For all of you who have feelings around Father’s Day that you might feel reluctant to post on social media, or those of you who feel obligation to feel (or only feel) both love or like for a father (biological or otherwise), or those of you whose fathers were absent, I feel you and I see you. I am also really happy for those of you who feel a lot of affection for your dads and like being around them, as well as those of you who are father figures and are doing your best to nurture your children.

I had a dad and a bio-dad. They were humans. They are both a part of me. I like some of that. I don’t like some of that. I know that neither of them asked for the role initially. (No one did, actually.) Both were well into middle age when I came along at 50 and 44, respectively, with children whose mothers were not mine. Both eventually came to like the idea of being a father to me. Dad embraced it as much as he could and loved me and supported me in a way that was, in hindsight and with full knowledge of things I wasn’t aware of until my mid 20’s, extraordinary. Bio-dad was around when I was little, but when his wife and six children arrived from Vietnam, things got… complicated. The other day, I read his obituary for the first time and saw pictures of him with his real family. It was jarring. I like to think that both dad and bio-dad did the best that they could.

Hoàn cảnh is a phrase my mother uses a lot that to me refers to something like “cosmically tragic extenuating circumstances,” or the fact that the conditions aren’t there for something more pleasant. Sadness is there. There’s also a sense that there’s nothing that can be done about it, or that if one could choose a different path, taking action despite (against?) hoàn cảnh creates something worse. This sad situation is the happiest possible one. What a word.

I have a sense of compassion for both of them. They both endured many hardships and circumstances that I will never really know about except through understanding the historical context, the hoàn cảnh, of their lives. They’re both gone — dad in 2006 and bio-dad in 2019 — and along with them their stories. What I know of their lives is less knowledge and more imagination and perhaps even speculation. What few stories of theirs I do remember have amalgamated in my skull with pieces of other people’s ideas of who they were and the effects of both their presence and absence in my life. They are less real people and more deep impressions in my soul that manifest as feelings and impulses in different situations.

Contemplating all of this helps me to be more aware of the effects I have on other people. Each of us leaves imprints on people. The closer the person is, the deeper the imprint. You can’t not leave an imprint, so make it a loving, healing embrace. This is how the five skandhas are helpful: form, feeling, perception, impression, discernment. They are windows into every dharma, or circumstance, or hoàn cảnh.