Things to think about #16 - Fatherhood, The Spectator, The Untethered Soul and the Dragonlance novels

My wife gave birth to our daughter, Veera, at the start of December, and it’s been a wild ride so far. Your job in the first few weeks and months, I now realise, is basically to keep your baby alive, which involves submitting yourself, and (in)famously your sleep patterns, to the needs of a lizard brain in a human suit that it has no control over. She feeds, sleeps, pees and poos, and screams in between all of these. More recently, she’s been doing mostly screaming.

Trying to look beyond this very intense period—and the miracle that my daughter is—can be difficult. People with children will tell budding parents that their life is about to permanently change, which is true, but in what way? It depends, I guess. Parenthood—in this case, fatherhood—is a strange initial feeling for me, best described as low-key dread and fear that something will go wrong and I won’t be able to help my daughter, mixed with a profound sense of responsibility. Cometh the hour, cometh the new father, I hope.

The Spectator, and reading

I recently signed up for a trial digital subscription to The Spectator. True to past form, I would normally read a few articles, let the subscription auto-renew, and then spend the next year barely touching it. I’m happy to report that this time might be different.

I like the cadence of The Spectator’s publication schedule, and while the journalism is, at times, relatively low-calorie, it’s exactly the kind of gateway drug I need to get back into reading regularly again—, having, like so many others, forgotten how to in a world of attention-span-reducing social media and endless content surfing. Granted, reading The Spectator is also, at least for me, an exercise in confirmation bias, though that isn’t saying much given the current fish-in-a-barrel setup offered by the hapless Labour government. Maybe when I tire of The Spectator, I’ll upgrade to The Economist.

The Untethered Soul and self-help books

I ventured into the world of self-help books with my latest audiobook listen: Michael Singer’s The Untethered Soul. I’m in two minds about this genre, which often purports to offer a recipe for a radically improved—if not perfect—life, mainly because… well, because it’s usually hogwash. That said, Singer’s book has a welcome strand of humility running through it: while acting on the tenets of The Untethered Soul will make your life better, it is also difficult to do. We are fallible, after all.

The book builds its argument around a deceptively simple distinction: the difference between the world that happens to you and the voice inside your head that never stops talking about it. The outer world is made up of events, people, sounds, and sensations; it simply unfolds. The inner world, by contrast, is a running commentary; judging, explaining, worrying, rehearsing, and reliving. Most of us live as if these two are the same thing, mistaking the narration for reality itself.

Singer’s key insight is that the inner voice is not who you are; you are the one who hears it. The moment you notice there is a voice commenting on your life, you have already stepped back from it. This shift, from being immersed in thought to observing thought, is the heart of the book. Instead of trying to silence the mind or replace negative thoughts with positive ones, Singer invites you to simply watch the voice as it speaks, without agreeing with it or pushing it away.

What follows from this practice is a growing sense of space. Emotions still arise, but they no longer consume you in the same way. Anger, anxiety, or sadness are experienced as temporary movements within awareness rather than defining truths about who you are or what must be done. By observing the inner dialogue, you begin to see how much suffering is created not by events themselves, but by the stories layered on top of them.

In daily life, this loosens the grip of habit. Old memories replay with less force, future worries lose their authority, and reactions become choices rather than reflexes. Life doesn’t become perfectly calm or painless, but it does become lighter. You engage with the world more directly, less filtered through fear and self-protection. The freedom Singer points to is not freedom from thought, but freedom from being ruled by it, a quiet but powerful shift that changes how everything else is experienced.

That’s all well and good as far as it goes, but it comes with challenges; the main one being that anyone who fully embraces Singer’s dictum runs the risk of becoming a selfish arsehole. After all, by ignoring the signals our emotions send us in response to the external environment, we risk removing ourselves from the feedback loop that keeps us in touch with the world and the people in it. I’m sure Singer would argue that I’ve missed some key underlying message here, but the balancing act between letting emotions drift through you—which can certainly be liberating in some cases—and recognising the signals those same emotions provide, and how they tether us to our social context, stayed with me as I listened to the book.

The Dragonlance universe

I said earlier that I was getting back into reading, implying that I’m starting with low-calorie content. And what better way to do that than by revisiting my teenage and young-adult obsession with AD&D (2nd edition, obviously) and the Dragonlance universe? The Dragonlance realm of Krynn is, by far, the most detailed and richly developed AD&D setting, thanks largely to the work of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman and their novels from the late 1980s through the 1990s and into the 2000s. The spine of the series is Chronicles and Legends, but the real beauty of the universe lies in the spin-offs—prequels and sequels that have kept it alive and added layers of depth to its characters.

I recently finished The Legend of Huma, the origin story of the Dragonlance, and I’m currently reading the final volume of Chronicles—Dragons of Spring Dawning—having listened to the previous two on Audible. It’s great fun to revisit these stories after having spent so much time with them, and in Krynn more generally, during my early youth. For anyone looking for fantasy novels, the Dragonlance books remain among the best.

I still think Netflix or Amazon could make a killing by throwing their weight behind a series adaptation of this universe, but the problem is probably that, to the uninitiated, it might look like a blend of The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, and there may not be much appetite for that right now. Still, the depth of the universe would lend itself to near-endless spin-offs and extensions if an original series were successful. If they need someone to mock-write the script, I’m up for the challenge.