Earlier this morning I watched my daughter get on the school bus for the first time (she starts a new school today), and in about an hour I’ll walk my son to his first day of Kindergarten.

We’ve fantasized about this day for years—the extra time that my wife will have, how much cleaner the house will be without children in it all day long, not having to pay for preschool, and so on.

And yet, here I sit, an unusual quiet to the morning, trembling.

I’m a much better starter than a finisher. I always loved the first days of school, when the year ahead was rich with possibilities, the opportunity to find new friends and unwrap new mysteries. By the end of the school year, I was disinterested and anxious, ready for summer to begin with its own possibilities stretching into the heat-miraged distance. I love Autumn and Spring. Beginnings, transitions.

Our preschool years are over.

When our children were born, we made grand promises to ourselves about the healthiness of the foods they would eat, the limits of screen time, the quality of our discipline, and the educational nature of our games and toys. We were naïve. Hopeful and bright and amazed at the vast possibility of it all, yes; but also, so naïve.

Way back then, we had beginner’s minds. And now here we are at the end of something, jaded, tired, and usually a little dehydrated. Our kids are as likely to have learned something from the television or iPad than from us. And don’t get me started about eating habits. It’s just so difficult. All. The. Time.

But if I turn my head just so, I can see the edges of the beginning we’ve approached and my attention turns away from all the botched decisions and lazy choices. The distance of the horizon ahead quickens my steps. Land ho—opportunity!

Our school years are just beginning!

I’ve somehow reached that age where things that I truly want can’t be purchased in a store—or if they can, I usually just buy them for myself.

So in honor of Monday’s birthiversary, here is a list of the things I really want, but probably can’t ask for and almost certainly won’t get.

• All the laundry to be clean, folded, and put away.
• An empty Instapaper queue, with all of my articles saved in a tidy, organized mélange of Pinboard, Evernote, and DevonThink.
• A CMS with the flexibility of WordPress, the stability of static pages/jekyll/Octopress, and the social community of Tumblr.
• More time alone with my wife
• More time together with our friends
• More time by myself
• Spend more within our means
• To not worry about my kids, to know that they’ll be alright, today, tomorrow, and forever after
• The Presidential election to be over
• My kids to be nicer to each other
• Liberty and justice for all
• To be an early-riser—the kind of person who easily wakes up two hours before anyone else in the house and uses that time to write or work-out or catch up on whatever
• Either a shorter list of books to-read or the time to devote to enjoying them
• Silence
• Joyous noise

I could probably go on, but it feels a little silly. It is, after all, kind of a silly birthday list, more to-dos than things. Come to think of it, maybe that’s the gift I’ll give myself: this list of things to do and strive for in my 39th year.

I used to think about “the kind of daughter” I wanted to raise. How could I have ever dared to define another spirit? Instead, our daughter has brought us the spectacular gift of herself, beyond any dream or fear or expectation.

This child is, thank God, utterly and fiercely herself. Even though many days her peculiarities fray me raw, I pray to never stop feeling grateful for and protective of them.

I can forecast the (not so far-off) storm approaching between her desire to fit in and her desire for uniqueness. The thunder that will roar as the super-heated air of her lightning personality collides with the cooler atmosphere of her peers will be mighty.

And then sometimes she is still such a little girl, loving a doll or playing dress-up at a museum. I try to remember to stay in Today, and not get too caught up in the whirling eddies of Little Girl Past and Tweenager Future.

I used to think I would raise my kids. By now, through so many missteps, mistakes, and meditation, I’ve learned the truth. We are, instead, raising each other, ever higher along the way.

This newly eight-year-old is so smart and so sensitive and so strange, she teaches me every day the extent to which I don’t know anything.

I used to fear that. Not anymore.

It’s a life’s work and it’s never perfect, except for the times when it is, hopefully more often than not. Marriage is like parenting is like life: magnificent/difficult/wonderful/horrible/sanctifying. Our very presence in each other’s lives helps us strive to be the best versions of ourselves.

I believe it should be available to everyone, but that’s probably a different post.

I am so thankful for the circumstances that put her and I on the same path.

Here’s to the next ten years, and the decades after that.

In only 5 years, our son has taught us every step of the way to embrace the unexpected.

A surprising but joyous pregnancy becomes a difficult and potentially dangerous pregnancy. An orderly, scheduled induction becomes a “this baby is coming and don’t anyone get in the way” overnight express train.

A little brother so easily overshadowed by an exuberant sister becomes the wisest and most quietly brilliant sun in the sky.

Keep surprising us, buddy, whether we want you to or not. And happy birthday.

…the blog is not about creating knowledge and it is certainly not about presenting anything in a finished form. She thinks of her blog as an old-fashioned salon: a semi-public, semi-private place where readers, writers, and translators of various stripes, are able to gather informally and chat about things — a kind of laboratory of thoughts. In the context of her blog, she is not a critic, and she is not even a curator, but more of a hostess.

As usual, the Internet didn’t disappoint. A quick Google and a few pokes around some Github repositories and I had my answer: Exitwp.

1. Export Wordpress data as Wordpress xml
2. Download exitwp
3. Put the xml file into a directory
4. Run the exitwp python script
5. Done

Yay!

A cough that wouldn’t go away. An abnormal CT scan. A frustrated doctor. An increasingly alarmed patient. These were the ingredients of a month-long odyssey into the possibility that perhaps Everything Might Not Turn Out Okay.

Part of it, to be sure, is me being me: a little overly dramatic, a little over-sensitive, a touch of hypochondria. But just because I didn’t uncover a life-altering diagnose doesn’t mean my life has been unaltered. Quite to the contrary, I have felt the edges of the veneer of mortality much more keenly in the past few months, and it’s changing me.

A series of deaths of family friends. Increased air travel (several trips in just a few months, far above average for me, and something I hate). Last week’s news of the death of Steve Jobs.

When I re-read Mr. Jobs’ account of his first brush with the cancer that would take his life, from the text of his 2005 Stanford commencement address: this past weekend, I couldn’t help but relate. And now can’t help but to quote his address at length:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

The appeal of (this portion of) Jobs’ speech lies in its utter fearlessness in the face of that which most of us fear most. That he could transform a fear of death into a catalyst for action is inspiring to say the least.

Can I live my life as if each day is my last? Can I avoid being trapped by the results of other people’s thinking? Can I follow my heart and intuition?

Can you?

All of those options have advantages and disadvantages. Some are certainly easier than others. Some are for everyone, some are explicitly for hackers.

I chose the geeky one: this site runs on Octopress, a very thorough, but still not exactly turnkey, static site generator based on Jekyll.

I was further inspired by my Internet pal Guillermo Esteves, who has done remarkable things bending Octopress to create a beautiful site at blog.gesteves.com. (Seriously: Guille has chops.)

Plus, much has been made lately in the nerd circles I frequent of the advantages of static, or “baked,” sites. Of those, the one that rang loudest for me was that of speed. I’m not tht worried about getting slammed with a traffic spike or being able to handle getting Fireballed, but I do like the idea of shaving milliseconds off of load and crawl times.

In the end, though, the most compelling reasons for choosing Octopress don’t line up neatly on a feature chart. Put simply, in the last couple of weeks I have had a hell of a lot of fun playing with Octopress.

Using a command-line, static tool combines many of the things I love the most and certainly the three things I’m most interested in exploring these days: mindfulness, writing, and coding.

Mindfulness:

Making a site and posting with Octopress is not as easy (for me) as with Wordpress or Tumblr. I have to focus on the post, focus on the process of posting. I like that: I want the things I post here to be thoughtful and intentional.

Writing:

Despite the previous point, Octopress itself is invisible as a writing tool. I can write wherever I want. This post has been written in a combination of Simplenote, Byword, and BBEdit.

Coding:

I am such a newbie. Because of Octopress I installed git and (finally) learned about version control. I’ve learned about .sass (I had no idea it even existed) and even quite a bit about Ruby. I even briefly ventured into vi. ::shudder::

Here’s what it boils down to: I want this site to be convenient and pleasurable to work with, but I also want it to be handcrafted—an actual fruit of my labors. Octopress gives me a magnificent start, but in some way or another, I’ve touched every file on this site. I like that.

Have you ever done a clean install of your computer? Where you wipe your entire hard drive clean and then reinstall your operating system over the newly blank slate of a clean drive?

Perhaps I’m the minority, but over decades of Mac ownership going back to system 7, I don’t remember ever having done that. We’ll leave the story of when I found Backup Religion for another time, but every system upgrade I can recall was just an in-place upgrade, albeit with a couple of backups on hand just in case.

So after a couple of weeks of beachballing with OS X Lion under our belt, I decided a clean install was perhaps the best next path. After all, our iMac’s drive was still essentially a clone of the MacBook’s drive it replaced, which was a clone of the PowerBook it replaced, which was a clone of a different iMac, and so on.

I’ve diligently copied the accumulated digital dust of a life from computer to computer, never stopping to notice them, never taking account of what the bits contained. The old college poetry, the grad school applications, the post-school business plans, the ancient emails, the resumes, websites, work projects, then finally the accreting mountain of digital photos, videos, and files that have come with parenthood and a Mac at the digital center of it all.

That’s a lot of baggage for a hard drive to hold.

So I spent the next three days making multiple backups and clones of my systems. All that digital junk may have been slowing down my computer, but I’d be damned if I was going to lose any of it.

Heart in throat, I booted from one of my cloned drives, wiped my iMac own to the metal, and started over. A base install. First Dropbox, then 1Password. Then the Mac App Store apps, setting up mail accounts, etc.

Photos. Music. Movies. Just reinstalling the essentials, I’ve got about 20 gigabytes more space on computer, and things are running much more smoothly. I don;t miss all the apps I downloaded as part of some overhyped promo bundle five years ago, and I seem to be doing alright not having app preferences that are older than my Second Grader.

A New Weblog

I’ve half-heartedly kept up with a number of blogs over the years, each time pulling over the posts from the previous incarnation. I’ve harbored the notion that I needed a place to keep the precious posts from sites long abandoned. They may have a minor degree of nostalgic value, but they’re not who I am today, or the writing I aim to post. So here we are, starting over. A clean install.

I speak of The Green Light.

The Green Light, so named and mythologized by my daughter at two years of age, cast a peculiar green shade from its vantage point at the end of our street. I’m sure that with a little while of dedicated Googling I could determine the reason this light cast such a verdant hue, though as you’ll see I’m not so interested in the light itself as what it represents and how it came to embed itself in the young imagination of a family just getting its feet underneath itself.

My daughter discovered it. Of course, it was always there, flicking on automatically at dusk and shutting itself off at dawn. But neither my wife nor I ever paid it any attention until it had captured our daughter’s imagination a way that very little else had before it.

My daughter G was captivated by it, and how different it was from the more pedestrian (ahem) light in front of our own home. She noticed it, in the way that a two-year-old notices things: with the realization that something out of the ordinary can transport us into a different world altogether.

“It’s The Green Light!” G would exclaim as we drove home, or left the front door, each time like a bolt of recognition that a long-lost friend had made the visit from far away. We would drive past our house and drive ‘round the cul de sac to visit it, sometimes multiple times, to satisfy G’s desire to see it. If the weather cooperated, when I got home from work we would walk together to pay it a visit. On more than one occasion, G would hug the stone lamppost. And on every occasion we would flirt with a tantrum at the prospect of being forced to leave its presence. The light had a personality, a life beyond our visits, and was the topic of toddler conversations and imaginings.

Who cares?

It was the first instance we witnessed of my daughter noticing something in the outside world and internalizing it into her vision of the universe. It was different, and so was special, and had nothing to do with her parents.

I desperately wished I had thought to document some of the tales that G told us about The Green Light; the specifics of the stories are lost. But if you ask G today, she still remembers it (as “part of the Old House”).

It has worked its way back into my consciousness—in part because my son is now approaching that magical age of discovery, and in part because I’ve spent a great deal of time lately thinking about where we anchor our creative energies.

This lamppost in a far north Chicago suburb became a totem for a little imagination, the source of focus for a mind teeming with ideas and hungry for explanations. A mind not all that different from the more grown-up ones that you and I try daily to “manage” or “control” or “organize.” We each tend to cluster our creative energies on something, and usually the brightest or shiniest or most immediately appealing.

We need a beacon.

For my daughter, it used to be The Green Light (and is now replaced by her various “kids” and fairies and art projects). For you or I, it might be our Work, or a Blog, or a Person. It may be a healthy focus, or it may not be so positive right now. But I think there must be value in recognizing It for what It is and looking deeper into how it informs your worldview.

And of course we can’t miss the symbolism of a Green Light meaning “GO,” can we?

So what’s your Green Light, and where is it telling you to go?

And in mine, she changed my life.

I received the “Future Author Award” that Spring day, and from that day forward whenever anyone asked me the perennial and horrid question “what do you want to be when you grow up,” I answered without hesitation: “author.” (Astronaut remained a very popular answer, but I knew deep inside I would write stories long before I would ever leave Earth.) I’m sure my parents had impressed the idea upon me at some point early on. They still talk about the “amazing” stories I would tell them while I took my bath (apparently a family tradition; my own daughter delivers some pretty wonderful narratives during her own bath times), and we lived in a house full of books. Sure, it would have happened in any case.

But the Future Author Award made it real.

Of course I would write books (or ads, or marketing brochures, or essays, or a blog). I had a blue ribbon that made it so. I wish I could remember why Mrs. G had such confidence in my literary future; the reason for her prophecy is lost to my memory. But I’ve never forgotten the gesture. There’s a part of me that wants to do everything I can to make sure I don’t let that faith be misplaced, and to fulfill the destiny that was given me in a partitioned classroom on the last day of school. I wonder if anyone else from that class has kept theirs, or if it means as much to them as mine does to me.