I am sorting through six years of personal emails I’d archived on the BCG system. It’s making me really sentimental! I’m reading messages from Quincy, Lisa, Beth Perez, Amy Glass, Jeri Herman, Mike Halperson, my parents, Lacy, and lots and lots from Matt. I am reminded of lots of things I forgot – like the fact that I provided Jesse Johnson with his wedding readings (what???) and that Dave McCoy was an incredible support to Matt during the first days of his dad’s illness. This one from Dad in particular (in response to a message from me to him called “parenting one day at a time” about the extraordinary speed with which it goes, and the sense that every day is a loss of some kind) really resonates today, for some reason:
Lins:
Your message is full of the pathos of parenting, as I remember it, and still experience it with you. Children are powerful precisely because they want, above all else, to grow up and become masterful. Imagine how you would feel if you knew that Grace would somehow stop growing up and instead remain the same? It would be a kind of living death. Her power and
your feelings are rooted in the thrill you have every day at her increasing mastery of life, a life she grabs with both hands. She is engaged becoming every day more of who she will be. So are you. Now you are a mother, and now a mother with two!
The bittersweet we feel is really only our sense of mortality at realizing that each phase in life is experienced only once, and that the direction must always be forward. We can never go back to Paris, from which all the pain, but not the joy, has been washed away by memory. We can never see you and Hilary lighting up the sidewalk and turning heads on the way to the
Luxembourg. We can never have the joy, again, of seeing you running on all cylindars at Princeton, or at BCG. You did not know, how could you have, how you showed up: masterful, brilliant, engaged. This is every parent’s joy, a child who is engaged and able to make his/her way in the world. Who goes from stength to srtrength. You should only remember to relish the moments, one by one. Though each comes only once, the memories can last forever. They are life’s great joy, especially at times, and they will come, when we are tested by fate and fortune.
I am greatly warmed by the fact that you sent me this message, and to know that even you have these trhoughts. They are in my mind every day.
Love,
Dad
If only I could learn this lesson – what will it take for me to internalize this? To live in each moment as it passes, as Thoreau says … and to be here now (Ram Dass). A daily struggle for me. Always looking ahead. I have so rarely in my life wished for time to slow down … usually I’m already five steps ahead and anticipating the next thing.
“I should be grateful that life is here today, though gone tomorrow, but I can’t help it. I want more.” – Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance
