We Lived Happily During the War, by Ilya Kaminsky

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we protested but not enough, we opposed them but not enough. I was in my bed, around my bed America was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house. I took a chair outside and watched the sun. In the sixth month of a disastrous reign in the house of money in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money, our great country of money, we (forgive us) lived happily during the war.

Happy seven months (and new year)!

Little Eliot turned seven months last week. How time flies, and already that eternally repeating process of child-growing-up-and-parent-growing-old begins to grimly crank. But every day of this rowing toward death becomes delight -- a new joy that my younger self could not have comprehended.

Every day he grows in length, dexterity, and responsiveness. He plays, smiles and laughs, grunts and babbles and gurgles, uses his hands to grab and fists to pound.

Having a child makes one realize the essential simplicity of life (a happy thing) and our helplessness in it (a sad thing). To know that we cannot really, truly ensure or wholly safeguard the wellbeing of ourselves or our loved ones is profoundly distressing at first, but it is followed by a liberating resignation. Our fates are not for us to understand nor amenable to protest. What can we do besides each day doing our task and doing it well? To work to put food "on the family" (per the Bushism), to cultivate the earth, to raise children (or a cabbage patch, or books of essays or whatever), and at all times to be at peace with death.

Looking at Eliot, I am in awe of how a little over seven months ago he was but a fetus, and fifteen months ago he was but an embryo. And before that, he was outside of time and space. To touch his face is to touch the grandest philosophical questions, and to be confounded with no answer but a smile.

Embryonic stem cells are "pluripotent", capable of turning into all types of cells. At 18 or 22 my life certainly felt pluripotent. Now at 33 the options available to me feel significantly diminished. But I gladly trade my proverbial pluripotency for that of a new organism, fresh to the world and all of its possibilities.

In the British Museum are thousands of artifacts of bygone kingdoms and peoples. There have been roughly sixty-five generations since the fall of Roman Empire and one hundred eighty-six generations since construction began on the Pyramids (according to Reddit). How glorious to experience first-hand today one revolution of the wheel of history!