“I remember my first child,” she said, cradling Ethan – her second, the one whose birth she is forgetting – close to her as she too prepared for a busy day. “I remember the stitches.” Apparently there were many.
“Does it trouble you,” I asked, “to have that memory fade?”
“No,” she said, smiling widely, burying her face into her son’s neck as he squirmed, “because I am living every one of these moments to its fullest.”
Even still, it troubles me. Maybe it’s because I’m not living every moment to its fullest, so caught up I become in the struggle, to be a good parent, to be productive, to provide, to, as Leo Rosten once said, “have it make some difference that I lived at all.”
I think what troubles me the most is how quickly memory fades. In time the ripples that extend from the centre of the pond where the stone was thrown disappear entirely, and all recollection of the stone itself is gone.
Creating and guiding
Having without owning
Letting go of expectations
Leading without controlling
This is the way of the Tao
Tao te Ching, Lao Tzu, verse 10
When Rio was born this is the quote we inscribed on his birth notice. He has from the start been our little Taoist master. (No more so than now, after he found my hair clippers and proceeded to shave his head…all he needs are some robes.)
Sometimes at night I’ll turn on the light in the hall outside the room where my family sleeps all side-by-side on a ten foot wide bed. The light slants in and the faces of my two boys – pale in the darkness – can be seen sleeping peacefully. I love that image, those boys limp in slumber, their arms splayed, Silas sucking in his dreams, Rio deep in sleep. I’ll stand in the door, or sit at the foot of the bed, and watch as they almost perceivably grow older, and out of our lives a day at a time.
And I tell myself that I have to let go.
Let go of everything.
In September I stood on the beach at Hollyhock, on Cortez Island, BC, and said to anything that cared to listen – the gulls wheeling overhead, the mud sharks in Desolation Sound – that I would now have to learn to let go of things. Of everything.
Attachment is part of why we suffer so badly in this world. We cling to ideas, people, places, plans, to the image that we have of ourselves, to a story that we tell others and ourselves about our lives. Most often these things have nothing to do with our reality what-so-ever.
My children are teaching me to let go. Sometimes – as when I watch them through the darkness and see them change just a tiny bit each day – the letting go is gentle. Other times – as when Rio, 4, pushes me away when I try to give him a kiss – the letting go is so much more abrupt.
We can let go, or we can have wrestled from our grasp. It’s our choice. But one way or another all of our illusions – that our children were ever really ours; that our lives could be anything but meaningful – will be shattered. Better to let go first, and save our fingers to brush delicately against all that we hold dear.
