Permission

We were at a dinner party last week in Lisbon, sitting around a long table with friends. The conversation had been flowing and at some point I started talking about a few of the projects I've been building lately and some of the questions I've been chasing in life.

Someone across the table said it sounded like I was quite curious and asked me where it came from.

I didn't wait. It's my father, I said.

The answer surprised me, not because it wasn't true, but because of how quickly it arrived. There was no searching, no scanning through possibilities, no internal deliberation about how to frame it. It was just there, fully formed, as if it had been waiting underneath the surface for the question to call it up.

My father is one of the most curious people I've ever known, and his curiosity shows up everywhere, with everyone. He asks questions of the taxi driver, the stranger sitting next to him on a long flight, the waiter, the person ahead of him in line. He doesn't strike them up because he's performing friendliness. He starts them because he's genuinely interested in what their day has been like, where they grew up, what they think about the thing they happen to be closest to.

There's a particular quality to the way he asks. Most questions, even kind ones, carry a hidden frame inside them, and you can feel the other person preparing the response they think you want to hear. My father's questions don't do that. They're open in a way that feels safe, and you could say anything back to him without it costing you anything. The strange answer, the unflattering one, the one you haven't fully thought through yet, all of it lands the same way. He's not waiting to land a point or steer you somewhere he's already decided to take you. He just wants to know.

I notice this most clearly by contrast. With many, including myself, there's a quiet tracking happening underneath the conversation, a constant calibration of how my words are going to be received before I let them out. I do this even with people I love. I do it with my mother, even now.

I don't do it with my father. With him, I just talk.

What strikes me is that I don't think he ever set out to teach me any of this. There was no lesson behind it, no moment where he sat me down and said curiosity matters, or stay open, or let people be themselves around you. He was just being himself, day after day, in the small moments of our ordinary life together, and I absorbed it the way kids absorb. Without instruction. Without effort. Just by being in proximity to it long enough that it became mine.

I was in Casablanca with my wife last month, and the hotel was supposed to arrange our airport pickup that I had prepaid for, but when we landed there was no pickup waiting. We figured it out on our own and got to the hotel late and tired, ready to be done with the day. When we checked in, I gave the front desk manager direct feedback about what had happened, not unkindly, but not softened either, naming what had gone wrong and what I expected the hotel to do about it.

I noticed my wife notice. She doesn't often see the side of me that's comfortable being direct with strangers, and once we were in our room, she mentioned it to me. Standing there, unpacking, I realized that I had been able to do it because I had seen my father do it, somewhere, sometime, in a moment I couldn't even fully remember.

I just knew, in that moment in Casablanca, that this is what he would have done, and that made it okay. I gave myself permission.

My father didn't just give me curiosity. He gave me a broader sense of what was okay, how to be in the world, what to ask for and what to expect, how to talk to people, how to take up space without apologizing for it. None of it was taught explicitly. All of it was modeled, in moments so ordinary I didn't even notice them happening.

That feels like one of the most important things I've come to understand about what a father is, or maybe about what any parent is, or any person who spends years sitting next to a child who's still figuring out how to be a person in the world. The big things don't get taught. They get transmitted, through the way you talk about strangers, the way you respond when something breaks, whether your questions are open or leading, whether you say something when the hotel didn't send the car.

My father wasn't trying to teach me any of it. He was being himself, and being himself turned out to be enough.

There's something humbling in that, and something a little daunting too, because if the most powerful things get transmitted accidentally, through who we are rather than what we try to teach, then the work isn't really about figuring out what to say to the people in our lives. The work is about who we're being, quietly, day after day, in the version of ourselves that shows up at the dinner table, on the plane, at the hotel check-in.

At the dinner party that night, after I said it was my father, the conversation moved on. Someone refilled a glass, the topic shifted, and we kept eating. But I kept turning the answer over in the back of my mind, sitting with how true it felt the moment I said it.

My father gave me curiosity by being curious. He gave me hope by being hopeful. And he gave me permission to move through the world the way I do, by moving through it that way himself.

He did it all without ever knowing he was doing it.