“Appreciate” This Advice While You Can
You get a lot of advice, most of it unwanted, as a parent. It comes in the form of tips, projections, judgments or sometimes, delusional nonsense. A good chunk of it is practical, as in it describes specific actions you can choose to take, or not, but some of it is abstract and useless. And no advice is more abstract and useless than “Appreciate these days while you can. It will be over before you know it.”
I acknowledge that this advice comes from a sweet place. Usually older folks reminiscing about the days when their grown children were ungrown children. And time being this fickle, fleeting thing is something that virtually every human on the planet experiences. But there is quite literally no way to capitalize on this advice in the slightest.
Think about it this way: Has anyone in the history of the human species ever appreciated a moment or time of their life enough as it happened that they didn’t miss it later in life? I’m not talking about changing as a person and not wanting to go back to earlier days. Like the thought of having to do high school over again being really unappealing or something. No, more like, “those days were so amazing and awesome, but I don’t miss them even slightly because I really appreciated them as they were happening!”
Appreciating moments as they come does nothing for whether or not you miss the days. You may look back on your past with indifference or disdain, but it won’t be because you appreciated them enough. Our memories are too weird for that. Time is this fire that burns our memories and often times the only rubble that is left are the good parts. Think of a picture of someone as a baby. An “ahhhh” coupled with a blast of nostalgia erupts from our brain, with the delirium from a lack of sleep, chunky poops, and crying completely filtered out. We just psychologically delete them.
Let me give you a personal example: Two of my kids are five and two. They both like sitting on my lap and reading books. When one hops on my lap, the other one is usually inspired to do the same. The trouble is, they both have very different definitions of “reading.” One prefers reading in the conventional sense, you know out loud and in the order indicated on the book. The other prefers flipping pages, pointing at random things, going backwards, and reading pages over again.
This almost always leads to screeching fights, turning the magic of reading into a tedious nightmare. In some amount of time, a year maybe two, this will go away. Someday, I may look back with reverence and miss it if you were to show a picture of me reading to them. The reality of having two screaming, whining kids on your lap is actually pretty lame, and telling myself I will miss this someday doesn’t help the present and won’t make me miss these days any less.
Sentimentality is inevitable. I feel it constantly. I look at photos of my nine-year-old, even as a toddler, and those days look like ancient history. I look forward and see the expiration date on her childhood looming. I remind myself to enjoy this time, but it does not matter. Some days are still shitty. You will miss earlier days in your life. (And probably you will convince yourself that the world was better then too.)
-B.S. Lewis
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