Time bends in unpredictable ways with children.  Eli is almost 6 months old, and he’s the most amazing little person, which always strikes me as an odd thing to realize.  It seems like there’s this wealth of common knowledge, generally in these seemingly obvious observations, “Children change your life”, “My child is the best thing to ever happen” or any number of different (even radically different) observations, which are impossible to apprehend (or at least I chose not to try) in the absence of the actual experience.

In the same way, there are all these things which I feel like I’ve known for quite a while about life, but for one reason or another have chosen to ignore until now.  I can’t quite put my finger on it.  It’s a feeling of constant, “Oh, now I get it” that never seems to end; and I’ve abandoned all hope of ever approaching a final sense of awareness in which “I get it”, because I don’t think that place is realistically apprehensible given our life expectancies.  Sometimes, it’s a vague feeling, having remembered a moment observing my parents doing something that I find myself now doing, remembering a kind of absent, half-concerned confusion as to the what’s and why’s of what they were doing, as it didn’t appear to make any sense to me, and then suddenly awakening to those answers as I find myself doing those actions.

I guess in a sense, it’s as if I spent a good portion of my life watching some other people live their lives; and I spent a portion of that time in observation pontificating and sometimes even going so far as to judge them in accordance with my own standards for how a life ought be lived.  Then, suddenly, I’m out of the stadium seating and onto the field; and I’m acutely aware of this sensation of replaying a match that’s already been played.