‘My mind is back now,’ said one of my boys last night, bounding up the stairs after a lengthy tantrum because I’d switched the TV off. Interesting, I thought. How the hell did you know that you’d lost your mind when you went to that electric, crimson place of no reason? Then I just said, ‘I’m glad it’s back,’ and I continued feeding my one year old, one eye to my mono-milkable boob with its steadily dropping supply.

So you know that you had lost your mind, here, in the murky, marvellous waters of early childhood? And, of course, you don’t know yet that the ability to cognize such a deep and sensible thing will totally disappear on you, to resurface well into adulthood. If you are lucky.

Wow. How many other things do we ‘know’ at one, two, at three, four, five – then lose completely as we grow, as we learn to cue and curb our behaviours and cater to what we think people want from us? Do we know that we are whole – that we are born this way? It’s plain to see, I’ve seen it in all my babies: they are whole. We were whole, then perhaps our psyches split into hundreds of shards, different personalities we try out, different ways of being. Do we know that we are good? Because there can be no intention to be ‘bad’ when you are so young you remember the sound of your mother’s heart in the womb. Do we know that time is not linear but spherical, always now, never then and never tomorrow?

What do we know about love? Do we know that we are love, until someone unwittingly dismantles that reality, for some children much sooner than others? And do we know about belonging? That every single one of us was born with the same right to be here, with the same potential in our tiny sacred souls and with equal importance to the unfurling of the planet?

We know, we know, we know… in infancy we know so much. Right now I’m thinking it’s absurd that I meditate, that I desperately search for slivers of day so I can be still, because essentially what it is I’m learning is how to be an infant again. To know I’m whole, to know I’m good, to fall into the whirl of time and just be in it – to love – and to belong.