It’s 4a.m.
I’ve been awake for an hour, and surrender has washed over me. I know I’m not going to be returning to bed tonight.
I have my small boy in my arms, and he has finally found his way into a peaceful sleep, huffing and sighing the slumber of a baby cutting teeth and learning new things and made restless by any number of other monumental changes in his tiny life.
And I’m wishing, somewhat frantically, that I had my phone with me.
I flip between mindfulness – noticing how laughably (and sadly) lost I feel without stimulus – and sheer desperation, plotting a stealthy move back upstairs to retrieve it, hoping that I don’t wake my wee one along the way.
He snuffles a little, and stirs, and I take a breath. I sit still. I sit inside my discomfort. I make a nest there and look down at the parted lips of my sweet baby, his impossibly long eyelashes. I look out the window and imagine my neighbours, snuggled, snoring, dreaming. Gratitude for warmth wraps me in my grandmother’s fleece shawl, which I am thankful to have remembered to toss over my shoulders on my way downstairs, which I am thankful is the symbol of maternal comfort in our house. My children know to calm their bodies and slow their breath at its softness on their cheeks.
I daydream, a little, about the many cups of tea I will drink this morning, once the sun shines through the windows, in an attempt to shake off this sleepless night.
I wish I had my phone again.
(a work in progress, this is).
But it’s a lesson, nonetheless. A realization that I have been too quick to grab for its familiar shape and glowing screen, for the mindless scrolling made justified when I convince myself that I am “looking for inspiration” or “networking.” I have lost, hopefully only for a short time, the ability to let silence and softness and darkness just be.
I remind myself that it is in this silence and softness and darkness that my intuition awakens. It is where inspiration lives, and gratitude, and spaciousness, and self-awareness. It is where I can go to feel found when I feel lost. It is where time stops and my children stay children, innocent, with impossibly long eyelashes, huffing in their sleep. It is me.