Half a year

My half birthday last week and Jane's half birthday tomorrow (Hey! One week apart, just like our birthdays were! What are the odds of that??) made me think of all the things that come in halves:

Half a loaf
Half a lump (Ha, ha! A little Pooh humour there!)
Half a league

Although, technically, it was half a league, half a league, half a league onward, which makes - let's see - one and a half leagues. Oh, well. I'm not great at making lists, so it was only a half-hearted effort, anyway. So forget about lists. On to mulling and pondering.

A span of six months usually doesn't make that big a difference in real time. For a kid, it can seems like a really long time, but for most adults, six months is just business as usual. With a few exceptions, when a lot happened really fast and things changed very quickly for me, my life has not undergone that many drastic revisions in the short space of six months. I can generally look back to myself six months ago and find myself more or less the same person that I was then, with perhaps a little more wisdom and experience to show for the time spent, but nothing out of the ordinary.

For a baby, however, the change is marked. Jane is a very different person from who she was six months ago. Everything about her has changed: her size, her personality, her abilities, her tastes, her perception of the world around her. She was 20.5 inches at birth, and now is 26 inches long, which means that she's been growing at the rate of practically an inch a month. I do not observe that drastic kind of change in my life.

I'm sure it has to do with the time span viewed as a percentage of the whole life. Right now, six months represents 1/51 of my life, so it's not going to make as marked a difference in me as it does in her. But still, can you imagine what our lives would be like if we lived at that breathless pace, learning and absorbing and changing and growing on a weekly and even a daily basis? It reminds me of those studies that prove that the average human uses only about 2% of his brain, and makes me wonder what we could accomplish if only we could tap into the other 98%!