These days, my daughter wakes up before 5am and starts commanding her audience in her room. The audience is a bunch of regulars: "Friend" (a pink blanket with an elephant head with a rattle inside), Curious George, a grey cat, a very large giraffe, a musical seahorse, a small giraffe, all of the blankets in her crib, and the vast landscape of learning in her mind. I imagine a collage of pictures and words: the ABC song, numbers in English and in Spanish, phrases and phrases that she has picked up ("I said no," "That's not nice," "Look at that, Mommy!" "Oh my goodness"), names of foods and objects and holidays, questions, exclamations.
She only stops talking long enough to gather thoughts back up into a bundle before beginning the next scene of this cluttered, delicious multi-act performance. She is her own MC, she is all of the actors playing me, her father, her teachers, her friends. It's a variety show of her own life, a one-woman play, an open mic run completely by her.
This is the performance of my daughter's chitta vrittis, uncut.
Now, they do not plague her. They don't seem to sit heavily in her heart, keeping her from sleep, bringing stress to her belly, creating fear and worry and sadness. Now and then, she wakes up crying in the middle of the night. Sometimes I hear her talking, and I assume she's had a bad dream...something got all twisted in that mind of hers. Maybe it's about time for it to start getting messy in there, and I think my job is to try and help her keep the darkness away.
She'll have to learn to calm them down one of these days. I hope she will not have to work too hard to find stillness in the mind, to hear her own breath again.
Somehow...between these morning toddler rituals of reciting our lives while we wait for parents to unfold themselves from bed and come to get us (if we were lucky enough to have loving parents waking up to our voices in a nearby room), the chitta vrittis take on more power than they deserve.
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