The Perspective of Tone

Lately I've been thinking about perspective. How much it changes with time, how much it changes us. It's impossible not to have any, yet very difficult to summon. Especially when trying to live at the current moment; of which, not doing so, of course, is impossible.

As an interesting side note, I started this post on 1/12/10.

I think I lost it for a while there, Perspective. Just before I had my 2nd son in November... my whole life was Life As Mom. I never had a great surprise party for turning 30, no collegial late 20s--that glorious Purgatory before a serious mortgage but after the impressionable early 20s. I was never in college, in teenage angst, and certainly not listening to Pink Floyd as a precocious pre-teen. My entire Being was always centered around shuttling someone around and being at a little person's beck and call.

Wait, that's not right, is it? Have I always had someone else in the #1 spot? Of course not. But it seems that way sometimes, the reversal of life's focus so complete. So complete that not one square inch of my car interior doesn't show some effect of a toddler being captive inside much of the time. So complete that phone conversations with friends invariably involve the mysteries of the toddler mind, and denigrate to poop. Lack of sleep means I hang up without ever saying the reason I called.

Even my brain is unrecognizable. I used to remember stuff. I used to think about subjects like economics, and statistics. And going out at night. And .. I wrote more regularly! (Though, ironically, in an actual diary.)

A good way to bring my Perspective, that elusive and eloquent elf, back in the foreground, is music. A song from a particular point in my life can bring me right back to the exact moment in which I had the luxury of time to enjoy it. Listening to Pink Floyd in my bathroom growing up. To Live in my first-year college dorm room. To something poppy, like Puff Daddy, in my early 20s. Dave Matthews can bring me back to many various late-20/early-30 situations, like dancing around my living room with wild abandon and flying arms and legs. Small, unknown alternative bands like Carbon Leaf can take me back to Charlottesville in 2005.

Most importantly, Van Morrison and Into the Mystic can transport me, emotional and pregnant for the first time into sitting at my desk, working from home in Fall 2006, and to two weeks ago. When I held my toddler tightly in my arms and danced him wildly around the kitchen, to squeals of laughter.

It's just that I hadn't had the chorus of laughter until now.