One Thing

As a new parent, you are in emergency mode.  It's not the only life event that can kick on your crisis function, of course- there's death, serious illness, job loss, divorce, and all the smaller ways in which the lives we know flare up and consume themselves.

But new parenthood is a reliable flint.

The pitfalls of emergency mode are many- you drop balls and lose sleep and develop an allergy to nonessentials.  Your life narrows.  

Which is also the signal virtue of emergency mode: your life narrows.  Your days contract. Miraculously, your to-do list shrinks.

You do one thing.  Maybe you do one thing plus staying alive.  

And if you do that, you've done all you can do.