You can’t actually be everything
I’m running around in an area of thought that I used to find myself in quite regularly. It’s around about the area of you can’t be everything and do everything. (When I say ‘you’ I really mean ‘me’ because your you might turn out to be quite different.) But, you, in the sense of ‘me’ or ‘I’ can’t seem to do everything. I can’t seem to pay attention, say, to the nuances of my children’s development, the shifts in their thinking, the modifications of their ways of talking, the slow trek toward independence AND pay attention to, say, the work that is before me. I’m not saying I can’t parent and work. I’m just saying that, say I’m busy focusing intensely on something else for six, eight, 10 hours a day then I’ve not go the same energy/focus of will/whatever you want to call it, to be attuned to them. I’m not saying this is a bad thing. Actually, in many respects, it’s a good thing: the children grow up, they find more self within themselves, and it may well be better for my attention, at least at times, to be elsewhere. But you (again, in the sense of “I”) might sometimes just miss them and that attention and that slow pace of things. I might miss just hanging out for a long time, and seeing what comes up and out. I might even like to do that every day–not just, say, as it is now, on the weekends, like yesterday mid-hike, the sunlight sunlighting, the birds chirping, the wind winding up there in one of our ridgeline parks, when one of the kids might just say something about themselves that you didn’t know, that they’re speaking because they’re happy and relaxed and because, there in the sun, in the calm of a long stretch of day, unstructured, there is time to know one another. And I have always been a fan of knowing one another. Of knowing people. Especially these children of mine. Favorites of mine on this earth.
