Six Pounds of Wisdom: What Newborns and Immortal Unicorns Teach Us About Presence

Three days ago, I held my great-niece1 for the first time. Six pounds (and change) of pure possibility wrapped in a hospital blanket, her fingers impossibly small and perfect, grasping at air as if trying to catch something only she could see. The moment her tiny hand wrapped around my index finger, I experienced what I can only describe as temporal vertigo. I was suddenly ancient and newly born, simultaneously.

It reminded me of the scene in The Last Unicorn where the immortal unicorn becomes human for the first time. She discovers mortality, yes, but more importantly, she discovers the weight of moments passing. "I can feel this body dying all around me," she says, and yet there's wonder in it, not horror. Because with mortality comes something immortality can never possess: the acute awareness of time's passage makes each second precious.

Holding that baby, I felt the same transformation in reverse, not immortal becoming mortal, but mortal becoming acutely aware of what mortality actually means.

The Architecture of Memory

There's a psychological concept called "reminiscence bump"2 which suggests we remember events from our teens and twenties with unusual clarity throughout our lives. Researchers theorize this happens because those years contain so many "firsts"—first love, first job, first apartment, first real heartbreak. The brain, apparently, files away novel experiences with extra care, as if it knows these moments will need to be recalled later for reference.

But here's what the research doesn't capture: the way certain moments create new categories of memory entirely. Holding that baby wasn't just another "first," it was a temporal reckoning, splitting my understanding of time into before and after. Before, I moved through days accumulating experiences. After, I realized I'd been accumulating something else entirely: the raw material of who I'm becoming.

The unicorn in Beagle's story doesn't just gain mortality when she becomes human; she gains the capacity for regret, for longing, for the bittersweet recognition of loss. These aren't bugs in the human experience; they're features. They're what make growth possible.

How many of us spend our twenties and thirties treating personal development as a destination rather than a process? We read books3, attend workshops, optimize our routines, all in service of becoming some future version of ourselves we imagine will be finished, complete, optimized. But what if the goal isn't to become immortal—unchanging, perfect, fixed—but to become more fully human?

The Paradox of Presence

When my great-niece looked at me with those unfocused newborn eyes, I had the strangest thought: she was seeing me more clearly than I see myself most days. Not because babies possess some mystical wisdom4, but because she was purely present. No past to compare this moment against, no future to worry about. Just the immediate reality of being held by a person whose face was becoming familiar.

There's a cognitive bias called the "impact bias" where we overestimate how much future events will affect our happiness and for how long. We imagine getting the promotion will make us happy for months, or that moving to a new city will solve our restlessness permanently. We're terrible at predicting our own emotional futures because we forget how quickly we adapt, how efficiently we normalize even dramatic changes.

But babies haven't learned to project happiness onto future scenarios yet. They exist in pure present-tense experience5. And somehow, being witnessed by that kind of presence made me aware of how rarely I inhabit my own life with such completeness.

What would it mean to approach personal growth from this place of presence rather than projection? Instead of asking "What do I need to become?" we might ask "What am I already becoming, and how can I pay attention to the process?"

The distinction matters more than it might initially appear. The first question positions growth as acquisition—we need to obtain certain qualities, achieve certain states, accumulate certain experiences. The second positions growth as recognition—we're already changing, already becoming, and our job is to notice and guide the process with intention.

The Laboratory of Ordinary Moments

My cousin mentioned her daughter had been nervous about me holding the baby6. Not because she didn't trust me, but because new parents exist in a heightened state of awareness where every interaction with their child feels monumentally important. She was right to be nervous, though not for the reasons she thought.

Holding that baby was monumentally important, but not because I might drop her or hold her wrong. It was important because it forced me to confront how casually I usually move through moments of connection. How often do I hold someone (literally or metaphorically) with the full awareness of what's happening?

The developmental psychologist Erik Erikson wrote about generativity: the concern for establishing and guiding the next generation7. He positioned this as a central task of middle adulthood, but I think he was onto something broader. Generativity isn't just about raising children; it's recognizing our role in the ongoing story of human experience.

Every conversation is an opportunity to practice generativity. Every interaction is a chance to hold someone's experience with the same careful attention I gave to those six pounds of new life. But we're so practiced at moving through our days on autopilot8 we miss most opportunities to actually show up.

Think about the last time someone really listened to you, not waiting for their turn to speak, not formulating their response while you talked, but actually listened with their full attention. How did it feel? Now think about the last time you listened to someone else with such presence. The gap between those two experiences might tell you something important about where your growth edge lies.

The Tyranny of Progress

Our culture sells us a particular story about personal development: linear progression toward an idealized self. We track habits, measure improvements, celebrate milestones. There's nothing wrong with any of this, except when it becomes the only story we tell ourselves about growth.

The unicorn's transformation in Beagle's story isn't an improvement. It's a fundamental change in the nature of her existence. She doesn't become a better unicorn; she becomes something entirely different. And there's loss in the transformation, even as there's gain.

Real personal growth often feels less linear achievement and more like seasonal change9. Periods of dormancy followed by unexpected blooming. Times when everything you thought you knew about yourself gets composted into fertile ground for something new to emerge.

When I held my great-niece, I felt forty-seven years of accumulated identity temporarily dissolve. I wasn't the person with my particular job, my specific anxieties, my carefully curated opinions about everything. I was just a human holding another human, participating in the most basic act of care our species knows.

It was humbling in the most literal sense. I was returned to ground level, to the fundamental experience of being present with another being. All my complicated self-concepts fell away, leaving something simpler and somehow more true.

The Weight of Witness

There's a concept in therapy called "therapeutic presence"10—the therapist's ability to be fully present with a client's experience without trying to fix, change, or interpret it. Just witnessing whatever arises with complete attention.

Holding that baby, I understood something about therapeutic presence I'd only intellectually grasped before. The healing power isn't in having answers or solutions; it's in offering the kind of attention which only becomes possible when you're not trying to accomplish anything.

How often do we extend this quality of presence to ourselves? We're quick to offer careful attention to others—babies, friends in crisis, even strangers who seem to need kindness. But when it comes to our own experience, we're more often trying to manage, improve, or transcend what we're feeling rather than simply being present with it.

The baby didn't need me to be wise or helpful or even particularly competent. She needed me to hold her steadily and pay attention to her cues. What if that's all any of us really need from ourselves as we navigate the ongoing process of becoming who we're becoming?

The Long View

My great-niece will have no memory of being held by me today. In six months, she won't even recognize my face. But I'll carry the memory of her tiny hand around my finger for the rest of my life11. There's something liberating about investing in experiences you know won't be reciprocally remembered.

It's the opposite of transactional thinking. I'm not holding her because she'll remember it fondly someday. I'm holding her because the experience of being present with new life changes something in me, expands my capacity for wonder, reminds me what attention actually feels like when it's not divided among seventeen different concerns.

The Last Unicorn's story suggests immortality isn't actually the prize we think it is. Endless time without the urgency of mortality leads to a kind of emotional numbness. The unicorn becomes human not because she wants to suffer, but because she wants to feel things deeply. Mortality makes everything matter more.

Personal growth might work the same way. The recognition we don't have infinite time to become who we're meant to be adds weight to each choice, each interaction, each moment of presence we're able to sustain.

What would change about how you move through your days if you truly absorbed the fact you won't be here forever? Not in a morbid way, but in the way holding new life makes you acutely aware of the preciousness of the time you have?

The Practice of Becoming

The baby fell asleep in my arms, her breathing so subtle I kept checking to make sure she was still alive12. Watching her sleep, I had this thought: she's not trying to become anything other than what she already is. She's just being human, moment by moment, with complete commitment to whatever each moment requires.

The unicorn's transformation teaches us something crucial about change: it's rarely about addition, more often about recognition. She doesn't gain humanity; she discovers she already contains it. Standing in a kitchen, holding six poundsof pure potential, I felt something similar. It wasn't the weight of everything I needed to fix about myself, but the weight of who I already was.

The baby stirred, opened her eyes for just a moment, seemed to look directly at me with an expression I can only describe as ancient recognition, then settled back into sleep. In forty-seven years of trying to figure out who I was supposed to be, no one had ever looked at me with such complete acceptance of whoever I was in the present moment.

This is what the unicorn discovers when she becomes human: not the burden of mortality, but the gift of mattering in time. Each moment becomes precious precisely because it won't last forever. My great-niece will grow up with no memory of this afternoon, but I will carry it forward: the way her weight felt in my arms, the trust she placed in a relative stranger, the reminder of what presence actually feels like when nothing else exists.

The memory of her small hand will outlast both of us, passed down in the stories I tell, in the way this moment changes how I move through the world. Immortality isn't the point after all. Memory is. And sometimes memory is just another word for love made visible across time.13