I want time to stand still.

I don’t remember feeling this way, not in a long while. An anxious, and therefore future-focused, person, I’m accustomed to always gearing up for the next thing. Getting ready to move. Being still for too long leads to restless legs and grinding teeth. When I see #timestandstill on Instagram posts, usually connected to kids’ growth patterns, I sigh a bit…maybe turn my head and gag.

But now I’m there: at the point where I want to be, well, here for awhile. Like I said: rare. Especially for a January–though that month turned upside down when we moved Down Under and it became summer. But this is even the first summer when I’m not eagerly awaiting the kids’ return to school, pushing them out the door and muttering “BYE FELICIAS” under my breath as I hotfoot it back to the car and my perceived freedom.

We’re actually enjoying each other this summer, this morning’s ill-judged outdoor showing of The Wind in the Willows notwithstanding (The Kid and Little Brother did agree on one thing: that it ranked 2/10. The humidity, and the fact that they were the oldest kids there, did not help. You win some, you lose some). At 11 and 8, they’re both at ages that are bearable, even delightful at times: they’ll each occasionally still reach out for my hand (TK no longer lets me kiss him or call him Jamesy Bear in public, though; fair enough). They can do much for themselves (more than they act like they can, at least). And maybe the best bit: they’re both at home in the ocean, TK venturing out beyond us all on his boogie board and LB content to be pummelled by the waves as long as I’m nearby to “climb” them with him.

I’m dreading the future. Not too put too fine a point on it, but it’s TK’s last year of primary school–their last year at the same school for at least three years. Puberty is coming, God help us. I fear rough waters ahead, the kind of waves they won’t be interested in riding with me. The gaining of personal space at a cost of their ever-ready current affection. We went shoe-shopping the other day; LB had jumped 2 sizes, and TK 3. His shoes are bigger than mine. I did not sign off on this.

What’s more, I just paid way too much money–money that could/should have gone for a necklift–for a dental exam in two months that I have no desire to take, and in the meantime I’m planning a coffee with the friend who sat down and devised a pathway for me to forge a new career in a field I’m passionate about, under her professional sponsorship. What’s more, I suspect that one of these days pretty soon my knees are going to buckle underneath me for the last time and that will be the end of my running and therefore sanity.

TIMES ARE TOUGH. But only, really, when I get ahead of myself–which is always, but doesn’t have to be.

Every afternoon this summer, the four of us (sorry, Kevin, it’s not dog-friendly) have been going to the beach. Clearing a half-hour or more to hunt for a park, drop our towels on the sand, and sprint toward the surf, where an initial chill gives way to a few minutes of heaven: salt spraying all around us (I’ve even given up on not getting my hair wet–truly rebellious behaviour), screams of joy, unpredictable rhythms. In the ocean, everyone–and that is a lot of everyones, and I’m not kidding when I mean everyone–is happy. Everyone is smiling. Everyone is a kid again. And there we are among them, the four of us both separate and together, each occupying our own space yet always returning to each other, to the shore, to home. Time dilates, stretches in these afternoons when we’re not watching it; when we’re carried by something else.

“Time is on our side,” TK said this morning when I told him we had an hour before we had to leave for the obligatory activity I’d planned to get us out of the house. Is it? I thought, because it doesn’t feel that way to me right now.

“The greatest danger, as I see it in myself,” writes May Sarton, “is the danger of withdrawal into private worlds. We have to keep the channels in ourselves open to pain. At the same time it is essential that true joys be experienced, that the sunrise not leave us unmoved, for civilization depends on the true joys, all those that have nothing to do with money or affluence–nature the arts, human love.”

Out there in the water, we are somehow all sharing life together: open to the full experience of it, the risk and the reward. Our phones waiting in the car, our watches sitting at home, only the waves in their rhythms of grace lifting us up as we inhabit only this moment, then gently returning us to earth and to each other. A return I have to trust will keep happening.