It's hard to do vipassana meditation when your wife is in the next room throwing up. I don't blame her though, she was pumped full of drugs, hadn't eaten all day and the obstetrics surgeon was just about to get out her scalpel. I persevered though, as earlier that day I had embarrassed myself by almost fainting when the anaesthetist had pushed the epidural needle into her spine. It worked. I stayed conscious, and a few minutes later I was holding a new life in my arms as it blinked with discomfort in the brightness of the theatre. She was born to the sound of Van Morrison. Wouldn't have been my first choice, but I wasn't running the show.
That was about 2 hours ago. Technically, an event for yesterdays day log. This is actually a sequel. Before I catch up on a days worth of lost sleep, I thought I'd share a few ideas about the human condition. Go ahead and down vote me; I'm a father again and nothing else matters.
unblemished:
Look into a new born child's eyes and you'll see innocence. Yes, yes, you all say. We've heard it all before. Stop; think about it like this next time. I don't just mean some notion of inate mental innocence, or the idea that the purity of the whites of their eyes represents something none of us have. The whites of a new born's eyes aren't even white. They're a sort of bluey-grey. But they're completely unblemished. There's not a mark on the bluey-grey surface. Next time you look in the mirror think about how we abuse our sight and how the things we wish we'd never witnessed leave their marks in the creeping veins and discolouration of your ciliary body.
we're the same all over:
Our relationship to our skin is shaped by the way we use it. The skin of a new born child feels exactly the same all over. The soles of the feet feel the same as the chest. The fingers are as smooth as the cheek. There is no hierarchy to the way our external envelop should be treated. Only patterns of use as we grow leave a history in the thickening and texture of the skin as it stretches like a hypersurface to perfom it's duty around our machinery.
Suddenly the monitor induced pain in my eyes and the callouses on my mouse-finger seem like a terrible mistake.
But maybe that's because I haven't slept for over 24 hours.