I again used the minutes before bed to meditate. I was feeling frustrated at my three month old – she was fussy tonight. And I found myself wondering if this will ever end. What is it about a newborn that leads to believe that this state lasts forever? It’s crazy to think so. It was especially hard with a first child, at least it was for me, but it’s there now, too, even though I know better.

But I sat with the frustration, and let it be. That helped a lot.

I was reminded of a line from Middlemarch in which Dorothea sits with her grief as companion, instead of fighting it:

“[Dorothea] was vigorous enough to have borne that hard night without feeling ill in body beyond some aching and fatigue; but she had waked to a new condition: she felt as if her soul had been liberated from its terrible conflict; she was no longer wrestling with her grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts. For now the thoughts came thickly. It was not in Dorothea's nature, for longer than the duration of a paroxysm, to sit in the narrow cell of her calamity, in the besotted misery of a consciousness that only sees another's lot as an accident of its own. “