One
night I sat on the edge of Henry's bed and stroked his hair while he
cried. "Mommy, I don't want to go to college."
He's
six.
"I'm
scared.”
Something
you should know: I am not great at coming up with the kind of
reductive explanations young children generally require. I should
have said something like, "Henry, college will be great! You'll
see. Don't worry about that now." Yes, that would've been
adequate--I see that now. In the moment, I feel the need to
explain all the mysteries of the universe, which of course I
don't even understand myself. I make things way too complicated.
"Just...just
be
six,
Henry. Just be here, in your bed, in your room, in this house, on
the farm, in the dark. Nothing else is real."
"What?" he barked.
Henry doesn't like me to make abstract statements like this. They annoy him, the way your sixth grade math teacher would be annoyed to find poems scrawled on your bar graph ditto. Henry may see the world in bar graphs, I'm not sure.
The greatest weakness of both the past and the future lies precisely in
their lack of reality....Where
did I read that? I wanted to tell him in a way that would make
sense, but I couldn't make sense of it myself there in the dark. I wanted to tell him
about the lilies of the field, and the sparrow's fall, something wise
and calming and motherly. But I foundered. His hair ran soft along my
palm. We sat like that for a minute, listening to each other
breathing.
"The
future isn't real. You don't know what college will be like. Your
six-year-old brain can only imagine what it's like, and you are
scared of what you imagine. But that's not real. Don't waste your
time in a place that isn't real." My little voice said: Why
don't you heed your own advice?
Shut up, you, I thought.
I spend my time in the future, too, because I
imagine it will be better than the present. I wait for things to
"level off." For the kids to get older, for Eric to be less
stressed at work, for us to have more time, fewer bills, more money.
But it isn't real. Those times will never come, because they consist
not primarily of concrete realities, but of a change in my
perception, and you can't passively wait for a change of perception. The kids getting older will not change my perception of
how busy I am or how much they require of me. Having fewer
bills or more money will not change my relationship to money and
savings, which as you probably know tends to remain the same no
matter your income level.
I lay
this veil of my imagined future over the present. I expect that the
kids will become more independent, and so I begin to resent that they
are not yet so. I expect that Eric will be less stressed one day, and
so I begin to resent that he is not yet so. And my relationships to
them become obscure, and vexed by both my memories and my expectations.
If
I can lay that aside, and see the present as it is with no
amendments, no caveats, then something miraculous happens. Then I can love
with a pure love. Then I can
appreciate the myriad blessings in my life, because they flow into
the present without the baggage of unfulfillable promises.
To
say what things are you have to see what things are, and seeing is
hard. I'm lucky if I can do it five minutes a day. To see the
miracle that is all around you, without the dark glass of my doubts
and fears and needs and wants. It's really hard. Try it.
