Between an end a new beginning , lies a story. The story starts with the change, is about the change and ends with a change. And no matter, how you look at this story of mine, it is a significant one.
Yet, I almost hesitate to write about it. It deserves a fitting blog full of metaphors, alliterations and over the top references. But strangely, I don’t quite feel like giving it the beans. It feels offensive. It feels indulgent. It feels vain. It feel unnecessary.
In fact, after being a new dad, many things that made up my freak have taken a back seat. They just don’t seem critical. I am shocked that I still love and care about cars. I can understand how your most critical identifying feature can become a mere footnote as a new parent. Being a parent creates this overarching perspective that tends to drown out other significant happenings in your life. You measure your happiness by the metrics of hours the baby napped in the day, the number of times he woke up in the night, ounces of milk he drank and the food eaten through the day. And even if this procedure repeats endlessly, each day is an evaluation of your parenthood. With this umbrella of expectation covering your mind, getting a new car and or a job seems to be a side story.
Even if it were worth documenting, I am still puzzled with whom I should share this other part of my life. My spouse is the co-parent and what applies to me would apply to her as well. My friends are also parents now, so their bandwidth is limited. Everyone else, doesn’t really exist any more in the remote living times of the COVID pandemic. Solitude has turned into loneliness. Delightful at first when the baby naps but daunting thereafter because it makes my mind observe the reckless speed of my life going by. So I just watch car videos on you tube to placate matters.
Why can’t I just ease out? Settle down and accept the more-than-enough life that I have already. My condition reeks of entitlement or greed. I often wonder how it will be in the future as I get older, my kid gets older. Wouldn’t standing out, doing more or excelling be even harder? Why am I constantly delaying the steady stateless by imparting somewhat random pulses? The simple answer is perhaps I seek greatness and I don’t want to know too soon if I am not going to find it.
What I actually want is the balance between not going gently into the night and living my life to the fullest in the now. If slowing down makes me fundamentally unhappy, then I must accept my affinity for change. The turmoil of the change then just becomes necessary evil. But staying put in the status quo eats me from within which inherently prevents me from enjoying my present.
In other words, quiet coyote Mr. Fox.
