No Replay Button

In my growing collection of inspired posts on social media by eloquent people who I’ve never heard of, one by LaTosha Brown really caught my attention. Here is one of many inspired paragraphs:

 

There is no stillness anywhere in the universe. Which means there is no going back. Not because we don’t want to. But because IT IS IMPOSSIBLE. The place we were doesn’t exist anymore as somewhere we can return to. Even trying to recreate what was once requires us doing something new to get there. The universe genuinely does not have a reverse gear. Our galaxy never crosses the same point again in our universe. Ever. 

 

This scientific response to the toxic MAGA fantasy is part of the point. But there’s also a general human truth here that we all have to face. One place it shows itself most clearly is in the raising of children. If you have one, you know exactly what she means when she says “The universe doesn’t have a reverse gear. There is no replay button.” If you don’t have children, you were one yourself, so you can look at this from that angle.

 

So after five days with my grandchildren, ages 14 and 10, I feel this incontrovertible truth yet again. Having just spent a week in Tokyo with Zadie, the elder, I was prepared for the American teenage playbook. One-word answers to questions, hibernating in her room, picking and choosing when to make an appearance and be at least mildly sociable. Luckily, there are still breakthroughs of her innocent, sweet, exuberant and childlike self— like her jumping up from our Rummy 500 game, phone in hand playing some music and her singing and dancing along without a twinge of self-consciousness. Yeah!

 

Meanwhile, Malik at 10 years old is just below the border of the upcoming revolution in the body, heart and mind known as puberty. We connect effortlessly with basketball (both playing and watching), card games, reading to each other and more. Yesterday, I bought him a bike (he had one that was stolen a few months ago) and we had fun biking around the neighborhood. 

 

Yet all too soon, his voice will drop and he'll grow a mustache and friends will far outweigh grandparents in importance and that’s just the way of the world. My job is simply to enjoy who he is now knowing it will change, to accept and even look forward to some of the new ways to be together in those changes to come.

 

How often we wish we could stop time, but on it relentlessly marches! Press the pause button on a relationship when all was new and fresh and vibrating with love, all polka-dots and moonbeams. An age when our kids ran to the door screaming “Mommy’s home! Daddy’s home!” and jumping into our arms.  When they cuddle and cozied up to us and looked at us with such loving eyes, convinced we could do no wrong. On a time in our country when government served the people with life-affirming and life-protecting programs, when the arts were thriving in the culture, when schools were alive with experimental ideas and teachers trusted to follow their inspired intuition, where we waited in line outside the movie theater for the next artistic film that would rock our world. 

But the universe will not have it. There is no going back. So we have no choice but to follow the changes of constantly shifting and redefined relationships, be they between people, institutions or governments.  And to remember that alongside our wistful resistance is the pleasure of new doors opened. Like the moment when Malik finally grows tall enough to finally beat me in one-on-one basketball. That Zadie will mature to the point of understanding how much we have loved her in each and every phrase and independently seek to spend our precious remaining time together. And of course, my fervent hopes that a nation will awaken to benevolent future rather than a fantasized nostalgic past. 

 

And so we go on…