Babies

This couldn't be more relevant if it tried.

Here I was (am - still in the same spot) sitting in a little park near my house, attempting to get a bit of reading done, which for me means headphones in and iPad in front of me, and I feel my seat rumble a bit.

There is this gorgeous little 10-month old girl with the most piercingly inquisitive blue eyes staring at me, trying to gain my attention so we can play together.

I pull my headphones out and the two of us strike up a dialogue, a mixture of words, babble and gurgles as we create a new connection. I don't have kids (or even singular kid) of my own, but many of my friends do, but they're as similar as adults. We all have heads and such but aside from that we're fairly unique.

Anyway, her Dad comes over and we get to playing/talking, about children, life and best of all - the search for immediacy in the digital.

As the sun starts to set, the smallest member of our party gets hungry, which means I'm left alone with cheerful waves and much mimicking in place of other forms of learned behaviour.

I watch my playfellows turn the corner, and I feel that acute sense of loss that I associate with the end of a live, theatrical performance, which is not the same as finishing a film, or even a long-form series. It's more like closing a wonderful book, or saying goodbye to a relative travelling overseas for a time.

This is exactly what I'm trying to explain, but I'll be damned if I can put it into words. It's like that time where (for a time) I was helping a lecturer/friend studying the phenomenological 'moment of laughter' - it's an easy thing to speak of, but a really tricky one to describe.

I won't say too much more on that, but I really feel like there is something that just happened that is inherently special, unique and oh so immediate that I'd like to feel while the feeling persists.

Maybe I should get around to creating a few babies of my own.