My youngest son turned three last week. All clichés apply. It really does go too fast. It really is incredible to see a personality bloom inside of a brand new person. You really do have to take a second and look around from to time or you just might miss it.

When I thought about what it was going to be like to be a parent, I also used to think about endings. I put myself in the role of mentor and molder, helping to shape my children into the men they would become. I thought about how they would end up when they started going to school, or their first big failure, or after they drove their first car, or when they were all grown up.

Like a lot of people, I think in terms of scenarios a lot. I'm usually trying to map out the fifty different ways that my day, or my project, or my plan for myself is going to go so that I can be prepared for all of them. So it's not that surprising that this also applied to how I thought about my future children.

That’s not how it works, of course. Children come to you fully baked, already people. You can, at best, help them realize who they are. But even that is mostly up to them.

As I’m watching my youngest of two start to become who he really is, it’s changing the way I think. I’m trying to let go of the scenarios, let go of endings. I’m thinking a lot more about beginnings.

It's the beginnings you miss if you rush right to the end. Uncertainty lies at the beginning, but also promise and optimism. I remember a lot of beginnings for both of my children—their experience first seeing a new city, the beginnings of their friendships with other kids and with one another. It is far more interesting to watch son realize something for the first time then it is to see him arrive at some predetermined destination.

What he finds funny, for instance. I can watch as he begins to turn over phrases and try out his comedic timing. He watches carefully how the world responds, and what the people around him say, and he tries to figure out how he can do it better.

"Grandpa always says funky like a monkey," he says, chuckling too himself. Then he goes through the list, "Daddy doesn't say that. Mommy doesn't say that. My brother doesn't say that." He sits to think about that, and wonder, why is it always Grandpa? And why is it always funny?

A few days later we're looking at something new at the store. He looks over at me with a knowing smile, barely able to contain himself. "That's funky like a monkey," he says, bursting into laughter. And I laugh too, because it is genuinely funny, and I'm witnessing the beginning of his sense of humor.

Each time I see a beginning in my kids, I try to pay attention. And every time it's worth it. But it's not just my children's lives. Beginnings are so interesting. They are so wonderfully worth our time. As I look around and move through the present, I have been trying to live in the beginnings more. I'm always glad when I do.

Otto Rank on leaning into our inability to rationalize the world around us:

Because of the inherent nature of the human being, man has always lived beyond psychology, in other words, irrationally. If we can grasp this paradoxical fact and accept it as the basis of our own living, then we shall be able to discover new values in place of the old ones which seem to be crumbling before our very eyes — vital human values, not mere psychological interpretations predetermined by our preferred ideologies. These new values which have to be discovered and rediscovered every so often are in reality old values, the natural human values which in the course of time are lost in rationalizations of one kind or another.