Finding Contentment in the Rhythms of an Everyday Life

As my daughter's second birthday approached, I found myself thinking a lot about the first few months of her life.

He arrived on Sunday morning as winter gave him spring, full of life and ready to accept his personality as a brand new person. There was snow blowing on the ground, and the sunrise that day was full of anticipation and ignorance coming along and waiting for something impossible to predict.

We brought her home a few days later, insecure and anxious like most new parents, and we sat in the rhythm of nursing, changing diapers, washing diapers, teasing the baby to sleep, and waiting for him to cry so the pattern could continue.

It was a rhythm of trial and immeasurable joy, somehow it all came together in one. As the cliché moves, having a baby changes everything.

I remember the first day I left the house alone and walked around a nearby lake. I remember feeling scared that she would need to breastfeed while I was gone, and that my husband would have to deal with a crying baby until I returned.

I remember sloping gray and muddy as I made my way down the dirt road to the dirt road. I remember feeling the sun on my face and how good it was to restore the use of my body.

I remember feeling like that way of walking - even in muddy swamps and bad weather - was enough to satisfy my need to feel alive and on my own skin, one person who embraced his personality, all day long.

I remember coming home from the meltdown back to the rhythm. I remember feeling like being part of this rhythm was enough.

That feeling of satisfaction in having only one half hour alone, outside, moving around the world on foot lasted for a few months. I felt a sense of peace after running in, or spending time in the garden, or climbing for a long time in the woods.

I went back to work full time and started running or working in the garden in the morning when the sun came up.

Despite the additional requirements for adding function to the rhythm of the day, that sense of peace - the idea that the normal rhythm of ‘living with a child’ was enough - was forgotten. For a while.

A few months after the baby wrote his first birthday, I saw that feeling of peace slippery. I found myself looking for more time, more resources, and more flexibility to do what I wanted to do.

I found myself wanting to feel like I was making a difference, I said I was old enough, I said I was happy enough. I found myself wanting to feel satisfied with life and I wanted to feel satisfied every day. But I was not there.

Elsewhere in the space between my daughter’s birthday and her twentieth birthday, that sense of peace caught up behind a different rhythm that felt busy and lacking and inadequate.

Walking for half an hour outside was no longer for me. After going inside, I wanted another half hour, then another, and then another. Sometimes all the time in the world, all the recognition in the world, all the joy in the world, would not feel enough.

I will not say that I have fully experienced that feeling of complete satisfaction. But as I think about my daughter’s newborn months, as her second birthday approaches, I bring back some of this peace.

In accepting that feeling of inadequacy, dissatisfaction, and happiness that comes and goes, I urge that peace to return to normal.

There is no doubt that it will still be a rhythm of temptation, weight loss, and immeasurable happiness, for that is what it means to be human. It is about exploring mountains and embracing valleys and their shadows.

It is about remembering that happiness and peace always exist even if they seem to be buried under schedules of wanting, dissatisfaction and fear.

It’s about seeing something unusual and strange like walking around a frozen lake on a muddy road. It is about remembering that we are all full of life and have the power to fully embrace our personality.

It is about knowing the conscience of doing something to change the feeling or the constant need to deal with our desire to get more - and to let it be there. Sometimes there is nothing to be done but to accept that being human means allowing all emotions to speak, and then letting it go when it no longer works.

Maybe accepting our personality and the life that comes with it means celebrating the anticipation and ignorance that comes with waiting for something that is impossible to guess