Take Heart: What Gives You The Most Profound Joy May Not Even Exist Yet

I’ve always wanted to be a father, but growing up, and into adulthood, that desire was an abstraction. It’s not something that I thought about that often, and that impulse to procreate was leavened by having grown up in a group home where everyday I was reminded of all that can go wrong when people have children.

Yet fatherhood has given me more joy, meaning, purpose and true, soul-deep satisfaction than anything I’ve ever done. If you’d told me at 25 that being a dad at 40 would be so wondrously rewarding I would have been surprised but also encouraged and delighted.

I’m saying this because if you’re 25 years old, or 32, or 17, of 47 and your life is a goddamn mess and you can’t see past tomorrow or next week, take some solace in the idea that the thing that brings you the most joy, that allows you to be the best version of yourself, may not even be on your radar right now. You might not even know it exists. It might not even exist at this point.

Hell, if you’d told me 10 years ago one of my favorite things would be podcasting, my response would be “What the f**k is podcasting?”

And it doesn’t necessarily have to be parenting. It could be a new relationship or job or project or a medium or art-form that blows your mind and gives your life new meaning.

You don’t know what the future will hold, but sometimes what it holds is wonderful and unexpected and transcendent. For me, that’s being Dexy’s dad. I don’t know what it is for you, but I implore you to hold on so that you have an opportunity to discover where your happiness lies. The world is full of awful surprises, but there are some glorious, glorious, life-affirming and life-changing ones as well.

Nathan Rabin is a dad, columnist and the author of five books, most recently 7 Days In Ohio: Trump, the Gathering of the Juggalos and the Summer Everything Went Insane