It was a beautiful moment that came too soon and was gone too soon. Four years on, I lay wondering how else it could have went. Heaven sent blessings rained down in a torrent, but I couldn’t see them at the time for the dark clouds. At once I had my happy camper, but also my greatest challenge as a fairly nascent parent of one already. This miracle child would cause well more than her weight in trouble, but whose fault was it but my own shortcomings in being able to raise a young soul with more spark than even I could handle.
For what’s better left alone only becomes obvious with the passage of time. With great reflection comes the privilege of wisdom wrought in the roaring furnace of tribulations never quite defined as your coming up in the world. We often lack the vocabulary necessary to expound the hard truths we discover through hardships meant to mold us into more discerning spiritual beings, and sometimes all we know is pain.
Every child is born with a cosmic assignment that is hidden yet somehow knowable with the right combination of meditation and self-knowing. This takes in account trials that shape the very lens through which we interpret the colors and shapes of things and the sounds, scents, and feelings both warm and cool that define the path we take in this meandering we call the daily walk of life. When you know as a child that the ways of the world around you are amiss, you seek guidance from the constellations that point towards your own true north.
Yet there are forces constantly turning you around and misdirecting your focus to watching your own step insofar as whose path you are crossing at that moment. When we observe others practicing what may be defined as odd behavior by self-appointed experts of the Normal, we must then look within ourselves and recognize it for what it is, the child within acting out because there is no other retort for what one can’t possibly relate to another.
While I could speak much more plainly about what I am thinking, specifics and timelines of the life path I no longer conform to, will only confuse and distort the message I aim to convey. To speak of past things better left behind, or put to them into art, puts them in focus and gives them a permanence that offers them more power than they deserve. The past only has power over us if we choose to give it, and it is often an unwitting choice, but a choice nonetheless.
All that matters now are the lessons learned by these experiences. The results most souls focus on are but temporary and subjective based on the emotional states and internal reasonings of those who existed in that moment in time. For me to keep myself in those states only serves to prevent me from growing past them.
We often seek solace in the wake of imperfect memories, as we know them as our own experience. Yet, in truth, they are distorted and eroded by the passage of time. Then, they are further complicated by the connections of millions of neurons that have formed since. To choose to remember only the joys of those troubled weeks spent in constant search of a place to park our spinning wheels gives me only the slightest bit of relief. Still, it is better to extract what faint bit of hope remains in those dearly departed moments of the blissful ignorance we observe in our offspring than to have ever lived without that bit of our journey at all.
Five years ago, I entered a new phase of my life, gaining a responsibility that I have since discharged, but will never disown. I’ve never been able to fathom how a parent could ever openly disown one of their own creations, yet I have seen plenty of examples. Where as a half baked doodle or hare brained verse are easily dismissed by the discerning artist as soon as they are created, once you are responsible for creating a new spark and delivering it unto Creation, there is no true way to ever forget your obligations to that solemn privilege with which you have been awarded.
