6 Year Olds and the Nature of Time

At Sea with Justin McRoberts

If you pay attention to my life in any way, shape, or form, you know that I have a 12-year-old, almost 13, and a six-year-old; she just turned six. My six-year-old, I call her the bird. She has a really unique and interesting relationship with time. And over the last, I don't know, three, four years, I've been paying attention to and learning from the way she actually experiences time. So when she has a memory about something, and it's something that was significant to her, if it's something that was important, or she feels impacted by, she'll say that it was yesterday. That's it's the word she uses. Do you remember yesterday? Now, when I hear her say that, my brain registers this calendar image, and I know that the event she's talking about wasn't yesterday; it was maybe two weeks ago; it could have been a year ago. But for her, the relationship she has to the moment to the memory isn't actually predicated on or measured by some, like, grid of blocks with dates and colored words. It's in her soul. That thing that happened is actually still close to her. She's still holding it right there. In her brain. In her body. She remembers it like it was yesterday; you've maybe heard that phrase; I remember it like it was yesterday. I think part of what we mean when we say that is that this thing that happened, in quote, the past is still deeply significant to me. So here's where Caitlin, the bird's relationship, the time is reinforcing the way I live my own life. Some of the most important things that have happened to me happened many years ago, three years ago, five years ago, and 20 years ago; I'm thinking of some specific things right now. And when my mind orients itself, when my soul orients itself towards those events, they're right there in front of me, quote, as if it was yesterday. And when I tell myself, Hey, that was a long time ago, I realized now that part of what I'm doing is saying, hey, that shouldn't have the hold on you that it does today because of how many days ago or weeks ago or months ago or years ago, it was its distance from this date on some grid calendar should matter more to you than your soul's experience of that event. What I'm doing when I tell myself that it was too long ago to matter is I'm denying my own experience of my own life. Whereas my six-year-old is looking into her own soul and saying, This still matters. Right now, because of the way I'm experiencing it, because of the way I feel it. So while I'm certainly on board with the whole notion that feelings are not facts and that my experience of a thing doesn't define the thing itself. I also know that the way I live my life from day to day, and the way I relate to the people around me, the way I'm postured to give myself to the day I'm in is actually really impacted and shaped and formed by my experience of my past. And I need to grant myself not just permission but actual space to let my yesterday, the yesterday that's still talking to me right now, actually get integrated into my today so that I can be more like my six-year-old, who emotionally is far more whole and present to her life than I am. The calendar shape, its blocks, and its coding inform my soul far too deeply. I'm far too quickly moving from one thing to the next. And I don't let my actual experience of the day before it catch up to me before I'm on to the next thing, which is to say that the practice of rest of stopping regularly throughout the course of my life allows the days before me to catch up with me. So that when I step into tomorrow, I'm more fully integrated. I'm more fully myself. I know who I am because I remember who I was; I can sift between things that mattered and didn't matter to me from the days before so that I can be more completely and wholly who I am in the days to come. The practice of rest is not just a divorce from the drudgery of daily life. It is a way to allow myself to become fully integrated as a human so that I can be fully who I am in the life that I'm living.