Watching your child grow up causes time to bend in a strange way. Being a parent is the only thing that can make five years seem like an eternity, yet it also passes in a flash. Only being a parent can create this contradiction. I'm thinking about the essence of time as my kid approaches this milestone. At five, she's in the beautiful process of becoming. She's no longer a completely helpless baby, but not yet the confident child who will navigate the world more and more on her own. It's an in-between phase, a doorway separating two distinct stages of being.
The Greeks spoke of chronos and kairos - chronological time versus the right moment. Her five years can be traced in chronos: 1,825 days, tons of diapers, first steps, first words. But it's the kairos moments that cut through the daily haze: her first real belly laugh, the day she called the moon beautiful, the morning during a car drive she said she really loved Taylor Swift. Five is the age of infinite questions, where "why" is both a greeting and an approach to life.
Through her perspective, I'm reminded that wonder is not only the beginning of wisdom - it is wisdom. She approaches each day as a scientist, explorer, doctor, and artist - experimenting with slime, flashlights, toy medical kits, solving puzzles, building blocks, drawing and painting and signing her name on the paper, cherishing every visit to the local library, going on picnics in the woods with her binoculars and being intrigued by deer, snakes, rabbits, and people we’d encounter, and one day saying that our small-breed dog, Harper, would somehow grow up to be a “big dog someday, and then we’ll train her to be a smart dog.”
As she turns five, I'm struck by the realization that being a parent means constantly living in the present while being pulled in different directions. We work hard to prepare her for an uncertain future, but at the same time we cling desperately to each fleeting moment. Perhaps this is what brings the most profound reality of parenting: it makes us time travelers. In our minds, we simultaneously inhabit our own childhood memories, our children's present, and the adult versions of ourselves they will eventually become.
Five years old is a full hand of fingers, a galaxy of memories, a lifetime of love, all compressed into 1,825 individual days, each a complete cosmos in and of itself.
