Farther along than you know.

The journey.

The other night I was putting Isaac to bed, and he was upset. Like a rumpled baby elephant. I couldn’t help kissing his little, perfect, nearly seven-year-old self, and it was hard to be serious about his worries, even though I tried. Worries are worries, after all.

He was fretting over future problems, or the phantoms of future problems. Specifically, is there any other way for us to get around India than by train? And if so, can we take it, because he doesn’t like getting on and off really fast!

The backstory to this is our last trip to India as a family, which was in 2018. We took a lot of train journeys. They were fairly calm, although there was one general class trip, but only for a few hours. But some of the stations have brief stops, and if we boarded or disembarked at those stations, we had to get ready and then walk on or off quickly. 

Isaac found this scary.

So there he was, worrying about a future trip that has no date even in the calendar yet, and a future self that feels just as scared as his six-year-old self about walking onto a train quickly. 

I hugged and kissed him and said, “We don’t even know when we’re traveling again.”

The truth is that his future self will be up to the task, and will laugh when he realizes that this is what he was afraid of. He’s enlarged it in his mind. Little five-year-old Isaac was more scared than seven, or eight or nine-year-old Isaac will be. And in his memory, it has become a desperate leap from a train, rather than, “Okay everyone, grab your bags and be ready to get off.”

I can relate.

Lying in bed, fretting about something that has seemed hard in the past, imagining that it will be just as hard in the unknown future, discounting years and days of growth, all those infinitesimal steps that shift glaciers and erode rock, that harden and toughen us in the best ways, while softening us at the same time. We are growing. These hard things are changing us, creating new pathways in our brains. Our limbs are stronger, our minds are quicker. We can handle it. My words for you are the same as they were for Isaac.

You are so much farther along, little one. You can do so much more than you used to be able to do. 

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