Hold it fast, let it go

A confluence of events has me noticing my place in time: Getting an elder signed up for assisted living. Tenacious emotional history roiling my generation. Our children working so hard, yet headed into an uncertain future. Our grandchildren’s fleeting childhood. Change roaring on in the wider world, in many ways not for the better.

In much of this, I’m grateful to be able to contribute and participate. Doing so gives me a sense of timelessness, or at least continuity. Pick your metaphysics to describe that connecting thread, but there’s a background steadiness that’s eternal enough for the likes of us. A lot of the time, though, that consistent “something” gets submerged by the attention-getting ephemerals—that is to say, by nearly everything we get attached to. We organize, plan, grasp, cling, worry, regret, all in the service of things gone in an instant.

I tried to think about this, but thinking seemed inadequate to the tension between the little-understood timeless and the adored ephemerals. Too many unknowns, complications, exceptions. Poetry, art, and stories do better. 

There’s also the doing, the simultaneous experience of continuity and loss. Recently Grandbaby and I have been sitting on blanket in the grass. We’ve had a string of beautiful days, not too hot, not too chilly. The birds are still singing. Everything is green from lovely rains. Although Grandbaby is crawling now, she’s so far not in constant motion. And while she loves to pull up grass and dandelions and to examine fallen leaves and linden bracts, she mostly doesn’t put them in her mouth. And there’s the absolute sweetness of being her jungle gym, and even more receiving the occasional baby hug—she wants up, I hold her, and she snuggles in so close, her cheek on my shoulder.

All the effort and the luck has gone into making those moments! I knew from experience with our own children that it’s lovely to sit with a baby in the grass, and how to manage a baby while doing it. But I don’t really remember doing it, although there are photos. Those kids spent a while growing up, then went on to have kids that they’ve trusted me to care for. So the joy of a cycle repeating…but the stiffness in my back—how much harder, physically to do it now than it must have been 40-odd years ago. And I won’t be doing this with my grandchildren’s children. If I’m paying attention, I can savor the moment, the serendipity, the ties to past and future—and at the same time, realize I need to release it, not idolize it or mourn its passing too much. Because that’s the kind of life we have. 

I linked to the novel Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, which I stumbled onto among my mother’s things. It’s a novel in the form of a long letter to a young son, written by a dying 77-year-old to tell the child about himself and his family history. The old man, a preacher, writes about his grandfather, active in the abolitionist cause and the Civil War; his father, a pacifist in reaction; his brother, an atheist in a line of preachers; his proxy son, the troubled child of his best friend;  and the present and future of the child. So about a 150-year span. And he meditates on how fleeting it all is (among many other things). But fleeting without being meaningless, and precious precisely because it is fleeting. That is something like the feeling I get sitting in the grass with GrandBaby. How rare the circumstances are that would allow such a thing, given all that goes into it. How precious that GrandBaby hug. How I’d better enjoy it now, because it won’t last.

So the doing is to witness the continuity, embrace the moment, and at the same time to hold it lightly and let it go.

I try.