Bending the arrow of time
‘Mama, I love you.’
My week starts out with an interaction that, for a moment, fulfills all my needs. She gives me a firm hug, holds on longer than I expected.
She smiles. Her unique facial expression fills my existence with an abundance of meaning - I guess this is awe. Even though I am tired and would adore some alone time, ‘we’ means the world to ‘me’.
While her tendency to set and unset boundaries is intensified, her expression of attachment and love is also. As parents, we practice presence and patience. As a child, she practices being her own body within the social body we call family. ‘No!’ she tells us convincingly. If needed, she is a rock.
Most of the time we do not speak in rocky words, we speak in movements, fluid or somewhat solid facial expressions and a magical, ongoing creative evolution we embody as an abundance of sensations.
Sometimes, I feel so fragile. All those developmental leaps.
What will her future be like? Wildfires, heatwaves, crop failures, and floods.
At night, I sometimes wake up with a frightening image in my mind. She tumbles down the stairs and almost drowns in a horrifying deep sea that has displaced our living room. Is this progression?
I feel anger because of our species’, because of my own, apparent inability to do something about the unfolding ecological crises.
Luckily, I often rest in her here and now. We draw meditatively, we dance to her favorite music (‘Mama, the girl with the violin!’), she shares her exhilarant enthusiasm when she sees a fly.
She is the fly, always on the fly.
Sometimes, I feel ashamed just looking into her eyes. Sometimes, I do not dare to hold her gaze for more than a moment. I know that her love for her parents is intensely intertwined with the trust that we somehow secure her future, that we guide her every time she walks down the stairs.
The uncontrollable passing of time is only truly understood through a feeling experience of the world. The experience of taking another step, letting the forces of nature, let gravity do its work. In this phenomenological dimension of life her subjective experience is tightly connected to our proximity and responsible care taking. We will catch her if she falls too fast, parenthood is also a force of nature.
Still, her time-travelling mind is growing in strength and organization. Every day.
One day, I know, she will be able to time travel way beyond the here and now, way beyond the physical existence of her parents.
I am afraid this day will come too soon and will be too frightening.
We, as a species, need to act so that children will have the safe space to time travel far, far into the future. Can I ethically and practically catch up with her daydreaming abilities?
I must trust. Her leg muscles are becoming stronger day by day, this is her way of bending the arrow of time.