weight

I’ve gotten better at noticing things.

The taste of coffee in the morning. The warmth of the mug against my palm. The smell of it, still steaming: sweet, earthy.

When I go out for a walk, which isn’t as often as I should, there is a particular way that sunlight filters through the trees that makes me stop just to watch it. And when I do, more often than not I see the patterns it casts on the sidewalk, shadow and light. I see the way they shift in the breeze, break apart and come together again as something slightly different, something new.

That’s the thing about noticing things, I guess. It takes practice. You get better at it as you go.

We can go through entire days, entire months, years even, noticing almost nothing at all. I know this because I’ve done it. There have been phases in my life where all I really felt was the weight of all the things that needed to get done. It’s hard to notice the light through the trees when there is homework to attempt and dinner to cook and and laundry to fold and hearts to mend and work to do.

Do I make it sound miserable? I don’t mean to. There is joy there, so much of it. The fact is, there has probably been more joy than I even realized. I’ve spent too much time with my head down.

Then somewhere along the way I realized that time, which is supposed to be this constant, unwavering thing – a second is a second is a second, forever – was speeding up. It happens, you know. I can’t tell you how, I just know that it does. A second is second, still, but a month disappears in an instant. A year is a single breath.

And it can break your heart, the way that time races by and all the things it leaves in its wake. But I have discovered that the trick to slowing it down, if only a little, is to notice. Somehow just stopping, just looking around, just noticing, tugs back on the reigns of time. So I try to. Some days I’m better than it than others.

Yesterday I noticed the weight of my daughter’s head in my lap.

It was bedtime, and that can be a tricky time of day. Because you want it to be over, really. There are so, so many bedtimes, and so often they get complicated. But last night, in the space between book and sleep, my daughter put her head in my lap and I noticed it all. The weight of it, but also the pink watermelon print on her shorts, the curve of her eyelashes, the gap between her front teeth, the impossible smoothness of her skin, the slightly crooked cut of her bangs (sorry). The sound of her voice. The sound of her voice, just as it is now.

I noticed all of these tiny, remarkable things that could have so easily just gone by, just disappeared. But instead I gathered it up, the entire moment and everything in it, and I tucked it away in a corner of my heart where I hope maybe it will be be safe from the passing of time.

With love. xx