He Was Six And Now He Is Not

You found it in the bottom drawer looking for something else.

A sweater. Dark blue, with the thing on the front, and it does not fit anybody in that house any more. You were holding it before you had decided to pick it up.

And you stood there for longer than you would admit.

Because he wore that constantly. There was a stretch of about a year when he had it on in most rooms most days, and you can hear exactly how he talked then, which is not how he talks now, and you noticed while you were standing there that you cannot pinpoint when the change happened.

He was six. And now he is not, and there is no particular day on which that stopped being true.

And here is the thought that came with it, and it is the reason for this article: I do not have very much of that year.

You have some. There is the party, and the trip, and the school one with his hair done. But of the ordinary version of him at six, the one in the sweater on a Tuesday, saying the things he used to say, you have almost nothing, because nothing about a Tuesday seemed worth recording at the time.

Now, I want to say very plainly what this article will not do to you.

I am not going to make you panic.

There is a whole genre that does this. It tells you they are only small for a moment, that you will blink and miss it, that you have some number of weekends left. It is designed to produce urgency and it works, and what it actually produces is a parent who is anxious in the middle of ordinary afternoons, which is not a better parent and is not a happier household.

Nobody photographs well from panic. And nobody enjoys their child from panic either.

What I have is much steadier than that, and it points at today.

Teach us to number our days

There is a line in the ninetieth psalm about counting time, and the second half tells you what the counting is for.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. (Psalm 90:12, King James Version)

So teach us to number our days.

Notice first that it is a request. Teach us. It is not a warning shouted at somebody, and it is not information being delivered to frighten anybody into action. It is a person asking to be given a way of seeing time.

And then the purpose: that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

Wisdom. Not urgency. Not anxiety, not hurry, not a sense that everything is running out.

That distinction is the whole verse, and almost everything written about time and children gets it backwards. Numbering your days in the way this psalm means does not produce a person running around trying to capture things. It produces somebody who knows what a day is worth and treats today accordingly.

And notice which days are being numbered. All of them. Not the significant ones. The psalm is not asking for help noticing birthdays; it is asking for a way of holding ordinary time, of which almost every day is made.

So the wisdom being asked for here is precisely the thing you did not have at six: the ability to look at a Tuesday, with a boy in a blue sweater on the floor, and know that this is one of the numbered days and is therefore worth something.

That is not a panic. It is closer to the opposite. A person who knows a day counts is calmer in it, not more frantic.

Numbering the days is asked for so a heart can be applied to wisdom, and it has never once been given to produce panic. Psalm 90:12 asks to be taught how to hold ordinary time, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody standing in a bedroom holding a sweater.

The ordinary version is the one you want

Here is the practical half, and it is about which photographs turn out to matter.

The pictures you have of that year are the events. The ones you want are the Tuesdays.

That is nearly always how it goes, and it is worth understanding why, because it will change what you point a camera at from today onward.

An event photograph records an occasion. It shows the child at a party, in the good clothes, doing the thing the day was about. It is a record of a date.

An ordinary photograph records a person. It shows how he sat. What he did with his hands. The way he wore that sweater with the sleeves pushed up. His actual face at rest, which is different from his face at a party, and which is what you are looking for when you go back.

You do not miss the party. You have the party. What is missing from that year is him.

And the reason the ordinary ones do not get taken is not carelessness. It is that at the time, an ordinary Tuesday does not present itself as anything. There is no signal. Nothing about it says: record this, this is the version of him you will want in ten years. It just looks like a boy on the floor, which is what you see every day, which is exactly why it is invisible.

So the missing pictures from that year are not a failure of attention. They are the natural result of a day that gave you no reason to lift a phone.

And that is the whole of what today needs: a reason. Not urgency. Just a decision made once, in advance, that the ordinary version is the one worth having.

The ordinary version of him is the one you go back for, and a Tuesday has never once given anybody a signal that it was worth recording. The written word asks for wisdom about ordinary days rather than about occasions, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody who has the party and not the person.

One photograph today, of nothing

So here is the assignment, and the last part is the whole of it.

Take one photograph of your child today doing nothing special.

Today. One. And it must be of nothing.

Not an occasion. Not a moment. Not something you have arranged or waited for. Find them doing whatever they are doing this afternoon: on the floor with something, eating, watching, lying on the sofa with their feet up on the wall, and take one picture of that.

And do not ask them to look up. That is the instruction that makes this work.

The moment you say their name, the thing you were photographing stops. They arrange their face, and you get a picture of a child responding to a camera, and you already have four hundred of those.

Take it from where you are, without saying anything, and put the phone down.

And then do not make it a habit or a project. There is no daily practice here, nothing to keep up, and no album that needs to exist by Christmas. One picture today, because today is one of the numbered days, and that is the only reason needed.

And here is the part about the year you missed, since it is the reason you read this far.

You cannot get six back. That is true and I am not going to soften it. But it is also true that today is going to look, in four years, exactly the way six looks now: a version of him that does not exist any more and that nobody thought was worth recording.

He is that age now, once, and this afternoon is entirely available.

Today is a numbered day and is worth recording, and the ordinary version of him has never once been the one that mattered less. Psalm 90:12 asks for wisdom about the days rather than alarm about them, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody taking one picture from across a room without saying anything.