The Unexpected
Some days, you wake up and a fallen limb or ice has busted every pipe or pump or road. You get a job to do that frustrates every plan.
Some days, you wake up and a light brush of snow has visited every branch and bench and stair. You get a morning coffee view, a gift of beauty.
When I had a baby, I became a data gathering fiend. I recorded every second of every day into a perfect little app that made graphs of the time spent feeding or sleeping. And I mined that data for patterns; I got peace.
Amidst the sea of waves that is nurturing a new human, data was my life raft. I sat right above the mayhem. When the first big transition came a few months later — when brain growth demanded more calories more frequently — I posted publicly about my frustration with the shift in prediction power.
“He’s a human, not an experiment,” one friend wisely (or rudely?) reminded me.
But I refused to put away my baby accounting until he was well over a year old — until enough unexpected days had taught me that I could hold them, too.
Sometimes, we have to number our days: count our steps or track our heart rate or log our symptoms so we can find order in the chaos, patterns in the pain. The data is like tracks in the snow as we scurry to fix a break or soothe a cry.
