backward, as this was shortly after the popularization of the Fosbury flop — and landed on an old mattress. Mom had to cover her eyes!

4. Without music, life would be a mistake.

OK, Nietzche actually said that, but it might as well have been my Dad, who has been an audiophile his whole life. From his early interest in western classical music and opera — in his early twenties, he was onstage as a supernumerary in the Met’s production of Aida — he has followed a wide and peripatetic path through rock, world music, jazz, electronica, Indian ragas, Scandinavian heavy metal, modern pop R&B, and many genres that I neither comprehend nor can listen to. :) His twenties corresponded exactly with the decade of the 60s, so I don’t have to tell you that he was steeped in the early days of rock. He crossed paths with Bob Dylan coming out of the bathroom at a dive bar in NY in 1962. He is older than the Boomers, and by 1964 had three young kids, so I like to think he came by his musical affinities directly, as some essential essence of his life. He still surprises us with new discoveries.

5. Don’t force things.

My dad has always had great dexterity and hand-eye coordination. In addition to working with small scale electronics, he built extremely detailed models, old cars and ships. I have vivid memories of him working closely in car engines, with soldering irons, and all manner of devices, sensitively nudging parts into place. Lacking this skill, I would tend to force things into where I thought they needed to go, sometimes breaking them. (I still do this, as attested by my dysfunctional lawnmower sitting in my backyard.) When it comes to people, “not forcing things”, i.e. not trying to make them do what you want them to do or be the way you want them to be, is a lot harder. My Dad seems pretty surrendered to this uncomfortable truth.

6. Find the humor in everything.

There is ALWAYS humor to be found.

7. Be spontaneous.

One day I was around 10, we were coming back from a Sunday drive, with me, my brother and sister in the car. As we pulled into the driveway in Dad’s red Fiat, he suddenly turned the wheel and tore across the front lawn, then turned around the house. We bounced through the backyard, the kids screaming in joy, and passed the back window of our kitchen, where Mom was hosting the neighborhood ladies, who were probably smoking cigarettes and playing mah jong. Fifty years later, I still remember the rush, that life can be like that.

8. Don’t be too spontaneous.

My mom was pretty pissed about the car incident and, to tell the truth, my Dad could go overboard with his spontaneity. I think he is still working on this one.

9. Make your amends, with acceptance and, if possible, joy.

On the occasions when my Dad has made mistakes that have hurt others, I’ve seen him take responsibility with uncommon grace. The fact that he has always repaired relations (when in his power) speaks to his sincerity of heart. For those of us who share the often-competing inheritances of Italian passion and Catholic “judgment,” the koan of guilt and repentance is a big one. Dad has not shied away.

10. Always be friendly.

My Dad will strike up a conversation with anyone, at any time, as an equal. Not only old friends and relatives (which goes without saying) but anyone he crosses paths with in life: cashiers, tradespeople, barbers, parking lot attendants, the woman ahead of him in line at the deli counter at Stop&Shop, mechanics, teachers, musicians, old schoolmates of his kids, the guy at the gas station with a cool car, countless people across the world on Discogs interested in his old LPs. My mom shares this trait, which I am happy to say I’ve inherited too.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad!

• Paul