So, what is it to have family with children over for several days?

Here’s the list of what you don’t get done: You don’t write at your usual pace, including the blog. You don’t get the laundry done or bring out the outdoors furniture from the shed. Your dog walks are shorter than usual. You don’t answer emails even though you promised. You shuffle students around, you barely do your sitting meditation practice, you certainly don’t study, and the books on hold at the library finally go because you never got there in time.

What do you get done? Not a lot, by most standards.

Everything slows way down because we have to pay a lot of attention to small details: What clothes are we wearing? This morning it was very cool, but now it’s getting warmer, so should we change? Do we have socks for bowling and roller-skating? What precisely do we have for breakfast? Lunch? Dinner? If he doesn’t eat this, what will he eat instead? If she’s a vegetarian, what will work? What snacks do we bring when we go out? When do I run out to pick up some milk? Does anybody have laundry that has to get done pronto? Run the dishwasher—empty the dishwasher—the faucets in the kitchen sink are rattling and we’ve just run out of ice cream.

Ahh, the minutiae of families with kids, forcing you to stop again and again and pay attention. A little bit like a Zen retreat.

I woke up at 5 o’clock in the morning, which I almost never do, and listened to the many inquiries of goldfinches. Hundreds of them congregate around our house each year at this time, and when life slows down, I could hear their chirping concertos.

Parents do so much to raise and support their children, and is any of that going to get into the history books? Maybe a few anthropologists will pay attention. The others will focus on Donald Trump’s presidency, the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, the Canadian election, climate threats to island nations in the Pacific, and how markets react to initiating and then withdrawing tariffs. They make it look like that’s the foreground for most people, and everything else is background.

What I love about being with family, among many things, is that it shifts things around. The background becomes foreground: We have 18 people for Easter dinner—We want to do things outside but it’s raining—Does everybody have extra blankets for an especially cold night?—He won’t eat fresh salad but maybe roasted broccoli florets—and We need more ice cream!

Never running out of ice cream is clearly at the foreground, so stand aside, Donald. And notice, too, how when you must pay attention to minutiae  or other details of daily living and (who said mint chip ice cream is minutiae anyway?), you also begin to see how life keeps on going and growing regardless of whether you did your emails or checked the headlines or wrote that blog. That’s a big lesson to folks like me who haven’t had kids (a lot because I didn’t want to be in the background) and continue to think that what we do at work is important, bigly. After all, that’s the foreground, damn it. That’s what the newspapers write about, isn’t it? Isn’t drama what it’s all about?

A good friend sent me the book Sum, by the neuroscientist and writer David Eagleman, a compendium of 40 alternatives for what the afterlife may look like, one of the best books I’ve read in years. In Metamorphosis, Eagleman writes of three deaths: when your body dies biologically, when it’s consigned to the grave, and the third big one is that moment in the future when your name is spoken for the last time. When that happens, you’re finally free to let go, free to leave.

In the meantime, you’re sitting in some purgatorial sitting room, waiting for that release. If you’ve always been in the background–a father who raised children and ran a small local library, the aunt taking care of her elderly parents–your name will be spoken by future generations for the last time fairly soon, and off you go.

But pity the Gandhis, the Churchills, the Abrahams and Mohammads, pity the Buddha and Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Shakespeare, whom people don’t forget and whose names continue to be invoked for generations. They never get to leave and finally have some peace.

So think again about what you want to do or who you want to be when you grow up. Meantime, how do you walk? With the forehead leading, as if all the stuff in your mind is what’s important? When you lead with the head, chances are you’ll see a lot more of what’s wrong than what’s right. The minute you lean back into the background, you see how life goes on and on, spiraling and bearing fruit in its own bohemian, free-spirited way.