Repose Overtakes You

I Have A Boy!

"Raising children is an enormously important part of life. I think one of the most important, or the most important, period." - Eric Braeden.

I had an inkling of what to expect with the arrival of my son. The consensus was that I was no longer going to sleep and I would no longer have any time for myself. There was speculation that I may even shake my opinions about mini-vans and replace my small VW with a dreary box with automatic sliding doors.  I arrived prepared for the worst.

Then along he came.  His little self with strawberry blonde hair, big, wandering eyes, and what I already assume to be a bit of an ambitious and almost feisty personality.  I even think he's a lot like me; constantly hungry and curious about everything around him.  He is, of course, only one month old now, so I can't be certain of anything.

There is something fascinating about being okay with being woken up constantly throughout the night. It's 2:14am and the faintest wimper of hunger interrupts my dreams and there I am, standing next to his bassinet calmly whispering, "Hello there! Should we check your diaper for a poopy?"

"There's plenty to read about keeping your sanity while raising children, but it's all common-sense stuff about task division and taking breaks and the relentlessly repeated magic date night with your spouse. What's missing is some 'tude." - Jeffery Kluger

I will admit that even though I am mostly tolerant of the late night interruptions, the mid day and later evening roars are not so pleasant. But then, I hear that will be short lived and there will be something new to challenge my patience. And even though my life as a parent is also in its infancy, I'm reminding myself that all the little things that might bug me now are just small sacrifices for what's to come. In the words of the late artist, poet and writer Kahlil Gibran, it's not really about me anyway.

“Your children are not your children.

They are sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. 

They come through you but not from you.

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

The archer sees the make upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness.

For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He also loves the bow that is stable.”

What I Have Lived For

After reading Stephen Fry's latest blog post, Only the Lonely, I found myself on Tumbler reading a passage from Bertand Russell's Autobiography.  This prologue speaks to the three things I, and I assume most people, would consider salient to living a fulfilling and compassionate life.  Love, knowledge and pity. As one of the world's biggest Moulin Rouge fans, I sometimes get sidetracked by the pursuit of love, truth, beauty and freedom, but alas, truth is only found through knowledge and there can't be beauty and freedom without liberation from abuse, oppression and hate.

“What I Have Lived For

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what—at last—I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”

— The Prologue to Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography