The Most Amazing Thing I've Learned in my 30s (so far)

I was lying facedown on my mat yesterday in hot yoga, as sweat dripped over my eyes and I tried to block out the grunting and panting of my impossibly taut classmates, the beefy men and bamboo-thin women so identical to one another that I began to wonder if I was in the presence of some sort of cult. The women were even similarly tattooed - on the inside of the wrist, which seemed unusual. Probably just a trend.

As I caught my breath (quietly - I am not a yoga grunter), I had a thought which I registered as "The most amazing thing I've learned in my 30s." That's a new category, which is probably good since I still have the second half of my 30s in front of me. I might have a few things left to learn.

So what was it? The Cosmic Waitress and manifestation? The fact that the single most important thing we can learn in school may be collaboration? The idea that you can dance until 4am in Miami in your 30s? Have sudden wonderful career moments with no notice at all? "If you can't breathe, back out?" "See the light, know the light, share the light, BE the light?"

No, the hot yoga relevatory moment was that, until I was in my 30s, I'd never understood when conception happens. I didn't know the truth about when the sperm and egg connected, started cell division and then...that most astonishing instant for a parent in love with their child beyond their wildest dreams: person-creation. When and how did she start to grow inside me? My whole life, I thought it happened during sex, just one lucky shot that lined conception right up there after orgasm in a single fantastic half hour. That made sense. Once I reached the age in which I was ready to have children, I learned that it was in fact a complicated math problem. It takes 12 hours for those little guys to get all the way up to a fallopian tube. It takes 72 hours for them to stop swimming and fall away. And the egg appears beautifully one day without a lot of notice, and then disintegrates 6-12 hours later (maybe 24). So the "moment" happens sometime 1-3 days after sex, and the full moon only shines once in that 28-day cycle. Just like the moon, we don't know how lucky we are when it appears.

How was it, I marveled, that I never understood this in my teens and 20s? Because what it means is that conception happens unseen in one regular moment - riding a bike outside in the fall rain; picking up your child from preschool; flossing your teeth while making eye contact with your cat in the mirror; an hour after falling into a deep sleep. How much can be contained in one moment?