“Time is Emotion”

Dear Horizon,

This past Wednesday was your 4 week birthday. The other night as you fell asleep on my chest, I had a surreal vision of you as a young man. You were even taller than your dad and fully out there on your own. Then I drifted off to sleep, but the vision was so strong that when your dad came back to the room I told him in a slight panic that you had grown up already and it was way too fast.

Even after he helped me wake up fully, I felt the lingering sense of having already missed important and beautiful moments with you over this past 4 weeks, even though I have barely even left your side for more than five or ten minutes since you were born. The rest of this letter is my attempt to make sense of this and find something valuable to share with you in the future and with others going through a similar challenge right now.

So I’ll just start by saying this whole “postpartum in a pandemic” is so disorienting... in some ways I’ve never been more present- physically, energetically, emotionally, and spiritually.... but in other ways, I have never felt more distracted and unfocused... and presence is directly related to our experience of time, so this is a good starting point for my exploration.

I don’t know where the influence of postpartum hormones and the impact of too much tragic news starts and stops, but I often feel like they are rushing over each other in waves of wide ranging emotions. In the course of a day I might find myself flooded with oxytocin, crying in gratitude for the gift of having you and your father and our family in one moment, laughing at the absurdity of a Coronavirus meme, and feeling angry and disgusted over yet another failed attempt to secure toilet paper.

The thing is, I fully expected my postpartum experience to be guided solely by you and your needs-not a clock, to- do list, or calendar. I was looking forward to this season when for once the world tells those who gave birth that they can put their schedules and calendar reminders on pause (Albeit for an embarrassingly short amount of time).

But what I didn’t expect was that this unscheduled, sacred season of bonding with you would take place in a world now suddenly unmoored from any coherent sense of chronological time. The internet is flooded with memes that show how our days, weeks and time itself are all blurring together. My favorite internet finds so far are “what a long year this week has been”, and “is it Saturday or 2023?”

I wonder if that’s why I saw you as a grown man in my vision—because in some ways, every day since you were born 28 days ago has felt like a year. The new normal for most of us seems to be- by all observations I’ve made on social media that we have long stretches of non- covid related activities (Netflix, homeschooling, exercise, working from home, etc.) punctuated by varying doses of reality whether that be in the form of consuming memes, watching pressers, reading news articles, navigating our daily needs, and dealing with the ever increasing complexity of logistics required to meet them. (We need to set up an unpacking and sanitizing station outside our house at this point).

All new parents feel some sort of need to capture the precious and fleeting moments of our children’s lives- thus the endless options for journals and memory books. I signed up for this cool app to help me document your journey with us. Everyday, like clockwork, it texts me questions to answer about you. It’s so much more responsive than an empty journal waiting for me to fill it with stories of your first days on earth.

For the first few days I couldn’t wait to respond and upload pictures to the app, but as the days of shelter- in- place and social distancing have gone on, one seeming just like the next, I find myself wanting the app to ask me questions that matter more than “what’s my favorite feature of Jorah”. Questions that seemed perfectly normal just 3 short weeks ago now sound hollow and even insensitive in some cases. Even the more substantive question I got last night, “what’s one piece of advice you want to give Jorah” rings rather hollow in light of the circumstances we are now living in.

One piece of advice? One? I want to write books to you about what matters most, I want to upload pictures of every place I’ve ever visited around the world and describe it to you in vivid detail, I want to introduce you to the people around this country and the world that I hold dear in my heart. I want to do it all NOW- but it’s too early and too late all at the same time. Can the app please speed up time or take us back in time?

I need time to speed up or stop or back up——because if I’m honest about it, I realize that underneath my well practiced ability to shift my state and have a higher quality emotional experience, I am AFRAID - maybe even terrified that after all these years of waiting and praying for you that our time together will be cut short. No, we are never promised any specific time period for our lives - but none of us could have imagined the cruelty of a virus that ends so many lives so abruptly, separating us while we are healthy AND while we are sick.

I got a taste of the wrenching pain of victims and their families this week when our beloved 12 year old dog Mila had to be hospitalized via curbside drop off and none of us could see her for over 24 hours. I cried inconsolably imagining if the worst happened and I couldn’t be by her side. Thankfully she is home now, and almost back to normal, but the experience shook me.

Last night I read an article in the Atlantic that called you Generation C. The author asserts, “As we’ll see, Gen C’s lives will be shaped by the choices made in the coming weeks, and by the losses we suffer as a result... As Gen C grows up, foreign plagues replace communists and terrorists as the new generational threat...”

Sounds disheartening, but somehow it made me feel better to see that “they” have already developed a “label” for you and your peers and even identified your generational threat! Labels bring comfort in uncertain times, and even seeing pandemics such as this one described as the new generational threat you and your peers will experience, endure, and fight normalizes our current situation to some extent. “They” even joke about the future day when people of your generation might choose to just skip the covid vaccination that ironically shaped so much of their lives.

So back to my desire to collapse time end experience everything with you, the closest I can come is to write about them now- while we are both here together. I trust that reminding myself of the wisdom and teachings that have elevated and shaped my life will add a healing balm to my own process of grieving along with a world that will never be the same. May they serve to remind me that although this is certainly my first pandemic, I have spent years carving out deep grooves on healing pathways that will always be there to serve me when I seek them. I pray that the intensity of having life stripped down to the barest of bones in this season will give me clarity on what truly matters most.

So to come full circle with where this letter started documenting my anxiety about losing time with you, this teaching from Tony Robbins is such an important guide- “Time is an emotion. A feeling. A way of looking at life that provides an emotional state. Think about it. How do you know how long something really takes other than by how it feels? A minute can feel like eternity when you're not fulfilled.”

Sure this could explain how we collectively don’t seem to know if it’s Saturday or the year 2023, but how can we be fulfilled in the midst of unprecedented global grief? And the answer is we can’t —— IF our fulfillment is in achievement or most of the things our culture has traditionally valued —-but it absolutely can be- IF we find our fulfillment in growth, gratitude, and contribution.

I want to be about the business of harvesting moments from my memory bank that cause my heart to swell and soar, and hunting the chance to grow, be thankful, and give to others in my present condition, no matter how challenging it is to do so. I saw an Instagram story of a well known teacher suffering with covid who told everyone about the practical ways she was working to recover AnD how her practice of gratitude was really the only thing bringing her any real relief. I believe the reason is simple- gratitude and the positive emotions that are created from growing and giving drive us toward LOVE.... which cannot coexist with fear.

So what would the app have asked me this week if I had a choice in the question?

What would you tell Horizon is the key to living a fulfilling life and making the most of the time he has to spend on this planet? We are living our way into the answers each day with gratitude and growth and emotions as our guides.

 I love you so much, Mom