Baby Talk

by | Tuesday, January 15, 2008

This piece was written sometime early 1996 when we were expecting our first child. I posted it to the web when we were expecting our second. It still reads well…

Connections

A few weeks ago, Smita (my wife) and I found out that we were going to have a baby–our first. I am not sure we still quite understand what this means, but as a friend said, we have a lifetime to get used to it. Not that the news came as a total surprise, we had been planning for it–but actually seeing the pink “plus” sign appear on the little contraption that tests pregnancy was something else. As you can imagine lots of things changed overnight, some big changes and lots of small ones.

I watch Smita, my wife, and see her body change, her moods fluctuate and I see a beautiful intricate process unfold. I see her body and mind adjusting itself to this new being, this new piece of life growing in her. I sit here, awestruck by this perfect piece of fine-tuned, fragile yet dynamically stable confluence of biological forces at work. One cannot but be amazed by its mystery and majesty–not to be awed by four billion years of evolution playing itself out in an individual. I am reminded of something Jacob Bronowski looking at his first daughter when she was four of five days old, and thinking, “These marvelous fingers, every joint so perfect, down to the finger nails. I could not have designed that detail in a million years.” But he goes on to say, “But of course it is exactly a million years that it took me, a million years that it took mankind…”

There are those that feel that seeing ourselves as being evolved beings somehow precludes this sense of mystery, that somehow knowing the brute mechanisms of blind evolution (in Tennyson’s famous words “Nature red in tooth and claw”) is demeaning and degrading. That somehow the mystery- the connection to the unity of the world is lost. I have been an agnostic (with periods of being an atheist) almost as long as I remember, but this idea of knowledge (specifically scientific knowledge) as robbing us of contact with mystery never really made sense to me. I have never had to go out and look for mysteries–they are all around us. And this feeling of unity with the world lies at every corner.

This mystery and unity with the world is there in the chanting of hymns by monks, in the Muezzin’s call to prayer, in understanding that each and every object in the universe attracts each and every other object with a force that is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them; in the way a smile can carry warmth and friendship across a crowded room, in understanding that each and every one of us is a robot controlled by a long molecule called DNA, that around one percent of TV snow (the stuff you see when no channel is on) is background radiation from the big bang; in understanding that the clumsy (often hilariously so) act of sex can lead to the this beautiful birth of new life. There is beauty and unity in all these things–things that are all around us, but sadly things we tend to ignore in our mad, rushed lives.

I look at Smita, and I put my hand on her stomach, trying to sense the little tadpole sized piece of life in there, trying to call, trying to convey these feelings I have. There is a joy so deep, so profound, that it can be felt only as an ache. There is a sense of connection so fundamental that maybe poetry is the only way one can express it and I am no poet. Whitman said, “A blade of grass is the journey-work of the stars.” and William Blake said:

To see the world in a grain of sand
The heavens in a wild flower
To hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

Being human comes with certain built in disadvantages, one of which is that we have no idea of what lies in the future, while we can spin intricate stories of possible worlds. Sitting here typing on the keyboard, I see a new stage in life in front of us, maybe more appropriately a new life waiting to be lived and fulfilled. It is moments like this where the world awaits to unfold, and there is fear and mystery as well as anticipation–and most of all a sense of continuity and unity.

Topics related to this post: Evolution | Fun | Housekeeping | Personal | Worth Reading

A few randomly selected blog posts…

TPACK in the land down under

I recently received an email from Debra Bourne, IT Coordinator at St. Paul's International College in Australia informing me about some work related to TPACK being done in Queensland. Specifically she mentioned a paper to be presented at the upcoming Australian...

TPACK in the SAGE Encyclopedia of Ed Tech

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Educational Technology, edited by Dr. Michael Spector just got published. We have one article in it on (no surprise there) TPACK! Koehler, M., & Mishra, P. (2015). TPACK (technological pedagogical content knowledge). In J. Spector (Ed.),...

Ambigrams in new book

The Art of Deception: Illusions to Challenge the Eye and the Mind is a new book edited by Brad Honeycutt. Brad is a graduate of Michigan State (Go Spartans!) and maintains a blog (anopticalillusion) devoted to optical illusions. A few of my designs have ended up on...

CEP917 receives AT&T award, update

I had written before, CEP917: Knowledge Media Design, a course taught by Dr. Danah Henriksen and myself, in the Fall semester of 2012, received First Place (in the Blended Course category) in the2013 MSU-AT&T Instructional Technology Awards Competition. The awards...

Heading to India

I leave for India tomorrow to participate in a Symposium on Education Technology in Schools: Converging for Innovation & Creativity being held in Bangalore from the 20th to the 22nd of August. The meeting is organized by the Quest Alliance, USAID and International...

eBook on Creativity, Technology & Teacher Education

eBook on Creativity, Technology & Teacher Education

Danah Henriksen and I recently edited a special issue of the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education (Volume 23, Number 3, July 2015) devoted to Creativity, Technology and Teacher Education (see blog post here). This special issue has now been issued as an eBook...

Ambigrams & Math: In one embeddable ebook

Over the past two years Gaurav Bhatnagar and I have written five columns for the Math education journal At Right Angles  on the topics of mathematics and visual wordplay, specifically Ambigrams. In this five articles we have explored everything from symmetry to...

The story of stuff

Check out Story of Stuff or watch the movie... [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucMJ32-xp64] For the new version of CEP817 or maybe even CEP917

Understanding student engagement

I had posted recently about a Gallup poll on student engagement. Essentially the poll showed that student engagement dropped precipitously (though as I wrote, not as starkly as their graph indicated) as students moved from elementary to high school. My friend, Gaurav...

6 Comments

  1. Nancy

    This was really lovely.

    I realize it was a long time ago, but congrats to you and Smita anyway! 🙂

    Reply
  2. Tony

    Very well written and a joy to read. Thanks for sharing!

    Reply
  3. Baby Girl or Baby Boy?

    You and Smita obviously have had the children now for awhile…Entering Junior High now. I’ll bet that the next time you look at this post you will be amazed how fast the time has gone.

    Reply
  4. baby girl

    I remember when we find out we going to be parents, it was very exciting, but we didn’t know what to do.

    Reply
  5. Baby Names

    When you plan to have a baby , your life will change forever, in a good way. I cant whait to have a baby

    Reply
  6. baby names

    Hmm. Its funny how we evolve as individuals over time and our personality changes with experience, however certain things such as having a baby bring out the same emotional response from us as they did when they occured for the first time.

    Reply

Leave a Reply to Baby Names Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *