Life’s Circle Game*
Some things we learn from experience. We learn other things from watching. Small children discover what it is to be raised by observing their parents as they learned what’s involved in child-rearing. As a new father, trial and error taught me how to parent young children. At the same time, I watched my parents as they learned the new challenges of parenting the young adults we had become.
I thought that was the entire circle of life and learning. At every stage, I was sure I had arrived at an understanding of how it all works. It was as simple as accepting that each generation is born, takes its place in the world, and then passes from view. But, there is much we cannot begin to imagine. Our vision is small, and the distance to our horizons is short. Speaking about the lifelong search we engage in, T.S. Eliot famously said in his poem, Four Quartets:
…the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Here I am, watching again, learning from my grown children how they parent their offspring, just as I learned about raising young children from watching how my parents raised me.
And here I am again, discovering how to parent grown children, just as I learned from observing my parents navigate the shoals of being parents to me and my siblings.
But there is more. I saw my parents become the best grandparents possible to our children. They seemed to do it effortlessly.
Now, my wife and I are exploring how to be the best grandparents possible to our own grandchildren. The circle rotates unendingly, reaching orbits unimaginable, until those orbits become real.
Our children have now become mature adults, close to being in their middle years. Our grandchildren will live in a world we couldn’t have fathomed a decade ago. And us? There are more years behind us than there are before us. But still, we explore. It is the state of being human, of being alive. When we cease exploring and being curious, we will have given up motion. And, as one of our children said recently, motion is life. Without motion, life ends.
What, you might ask, remains to be discovered?
Magic and joy. The fortunate among us are led to a promised land in which we have increasingly more in common with our mature children. It is a world sweeter than could have been envisioned, a world in which we are not raising grown children as much as befriending them, and they us. It is a world in which we offer the benefit of our lived experience. In turn, they offer us the equally important gift of their vision and vitality, a view of current reality that would otherwise be inaccessible to us.
We laugh together at the absurdity of the world. We share the experiences we’ve had. If it’s true that children can never really know their parents, this is the time of life when closing that gap becomes possible. They are old enough to be curious about our early experiences and capable of understanding how those experiences formed us.
This, too, is part of life’s circularity. Knowing how parents became the kind of people they are affords children a perspective on the impact their histories might have on their lives. It further opens the possibility that we all have the power to choose who we want to become: we need not be captive to the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. What parent would not delight in presenting a child with such an unexpected freedom?
It’s not always easy or simple. There is teaching going on as well as learning. Only now, it’s intergenerational, and it goes both ways. It is punctuated not only by love and laughter, but also by friendship and common experience. And, above all, by our common devotion to the third generation.
I wonder, is this where I started? Have I come full circle? Is this how it feels to know the place for the first time?
If so, how wonderful. And if not, I look forward to arriving there. It will feel like reaching home after a long journey. Either way, what a surprising and unexpected gift. For us all.
*With thanks to Joni Mitchell for “The Circle Game”