Making the world small

Meg Giordano

For a number of years, it was a regular part of my world to be up at night with babies. This, as many folks know, gets old real fast but it’s also pretty much what is to be expected if you have a baby. Everyone strategizes it out differently, and everyone feels it in their own way. I remember on occasion fighting rising panic as I’m sitting there in the dark, so very tired already and thinking about how the next day will come whether or not I manage to get any real sleep. Feeling each moment slipping by and feeling so helpless. Knowing that, while other folks were certainly supportive and sympathetic, this suffering was too ‘normal’ to expect the outside world to feel compelled to do anything about. This was mine to deal with. Every night.

Every. Night.

What do you do when your burden is a form of normal life, and for the time being you are helpless to make it any different?

I discovered one thing that felt like just the tiniest bit of agency, and I clung to it. I learned to turn the clock backwards to face the wall (if it were now, I would say I learned to turn my phone over). As soon as I would hear the baby in the middle of the night and would start to pull myself up, I would look away from the clock and turn it around so I wouldn’t know what time it was. What did it matter? I would be up for as long as I had to be up, regardless of the time. Why torture myself with knowing how many minutes were passing, and how short the time was before morning would arrive, and all that came with it?

On one level, this method was a desperate form of ‘ignorance is bliss.’ And it was – if not exactly bliss, it was mercy.

However, I began to notice that my practice of banishing time involved quite a bit more. I found that I was creating a space around me, a tent of peace, a retreat from the world. Actually, I wouldn’t say I was retreating from the world – rather, I was making my world small. This was my world. I almost never turned on a light, so even the darkness helped by closing around me and the baby. I don’t quite know why it made such a difference, but it did.

To be clear, I’m not sentimentalizing the situation. This didn’t turn my sleepless nights into ‘precious bonding time’ (though that may be the case for others). I can’t honestly say I was ‘savoring each moment, knowing it wouldn’t last.’ It was too normal for that. It was just that my reality became very small, and thus inhabiting it fully was more possible. You can’t be everywhere at once, and you can’t do it all – often, you can’t even do most. And when that feels most overwhelming, time can feel like your enemy.

But if your world is small, and you have banished time from your world, it becomes easier to not lose yourself. It’s just you and whoever you share that space with, and that’s pretty much all that happens. You inhabit the space with whatever is currently in you – and whatever is in you fills the space, and fills it abundantly. That could be good or bad, but one thing it isn’t is empty. Or rushing by you. Or leaving you behind. Or asking for more than you can give. The smaller your world, the more you are able to fill it, and even on occasion enjoy inhabiting it.

The outside world will tick on, and eventually, when the time is right, you’ll rejoin it. And likely it will indeed be bigger, faster, and more taxing than you have the ready resources to handle. But the secret, unseen agency you gained in your sojourn within your own timeless world stays with you.

Well, those days did of course pass, and I no longer sit awake with babies in the darkness of the night. But I’ve not forgotten the power I learned in those days. I still at times feel the impulse to make my world small, for just a bit anyway. Any number of things can make a person feel that time is being unkind – that they are helpless, watching as the minutes, hours, days rush by while they are suffering some burden that seems to drain the energy out of their life. And of course that’s true, and real. Time is passing. It would be silly to say it isn’t. In fact, as most of us come to discover, the burdens only get bigger with time – bigger pains, bigger losses, bigger failures. We still can’t be everywhere at once, and we still can’t do it all, or even most. And we realize that there are things we likely won’t ever get around to making good on. Life is too big for us. But this burden, too, is almost unbearably normal – and though people may be supportive and sympathetic, it is ours to face. Every day.

So, what can we do when our burden is a form of normal life, and for the time being we are helpless to make it any different? We can, every now and then, make our world smaller. We actually can. We can ‘clock out’ from our view of what our life holds and asks of us, or even what we genuinely want it to be, and just inhabit the space close around us. There, with those we bring into the space with us, may we discover we are big enough after all.