It's My Son's Birthday Today - a reflection on the fiction of time

Time is such a strange thing. It really is made up, this concept that we are moving forward. That time is linear in that way. That what is past is really far behind us and where we are going is in this distance place that we strive for. 

I am knowing that time is made up because my memories, they are not old. They are not far in the past. They are right here with me. They are yesterday and right now and I think (I know) that they are right in front of me, too.

When my son was born, this was big. This was that once in a lifetime paradigm shift where in that one instant I went from being not a mom to now a mom. I did not think about this at that moment. What I thought was thank god this baby is out of me. The birthing experience of this, my first born, was not a pretty thing... a writing for another day :-)

And so I did not take in, in just this moment of his birth, that this was as huge as it was. But it was. And over time (whatever that is) I began to grasp the enormity of this. The shift in me caused by his entrance into this world and into my life.

So here's the thing. When I think about this now, when I write about it here or reflect about it over these years that he has grown from small sweet boy to kind and great man, it is not a reflection back. It is all right here. The twenty-seven years that pretend to fill the space between when he was first here and the here that he stands in now, this space is small. So small that it does not exist. 

The freshness of those rough and tumble images of my son when he was a boy merge into his journey as a man. I see him run from room to room, a cape around his neck just as clearly as I see him walk kindly around a hot and full yoga studio where he shares his wisdom and light, class after class. Where one image comes from years ago, in the clearness in my mind it stands hand in hand with the newness of the other. There is no time between the two and so no time between what is.

It is all right here now.

And so, just as my son grows forward my perspective changes as I, too, move forward. Or is it back? Or to the side just a bit so that things look different? Because this is what I mean by time not being real. If those things that happened before feel just as new as the things that will happen soon then of course they are all just what is in this moment in time (that word again). 

I think I need a new vocabulary. Instead of reflection back to what seems to have come before, I will now say that I am reflecting in on what has always been. And in this way, the image of my son on the day of his birth and my son, today, on this, his birthday, will just be one moment encompassing many.

Happy birthday, to you my wondrous boy.