I have observed this before, but it is interesting to me that the sadness that marks the growth of my children is not associated with their own development, but seeing it in their schoolmates and friends. I suppose I know I will always be around them–to some extent, who knows if they will leave town?–but will not be around their schoolmates. Those children, whose progress I only see in fits and starts, at awards or at sporting events, mark for me I guess times that are now gone. I remember them when they were little. I remember, then, who my own children were then.
Experientially, it is like an odor that just suddenly transports you into a completely different emotional gestalt, associated with another time and place. One marks, by contrast, the slow progress of time, the slow passage on a conveyor belt that ends for all of us sooner or later.
What do children give us? Why do we value the time when they are little so much? I think it is innocence. I think we are all born with the capacity for unreasoning cruelty, but not for intentional cruelty, knowing cruelty.
Deep requited love–and children respond marvelously to sincere love–is a sensation of RELAXATION. This hit me the other day. All of us keep, from necessity, psychological boundaries in place, to prevent emotional injury. Love is dropping those boundaries. It is a risk whose payoff is a profound sense of released tension.
We want to be with others. We want to be with them in an emotional room where you can’t be hurt. Yet that is not how things work.
I wonder, though, how things would be if there were no children, if we all lived as adults our whole lives. Would we not need to recreate or retain some of the innocence that children bring? And as I have wondered before, what if we had no gender, and could not have physical sex? How would we relate to one another? That sense of connection, love, is the real one. Everything else has the potential to include love, but need not. Quite obviously, sex can be loveless, and quite obviously many parents indulge their own need for affection by taking and using the love children offer so spontaneously, without repaying the debt.
Few thoughts, sparked by some dreams I had last night.