February, A Moment & Passing

Awake in the Winter.

It is February. We have deep snow, but a warmer day has moved in and now we are seeing puddles in the street. Snow and soup. Slowly the trees are losing their coverage and the thick ground is narrowing. The smell is wet. Sometimes wet and slightly warmer is colder than frozen cold. I definitely felt it in the creek today… the newly rushing cold water felt considerably colder than the slow moving slush of last week.

February is a like a temporary month, so short in its presence. The thick of winter sets in during January, and suddenly my mind is ready for more. More winter, more cold, more frozen streets, more white landscapes and cross country trails. I’m ready for months of it, but that is now how our calendar works. February suddenly accelerates and here towards the end of it I find myself grasping, holding on for dear more, but I can see March coming, and I know more winter will roll in, but it’s temporary, this season will come to an end just as I’m starting to feel settled.

Such is life and the seasons therein.

The same thing happens across the board game.

I remember when our first child was born. I’d only recently settled into the idea of movement, travel, wide and expansive exploration. I’d nearly perfected the idea of seasonal work. I worked a ton, then traveled. My wife and I were on track to see the world, and in fact she’d already seen much of it. Sometimes we traveled together, sometimes we travelled apart. She was heavy into international travel while I was a sucker for the America West. We’d reconvene, work, and repeat. We mastered it. We’re ready for more. Then, with my help, she got pregnant. We weren’t really trying, though we weren’t really not trying either. We liked the idea of kids, just were not sure when, as we’d mastered a sort of travel centric lifestyle.

But suddenly that season came to an end. A new season began.

A baby.

Baby season was great. It honestly felt a little overwhelming at the time, but in a good way. It felt like it was going to last forever. But like all good seasons, suddenly you look up, just as you feel you are getting your stride, and holy shit, it’s almost over. By chance, actually by plan, we spread our kids out at just under 4 years. The second one we planned. It extended baby season, but not by much. Four years of raising kids, though it feels long at times while you are in it, does not actually last very long. The baby season is full of insanity… You have this little creature that has zero independence from you and relies on you for literally every single thing other than breathing. Feeding, keeping clean, movement, learning to walk, talk, social interaction, education, nature exposure… as a parent you are responsible for every single thing this little creature does. It is exciting, exhausting, fascinating, and most of all, brief. Most every parent I know doesn’t think so at the time, because when you are in it you aren’t really looking up, but it is fast.

And something shifts inside you. That season you were in before kids… that era is gone. It’s like last summer. You remember parts, but it’s different now. You are different. Everything is different. The world is different. And like February, it goes too fast. Just as you begin to come up for air, just as your kids start to evolve into a modicum of independence, something else emerges.

My oldest is just a few months from 20. My youngest is 16. Both are incredibly independent in most aspects of life, and thriving. At this point I see the parenting up until now as a really three phase era. Baby’s, kids, young adults. All three seasons go too fast. But I’m ok with it. I now recognize that all seasons do this. In geographic seasonal terms, as the world turns, and in life, the seasons we move through in the greater aspect of time. Just as you settle in, the earth shifts on its axis and every sunrise brings an evolution. Expect the unexpected.

This same notion can be applied well beyond our movement through the calendar, beyond the notion of raising kids, or seasons of our personal life.

We are in constant motion, moving through terrain. I think about the different decades I’ve gotten to experience in life. And here is one of the secrets I’ve discovered and constantly try to remind myself of. Embrace what draws you in when you see it, because you are never guaranteed that anything will repeat itself.

I think about times I was with my kids on a trip. At times I was tempted to think, well, we’ll just do this next time we are here, only to find out there is no next time. Or, I’ll take them next to I go do this or that, only to realize later, that that particular opportunity, though it seemed easily repeatable, is not. Never will be.

Perhaps the best analogy, though shallower, but one I see repeated over and over in my life relates to photography. This ties in with kids as well, but is across the board similar with taking photos… Perhaps out driving. I have my camera but am on the way somewhere specific (there are times when I’m driving no where specific, when the whole intention is to find a moment to stop and photograph) and I will see something beautiful, the way light is uniquely falling across the mountain on the other side of the valley, and I really want the photo, but it would pause my drive and I feel like I’m late, so I don’t, thinking, surely the light will hit that way again. Well in fact I can report, it almost never does hit that way again. Sometimes it is not worth putting down the thing I was doing to get the photograph, but more often than not I later regret not taking the split second to make it happen. Moments of light are fleeting and ever changing.

The same goes for late at night when I have an idea for writing. I keep my journal by the bed most nights, but even that at times feels too much to get to. I will lay in the dark debating whether or not to sit up, find a light and write the thing. Surely I’ll remember it in the morning. Surely this solid of an idea won’t get lost in the darkness. But just like the missed photograph, the missed idea is often completely forgotten. I don’t even know how this is possible sometimes, as I think it over and over trying to ingrain it before I drift back to sleep, but wildly, sometimes I can’t even remember the genre of thought I had. Sometimes I think I forget I had any idea at all. So now I know, if it is actually a good idea, just sit up and write it.

Fleeting moments. We pass by so many without pausing to embrace them. Sometimes it makes perfect sense, but many I’ve found over the years are moments I gave up for what? I can’t remember… didn’t actually matter. I’m trying to not do these. The phone is one of the worst sinkholes of time. The value of life is learning to embrace the most moments, even as they pass subtly around the edges.

This is one of my particular draws to photography. Even drawing. Even writing, though in reality writing can be a distraction for the actual reality. But it is its own beast, with its own draw, creating a world of something altogether different, creating a new reality. But photography stops me at a place in time. It creates a pause in which I can look for the subtleties that are drawing me in, helping me find the thing that I am noticing. How the light shines on the low hung branches, just across the top, shining with crystals of light fractured in the icy edge. And those subtle shadows in the pillows of snow. Or whatever. Sometimes it’s simply a pleasing shape of the hill.

I love to take those moments in, consider just for a moment what it is in the evolutionary history of our beings that creates this change in chemistry inside me that is created by simply seeing light reflected off a particular angle. In that moment, a moment of wonder, the question I always ask is, why did we evolve to think this is beautiful, even to the point of euphoric at times. What is it about standing on a mountain overlooking a sea of granite? Or on a beach, watching the sun to down? Or even just watching the steam rise out of my coffee cup in the winter cold? And I remember, these subtle little moments that modernity seems hellbent on taking away from our lives, these simple seconds in which we pause, here is where life is best lived. Is lived. And all it takes is a quiet consciousness to attain it.

February is passing swiftly. It’s almost to the end. My kids are no longer little. Winter is dripping. I go for a run up the hill with Acre. He has a tremendous amount of energy today, and in the thick snow he just leaps from place to place, but even after several miles, while I’m exhausted from the deep, wet snow that isn’t quite packed, he doesn’t seem to have burned any energy off yet. He’s so damn happy running in the snow, it’s contagious.

It’s now night. The temperatures are dropping. Puddles are freezing. The light from somewhere a thousand miles away is reflecting off the snow, still a little of it lingering in the trees and a full desert of it across the valley.