How Children Hold Us
I feel so lucky whenever I hold my kids’ hand. I’m saving them from oncoming traffic, but they’re saving me from incipient mortality. I’m walking them into this world, but they’re walking me out. We’re both ultimately helpless. We hold each other, really, hand in hand.
That’s the reason the children are here. When Din Anna was murdered, the family became wildly unbalanced. All death, all the time. That’s why I brought the children back to Sri Lanka while my wife stayed behind in Oxford. Our nuclear family split to give the greater family energy. The children think they’re being cared for by doting elders, but they don’t get it. They care for the elders. They give them life.
The children are blissfully unaware and when you’re caring for them you can catch a contact high. Children's emotions are so outside their body that adults have to step in to modulate them, which means we have to be on their wavelength for a while. That means you have to really focused on mundane things like every green fleck in a pasta or uncomfortable socks or how cool this rock is or what that bird is doing. Kids are in a constant flow state and you have to be with them to keep it from overflowing. I wouldn’t call this a meditative state but it’s an insistent madness that nonetheless forces you to concentrate.
