The Weight of Small Things

He is two years old. He weighs fourteen kilograms, which is something I know precisely because I carry him, often, and because his weight has become a kind of unit of measurement for presence. When he is asleep on my chest I can feel his breathing through my whole body. When he is awake and upset and wants to be held, the fourteen kilograms arrive suddenly and heavily and with conviction.

I have been thinking about weight lately — the weight of small things, and the way that small things accumulate until they become the substance of a life.

The arithmetic of ordinary days

A toddler's day is arithmetic. Breakfast, then play, then the protest against nap time, then nap, then snack, then the long afternoon which is the longest part of the day, then bath, then dinner, then the battle over bedtime which is negotiated differently every night and resolved differently every night and which he always loses and always treats as a defeat worthy of extensive commentary.

This sounds like a summary. It is not. Each of these things is, in person, enormous. Breakfast is not a meal — it is a negotiation over texture and temperature and which spoon and whether the banana goes on the left or the right. The protest against nap time contains multitudes: the genuine tiredness, the furious resistance to the tiredness, the way both exist simultaneously without apparent contradiction.

I used to be impatient with repetition. I valued novelty. I wanted, in the language of the productivity world I had been living in, to do things that scaled.

A toddler does not scale. A toddler is the opposite of scaling. He requires the same things, in the same sequence, with the same attention, every day. And what I am learning — slowly, against my nature — is that this is not a problem to be solved but a quality to be inhabited.

What presence actually means

People talk about being present as though it is an achievement, a mode you switch into. As though there is a technique for it. I used to read about it. I took it seriously as a concept.

What my son has taught me is that presence is not a technique. It is a consequence. When you are sitting on the floor with a two-year-old who is explaining, in great detail and with enormous seriousness, why the red block has to go on the top, you are present. Not because you decided to be. Not because you remembered your breathing. Because the alternative — to be elsewhere in your mind while your body is on the floor — is too obviously a crime to commit.

He looked at me once, mid-explanation about the block, and said, "Appa, you listening?" I was. I am trying always to be.

The weight, continued

He is asleep now as I write this. In an hour he will wake up and come looking for me, and whatever I am doing will stop being the most important thing.

This used to feel like interruption. It doesn't anymore. Or rather — it still does, in the small mechanical sense, but the interruption no longer has the quality of loss. It has the quality of returning to the thing that is actually going on.

Fourteen kilograms, asleep, breathing in the other room. The weight of small things.