Infancy

Infants and small children take naps. Now, I take naps.

I was once told that it was the amount of new world to process that caused the young to sleep more (although still not nearly enough, according to some parents I know). It is while we sleep that our brains organize and filter all the information that has passed into our busy minds through our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin. That is my excuse.

While living in the world is not new to me, everything is new. This world is not the world I have lived in for the past several years. This world is not even the world that I have lived in ever. Sure, I've seen and felt grass before, but less often than dust and concrete. Sure, breathing is an old habit, but breathing wet air, humid dampness, and it is not a vacation breathing but every day real life breathing. And every day I take one more step into the living of a full life here and now.

I take pleasure in the freshness of it, approaching life like a five year old child, seeing things as if they are new. Even the old seems new and I wonder if now in this world I could learn to clap and cheer for the rising of the sun.  I will take pleasure in the time when I finally become comfortable with this world too, though. There is a joy in each stage that differs from other joys like the joy that comes from playing volleyball on a sunny beach is different from the joy of sitting next to a wood fire reading a book during a snowstorm.

So I learn and adjust and nap.

Some Quotes I Found Digging Through Old Papers

Those to whom Christ is precious, will long that others should taste of that preciousness.  --Thomas Chalmers


Ferdinand: "Wherefore weep you?"
Miranda: " At mine unworthiness, that dare not offer what I desire to give, and muchless take what I shall die to want"
--The Tempest III ii l. 77-79


It is what she needs; no thin Idealist, no coarse Realist, but a man whose eye reads the heavens while his feet step firmly on the ground, and his hands are strong and dexterous for the use of human implements. A man religious, virtuous and--sagacious; a man of universal sympathies, but self-possessed; a man who knows the region of emotion, though he is not its slave; a man to whom the world is no more spectacle, or fleeting shadow, but a great solemn game to be played with good heed, for its stakes are of eternal value, yet who, if his own play be true, heeds not what he loses by the falsehood of others. --Margaret Fuller