It’s like… time and shit, man… shit’s weird.

She bellows as she runs. Objectively it’s a pint-size bellow because she’s only nine, so it’s easy to see it as cute - she’s a LITTLE person and it can be funny to see littles acting big - but for her size it’s a full body roar, and the urge to call it cute is dismissive. She’s a little PERSON and this is her taking on a real challenge. She bellows, runs, eyebrows scrunched, lips pulled back and teeth bared in a snarl, fists clenched and she runs toward the ramp and wall, and misses.

We’re at the kids ninja gym. She’s trying the warped wall. They have six walls in ascending height. She can do the smallest two, and is now working on three. She runs at it easily a dozen times, maybe fifteen or twenty or twenty five, in sets of three to six until she’s panting at the end of each set. She gets closes in the middle. “Daddy I touched the top this time!” I honestly admire the determination. She has more of it at nine than I think I’ve ever had. I don’t know if she has an internal mental life like my, full of the worst self talk. I try not to let on about mine, in the fear it might be contagious. I feel like a successful parent in these moments of distance, noticing the ways she is not turning out like me. I worry sometimes she will have terrible musical taste as a result. I’d live with that, happily, content to grow old talking with my fellow misfit friends about unlistenable music my thriving child doesn’t understand.

My five year old walks repeatedly across one of the balance obstacles, gripping my hand with hers, tiny and sweating with nervousness, as the obstacle wobbles. With each try she’s a little braver and more independent. Here too the pride of distance; please she seems on track please let her stay on track, don’t let her end up like me in terms of fearfully shying away from effort, I catch myself thinking that sometimes in the voice I used to pray to god and my dead relatives when I was seven. I’ve made progress, I will say, on being brave, and I talk about that a little with my kids, praising their effort and bravery.

I have been struggling with time lately, having trouble situating myself in time. I want it to go faster in that I want to skip through all the stress and sleepless nights and low bank balances, the avalanche of it all, and get to a lower rate of flow, a more manageable amount of life per hour. And I want it to go faster because I anticipate it will someday slow down. Let’s just fast forward through this bit, then do the next bit at half tempo. But I also don’t want to fast forward, I want to slow it down, freeze it, because I can feel my children’s childhoods accelerating away from me. Big’s gonna be ten soon, with eleven, twelve, teenager hood just around the corner. She’s closer to the age of moving out than to when she was born. My middle’s six in just a few weeks, starting to read, knows things of her own - she quizzes me about animals she learned about on PBS, and is starting to stop being surprised every time she knows things I don’t. The baby will be two before I know it, is already running around, starting to talk. She’s little in body and not a lot of hair so she still looks babyish but acts more like a small kid every day. All of them are bigger and more sophisticated by the day and I love that, and the frequency of their milestones is so fast - especially coming as the milestones do amid the rush and the push of the rest - that I lose some my ability to appreciate or even notice sometimes. And then when I do notice the moments as just flashes. The middle holds the baby’s hands as the baby walks across the living room. The biggest reads the middle a book, the two of them cuddled up under a blanket. The baby flops on top.

I want to photograph it, tape record it, film it, to have to relive later (when? In what spare time?). I find myself mid-moment sometimes worrying about my calendar, all the dumb shit demanding my time, and then in the moments when I can get my head out of that space I sometimes find myself fretting for lack of documentation, knowing I will later wish I could relive this and regret the lack of a record of the moment and that future regret travels back in time to the present and pulls me halfway out of the moment now. Of course often trying to document means I miss the moment altogether, especially with the baby, who shouts and cries for any electronic device in sight. The greater I give reign to my impulse to documentation the more experiences come pre-ruined. I suppose I am just old man now griping at those computerized camera phones that young people have got these days in my day we had no such thing. If I am honest in my heart I miss the feel and sound of polaroid, and what I still think of as ‘regular cameras’ as if digital were not the norm now.

I felt great delight watching my kids at the gym, and helping them and celebrating with them, a few hugs and many high fives. I wanted to photo and video it all. Couldn’t, my phone’s memory is nearly full - too many digitized memories, and too cheap a phone - and I needed to do hands on help, like holding the five year old as she scrambled up the wall. I want to just enjoy these instances in their fleeting happening and I worry because my retention rate will be less than one hundred percent, and I know all the moments I don’t retain were ones worth keeping.

Occasionally a friend will ask how my weekend was, or my week or month or season or year or three depending on low long it’s been since we talked, and my mind will halt completely, all the chattering of self doubt and fear of climate change and student load debt and the snippets of song lyrics all fall into a hush, a moment of complete blank and silence - the same thing used to happen when I would go to record stores and I would be in a mental free fall wondering “do I even like music?” - and I will say something like “ummm, I don’t remember. Fine, I’m sure. If it was bad I would recall it.”

I can’t tell if my mind blanking like this is good or bad. Perhaps the blank means I lived in the flow of doing as the doing took place. Perhaps it means I retained none of these meaningful moments and will regret later that I can’t give an account of how I spent my time (“And so passed / The time given to me on earth”) nor what any of it meant. Was I happy over the weekend? I don’t even know what I had for breakfast yesterday. Grapenuts, I think? No it was fridge oats with dates and salt and a bit of coconut oil. The little brainspace I have left is full of that kind of minutia - breakfasts, work emails, smalltalk. Deadtime masquerading as human interaction.

I worry the minutia will crowd out the good times, that I will end up not knowing how I spent my time, forgetting that I have spent so much of it really in fact quite well. I can feel the good times passing even as they happen, receding into the background of boredom and annoyance, small paper boats in a torrent of bill paying and dishwashing and work emails and meetings and smiling and nodding at strangers. The signal to noise ratio on daily life is poor, far too much static and so much of it fundamentally eliminable and my anger at the unnecessaryness of all the dumb shit, that it would be entirely possible to live without all this dead time, becomes just another sink down which I pour time.

It’s fine. It’s all fine. Everything’s fine. Genuinely so. Life’s pretty sweet - these great kids, a decent marriage, good music, friends - just a bit of bitter taste close to the rind. I feel content a moment, this is what it is, this is how it goes, this is fine, it’s good, it’s enough. And then I’m off to wondering again, the old loop, the bad infinity. I wonder if I’d look back more happily if I had more documentary evidence of it all. And I wonder if I’d have less to look back on if I spent more time documenting it. Kierkegaard again I suppose, do it or do not do it, you will regret both. Infinite resignation.